Things in Persia do not change, they only decay; | sampler."

LONGFELLOW.

II.

There can be no doubt that the power, possessed by Longfellow in so eminent a degree, of making the melody dependent on the thought, is a far higher poetic power than the rhyme and metre power, for these last are in a sense physical gifts, and lie in the ear, or in counting on the fingers; but the deeper harmony comes from a deeper source, and must lie in the spiritual nature of the poet. It is an Elizabethan quality as opposed to an Augustan quality. Pope, for instance, is Augustan. His lines are tied up in little bundles sawed off to exact length. He has one measured tone for all emotions, and consequently is forced to confine himself to a narrow range of feeling.

Very closely connected with this quality of Longfellow's is his constructive power. As has been said of Hawthorne, he had not only the artist's love of beauty, but the artist's sense of structure. His shorter poems embody and round off a conception-they are structural wholes, with a beginning, and a middle, and a close, and a flow and continuity. We find no patch-work ornaments sewed on loosely, but each sentence harmonizing and fitting, and having a vital relation to the theme. It is true we do not find any of the strong dynamic phrases which lie like unhewn blocks of stone, half covered up in Browning's verbiage, or scattered few and far between in the dreary waste of Wordsworth blank verse. Longfellow's blocks are neat and polished, and fitted accurately to their places. His poetic structures do not have the impressiveness of a rock-hewn Egyptian temple-vague, vast, suggestive of unregulated power, and of an imperial will and domination; nor the oriental magnificence of the house of Solomon, with the multiform human activities of a great metropolis in its outer courts, and its guarded central shrine holding the ark of the covenant; nor have they the cheerful, open-air serenity and severe outlines of a Grecian temple; still less, the scope and elevating power of the great Gothic minsters, where grotesque ornamentation and reaches of

gloomy space express the devotion of a moody and earnest race, a race whose animalism and aspirations were as close together, and in as sharp contrast, as their oriel windows, and the gargoyles and demons sculptured above them.

Longfellow's poems are like wayside chapels, carefully built by pious hands, finished without and within-the floor, a carefully fitted mosaic, the walls, garnished with precious stones and votive pictures, and tablets to the dead who sleep in peace, the wh le radiant with the indwelling of a gentle spirit of rest, the spirit of Christ, the Healer and Consoler, not of Christ, the Accuser and Judge. And Longfellow's longer narrative poems march steadily. The story in them unfolds naturally. Evangeline is as interesting as a novel. Try it on those acute, unbiased critics, the children. It fascinates them, for there is just description enough to make a back-ground, and then the incidents follow naturally, and cumulate-each succeeding picture adding to the effect, brought in at just the right-time and dwelt on just long enough, with fine, unconscious art. Observe what a patch-work most stories are; how the chapter are semi-detached incidents, perhaps not even complete in themselves, certainly not integral parts of the action; and how the tone of the style and the interest drops instead of rising as the end is neared. Observe, too, how tired one becomes in reading such stories; how difficult it is to hold one's attention throughout. This defect in modern stories comes, no doubt in part, from the fact that they are written in serial form, and paid for by the page, so that there is no time for them to form organically in the artist's mind. We must have our fresh eggs for breakfast every morning, and cannot allow to our domestic fowls any period for incubation. But, whatever the reason, if you will notice the difference in the effect on the reader made by a well and ill-told story, you will acknowledge that Evangeline is well told.

I do not say that Longfellow had the firm grasp on a story as a whole, and on its obscure interpretations, that Hawthorne had; but, certainly, when Hawthorne gave Long

ow they felt. its dragons

fellow the plot of Evangeline, saying he did | ters of this singular phantasmagoria? We not care to use it, it fell into hands capable of feel-dimly it may be-but we do feel in some handling it. The master-necromancer might measure, the same impelling forces that torhave plunged the figures into a profounder mented our most distant for thers: at least gloom, some deeper mystic symbolism might we can by sympathy in have beckoned from the shadow; the sorrow But Chinese mythology, might have been more bitter, and the despair swallowing the sun, and its fantastic array of more hopeless, but the art which made a unity monsters, grotesque and malignant, but not of the story could not have been more sponta- purposive, appears to us to lack earnestness neous and natural. It is this naturalness of and consecutiveness. Indeed, it is not naturstory-telling which makes The Vicar of Wake-ally that we recognize any elements of beauty field so attractive. Morris is sometimes re- in Chinese art-their sense of form is so much ferred to as a great story-teller, but it seems weaker than ours, their sense of color so much to me that there is no story in The Earthly more developed. In the same way, the myths Paradise that is developed so naturally as the of the North American Indians are foreign to simple story of Evangeline. us. To make them the basis of a work of art is a much more difficult task thau to take up and embody a Grecian myth. Southey found matter in the Arabian myths much more tractable; but compare The Curse of Kehama, or Moore's Oriental Legends, or Kingsley's Andromeda, to Hiawatha. Longfellow has made a far finer poem out of much less promising material. He has done it because he possessed far higher imaginative power.

Longfellow's best claim to literary power rests, I think, on Hiawatha. This poem lent itself easily to parody-in fact was a direct invitation to ridicule of a cheap kind-but I think it a poem of a very high order. I have time to call your attention to but one or two points of its excellence.

In the first place, we must notice the great intrinsic difficulty of the task. It was an attempt to realize in verse a mythical theory of the universe, as it arose in the mind of a crude, childish race. All modern thought must be kept out of the rendition. This Longfellow has done, except in one or two instances.

It would be interesting to quote the original stories in Schoolcraft, and examine just how Longfellow has transmuted them. Indian scholars say he has made mistakes in translating words, but all who have any historic sense In the next place, the myths in question are agree that he has given the Indian spirit. For those of a race in no way akin to us, a race he has taken the stories into his mind and much more akin to the Japanese and Chinese given them out again, not merely re-told them, than to the Indo Germans. It is not difficult but re-created them. He has done exactly for us to imagine the frame of mind which what an Indian would have done, had there produced the Scandinavian myths. The grim been born among the Ojibways a man who humor, the firm grasp of the ethical element, summed up in himself the race-feeling, and the underlying melancholy, the pervading had the power to give it out again in artistic feeling of the majesty of the sea, the delight form. He has made himself, for the time bein personal conflict, which are basic elements ing the Ojibway Homer. Is there another in the poetry and mythology of the great instance of a modern poet who could have northern race whose blood flows in our veins done this? Goethe perhaps could have done but slightly diluted, find their response and it, but Goethe would have been more subcounterpart in the modern man. Even the jective, would have put more of the ninemyths of India appeal to something native in teenth century between the lines. Tennyson us. They are the attempt of a related race to has infused more of modern life into any ten express in concrete form some answer to the lines of the Idyls of the King than Longfellow great questions, Whence? and Whither?-from has put into the whole of Hiawatha. I admit what origin sprang man, and the pleasant that there are lines where modern sentiment earth, and the limitless sea?-who are the mas-intrudes, but they are rare, and the entire feel

poet of great name is independent of these. Mythical history is the field-ground of the epic, which constitutes in weight and dignity, if not in bulk, three-quarters of imaginative literature. Longfellow had the eye for the true value of the Indian myths, and the poetic instinct to recast them in harmony with their essential spirit.

ing and motive of the poem is antique, elemental that of an infant, inarticulate race. The atmosphere of the Celtic myths as reproduced in Tennyson's Idyls of the King, is not exactly modern, though we cannot help thinking that Lancelot and Guinevere and Arthur would not be much out of place in modern English society. There is, at least, a great deal of the conventional knight and lady about A second but minor point is, that Longfelthem, and a suggestion of modernness through-low has realized perfectly the tone of the out all the treatment. Northwestern Lake Country. The forest he

Now, there is very little that is melodrama- describes is the Northern forest. The moon tic in Hiawatha. Longfellow took a set of is the Northern moon-the cold moon of Lake legends whose inner spirit was essentially Superior. It is almost impossible to believe foreign to the American mind. He has given that he had not been there, so truly does he them an independent treatment, and realized a reproduce the impression made by that vast primitive state of mind and an embryonic so- and cheerless region. Some early familiarity ciety, removed from us, not only in time, but with the forest of Maine must have aided him in sphere of existence. To have done this in embodying the sentiment of a kindred landimplies a great imaginative and artistic achieve- scape. In his descriptions of the lake there is ment. How immeasurably superior is his no hint of the majesty and haunting mystery conception of savage life to Cooper's! The of the ocean. He instinctively felt the differsuperiority lies not so much in the formal pre-ence in the impressions made on us by the sentation of the scenery, actors, and the like, Atlantic, and by a great inland sea. And, -a comparatively simple matter-but in the again, the Indian's relation to the wild things apprehension of the inner life of the savage -to the heron, the crow, the squirrel, the man, in which Cooper is ridiculously senti- wild goose-is truly conveyed. Instead of mental, conventional, and untrue. Whatever the humorous tenderness of the Teutonic mind dignity and impressiveness there is in Long- toward the brute creation, we have a sense of fellow's poem is strictly an Indian dignity, personal acquaintance with a fellow denizen and is not purchased by attributing to the of the woods. Over all is a suggestion of pasavage the reflective and self-conscious quali-tient waiting, of vast reaches of forest, of the ties of a civilized race.

limited, apathetic life of the little, isolated Mr. Palfrey seems to think that the Indian Indian village, with its dumb fragment of a myths were entirely destitute of any moral or race doomed to extinction; whose evolution poetic content, that they were poor, confused, has reached its possibilities, and droops in its jejune. Thus they might appear to the unim-downward curve. aginative mind, but it is impossible that any genuine mythology should be really so. For myths are really embryonic theology, history, science, and poetry. Every race gives birth to this strange, mystic product, which becomes the raw material for successive generations of artists. The body of Greek, and Latin, and Scandinavian mythology, the heroic myths of "Charlemagne and his Paladins," of "Arthur and his Knights," the religious "Myths of the Middle Ages," are all of them very significant outcomes of the race-imagination. The great body of local tradition is hardly less so. No

Our modern language is so full of associations from our modern life and culture, such words as "home," "country," "people," "hearth-fire," have a meaning in our minds so much fuller than that which they have in the minds of an undeveloped and stationary race, of a race profoundly foreign to all our aspirations and ambitions, that none but a great imaginative artist can re-create the aspect of nature and the “social milieu" which was their environment, as Longfellow has done.

A third striking point in Longfellow's handling of these Indian myths is the boldness