— 17—

and Kaisers of old pass before his eye. The metre is the stately measure of Müller's Alexander Ypsilanti“ and similar poems:

The last few lines of„Nuremberg“ may suffice as a specimen:

Vanished is the ancient splendour, and before my dreamy eye

Waye these mingling shapes and figures like a faded tapestry

Not thy Councils, not thy Kaisers, win for thee the world's regard: But thy painter Albrecht Dürer, and Hans Sachs, thy cobbler-bard. Thus, o Nüremberg, a wanderer from a region far away,

As he paced thy streets and court-yards, sang in thought his careless lay: Gathering from the pavement's crevice, as a floweret of the soil,

The nobility of labour,— the long pedigree of toil.

The Norman Baron, Carillon, Walther von der Vogelweide and the Arsenal of Springfield are written in a similar spirit.

In the„Golden Legend“ we have another fruit of Longfellow's mediaeval and German studies. It is in a dramatical form the well known subject of the„Arme Heinrich“ by Hartmann von der Aue. The American poet says in his Notes:„I have called this poem the Golden Legend, because the story upon which it is founded, seems to me to surpass all other legends in beauty and significance. It exhibits amid the corruptions of the middle ages the virtue of disinterestedness and self-sacrifice and the power of Faith, Hope and Charity, sufficient for all the exigencies of life and death.“

Longfellow seizes this opportunity to interweave with the original tale a great variety of mediaeval pictures from the religious and social life of the Middle Ages; the poet's imagination was kindled by the gigantic drama of Faustus, before he sat down to write the Golden Legend.

Our author has tried his skill also in epic poetry and given us three specimens which alone would be sufficient to transmit his name to posterity. The subject of the first of these charming poems is the cruel, inhumane expulsion of the French colonists of Arcadia by the Englisn. The miserable fate of the poor exiles and particularly of the heroine, Evangeline, is treated in a truly poetical manner and magnificent language. The undisturbed, happy life of the simple and harmless settlers, the peaceful landscape, and then the sudden rushing in of clashing arms, the long sufferings of patient, noble Evangeline and the gigantic majesty of American nature belong to the most beautiful that poetry has produced in this branch of composition. In perusing the beautiful lines of Evangeline the reader is involuntarily reminded of the German so called„Bürgerliche Epos“, and there can be no doubt that the author has had before his mind our„Hermann and Dorothea“. We always return to this little epos with a new delight.

A similar impression is produced by„Miles Standish' courtship“, a lovely Puritan idyl, which we peruse with as much pleasure as the best German specimens of the same kind. The question has been often ventilated whether Longfellow, in following the Germans, would not have done better, not to imitate them too closely in the metre and to choose, in the epos, a more suitable verse than the hexameter. This is not the place for examining into metrical questions, nor to decide whether the classical dactylic hexameter has any right of existence in English literature; for ever since the Elizabethan period down to time when Dr. Arnold published his Homer the subject has been abundantly

discussed. It may be sufficient to say that among the numerons hexameters we know, we consider 3