act, by way of showing how very easy a matter it is to make a man discourse Sancho Panza: Chispa. Abernuncio Satanas! and a plague upon all lovers who ramble about at night, drinking the elements, instead of sleeping quietly in their beds. Every dead man to his cemetery, say I; and every friar to his monastery. Now, here's my master Victorian, yesterday a cow-keeper and to-day a gentleman; yesterday a student and to-day a lover; and I must be up later than the nightingale, for as the abbot sings so must the sacristan respond. God grant he may soon be married, for then shall all this serenading cease. Ay, marry, marry, marry! Mother, what does marry mean? It means to spin, to bear children, and to weep, my daughter! And, of a truth, there is something more in matrimony than the wedding-ring. And now, gentlemen. Pax vobiscum! as the ass said to the cabbages! And, we might add, as an ass only should say. In fact, throughout "The Spanish Student," as well as throughout other compositions of its author, there runs a very obvious vein of imitation. We are perpetually reminded of something we have seen before—some old acquaintance in manner or matter; and even where the similarity cannot be said to amount to plagiarism, it is still injurious to the poet in the good opinion of him who reads. Among the minor defects of the play, we may mention the frequent allusion to book incidents not generally known, and requiring each a note by way of explanation. The drama demands that everything be so instantaneously evident that he who runs may read; and the only impression effected by these notes to a play is, that the author is desirous of showing his reading. We may mention, also, occasional tautologies—such as: Or Never did I behold thee so attired What we need Is the celestial fire to change the fruit We may speak, too, of more than occasional errors of grammar. Did no one see thee? None, my love, but thou. Here"but" is not a conjunction, but a preposition, and governs thee in the objective. "None but thee" would be right; meaning none except thee, saving thee. At page 27, "mayst" is somewhat incorrectly written "may'st." An page 34 we have: I have no other saint than thou to pray to. Here authority and analogy are both against Mr. Longfellow. "Than" also is here a preposition governing the objective, and meaning save, or except. "I have none other God than thee," &c. See Horne Tooke. The Latin "quam te" is exactly equivalent. At page SO we read: Like thee I am a captive, and like thee, Here "like thee" (although grammatical of course) does not convey the idea. Mr. L. does not mean that the speaker is like the bird itself, but that his condition resembles it. The true reading would thus be: At thou I am a captive, and, as thou, I have a gentle gaoler: That is to say, as thou art, and as thou hast. Upon the whole, we regret that Professor Longfellow has written this work, and feel especially vexed that he has committed himself by its republication. Only when regarded as a mere poem, can it be said to have merit of any kind. For, in fact, it is only when we separate the poem from the drama, that the passages we have commended as beautiful can be understood to have beauty. We are not too sure, indeed, that a "dramatic poem" is not a flat contradiction in terms. At all events a man of true genius, (and such Mr. L. unquestionably is,) has no business with these hybrid and paradoxical compositions. Let a poem be a poem only; let a play be a play and nothing more. As for "The Spanish Student," its thesis is unoriginal; its incidents are antique; its plot is no plot; its characters have no character: in short, it is little better than a play upor. words, to style it "A Play" at all. LONGFELLOW'S BALLADS.* "Il y à parier," says Chamfort, " que toute idée publique, toute convention recue, est une sottise, car elle a convenue au plus grand nombre."—One would be safe in wagering that any given public idea is erroneous, for it has been yielded to the clamor of the majority; and this strictly philosophical, although somewhat French assertion, has especial bearing upon the whole race of what are termed maxims and popular proverbs; nine-tenths of which are the quintessence of folly. One of the most deplorably false of them is the antique adage, De gustibus non est disputandum—there should be no disputing about taste. Here the idea designed to be conveyed is that any one person has as just right to consider his own taste the true, as has any one other—that taste itself, in short, is an arbitrary something, amenable to no law, and measurable by no definite rules. It must be confessed, however, that the exceedingly vague and impotent treatises which are alone extant, have much to answer for as regards confirming the general error. Not the least important service which, hereafter, mankind will owe to Phrenology, may, perhaps, be recognised in an analysis of the real principles, and a digest of the resulting laws of taste. These principles, in fact, are as clearly traceable, and these laws as readily susceptible of system as are any whatever. In the meantime, the insane adage above mentioned is in no respect more generally, more stupidly, and more pertinaciously quoted than by the admirers of what is termed the "good old Pope," or the "good old Goldsmith school" of poetry, in reference to the bolder, more natural, and more ideal compositions of such authors as Coëtlogon and Lamartinet in France; Herder, Ballads and other Poems. By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Author of "Voices of the Night," "Hyperion," etc: Second Edition. John Owen: Cambridge. We allude here chiefly to the "David" of Coëtlogon, and only to the • Chúte d'un Ange" of Lamartine. Körner, and Uhland in Germany; Brun and Baggesen in Denmark; Bellman, Tegner, and Nyberg* in Sweden; Keats, Shelly, Coleridge, and Tennyson in England; Lowell and Longfellow in America. "De gustibus non," say these "good-old-school" fellows; and we have no doubt that their mental translation of the phrase is "We pity your taste--we pity everybody's taste but our own." It is our purpose to controvert the popular idea that the poets just mentioned owe to novelty, to trickeries of expression, and to other meretricious effects, their appreciation by certain readers: —to demonstrate (for the matter is susceptible of demonstration) that such poetry and such alone has fulfilled the legitimate office of the muse; has thoroughly satisfied an earnest and unquenchable desire existing in the heart of man. This volume of Ballads and Tales includes, with several brief original pieces, a translation from the Swedish of Tegner. In attempting (what never should be attempted) a literal version of both the words and the metre of this poem, Professor Longfellow has failed to do justice either to his author or himself. He has striven to do what no man ever did well, and what, from the nature of language itself, never can be well done. Unless, for example, we shall come to have an influx of spondees in our English tongue, it will always be impossible to construct an English hexameter. Our spondees, or, we should say, our spondaic words, are rare. In the Swedish they are nearly as abundant as in the Latin and Greek. We have only "compound," "context,” "footfall," and a few other similar ones. This is the difficulty; and that it is so will become evident upon reading "The Children of the Lord's Supper," where the sole readable verses are those in which we meet with the rare spondaic dissyllables. We mean to say readable as hexameters; for many of them will read very well as mere English dactylics with certain irregularities. Much as we admire the genius of Mr. Longfellow, we are fully sensible of his many errors of affectation and imitation. His artistical skill is great, and his ideality high. But his conception of the aims of poesy is all wrong; and this we shall prove at some future day—to our own satisfaction, at least. His didactics *C. Julia Nyberg, author of the "Dikter von Euphrosyne." L are all out of place. He has written brilliant poems—by accident; that is to say when permitting his genius to get the better of his conventional habit of thinking—a habit deduced from German study. We do not mean to say that a didactic moral may not be well made the under-current of a poetical thesis; but that it can never be well put so obtrusively forth, as in the majority of his compositions..... We have said that Mr. Longfellow's conception of the aims of poesy is erroneous; and that thus, laboring at a disadvantage, he does violent wrong to his own high powers; and now the question is, what are his ideas of the aims of the Muse, as we gather these ideas from the general tendency of his poems? It will be at once evident that, imbued with the peculiar spirit of German song (in pure conventionality) he regards the inculcation of a moral as essential. Here we find it necessary to repeat that we have reference only to the general tendency of his compositions; for there are some magnificent exceptions, where, as if by accident, he has permitted his genius to get the better of his conventional prejudice. But didacticism is the prevalent tone of his song. His invention, his imagery, his all, is made subservient to the elucidation of some one or more points (but rarely of more than one) which he looks upon as truth. And that this mode of procedure will find stern defenders should never excite surprise, so long as the world is full to overflowing with cant and conventicles. There are men who will scramble on all fours through he muddiest sloughs of vice to pick up a single apple of virtue. There are things called men who, so long as the sun rolls, will greet with snuffling huzzas every figure that takes upon itself the semblance of truth, even although the figure, in itself only a "stuffed Paddy," be as much out of place as a toga on the statue of Washington, or out of season as rabbits in the days of the dog-star...... We say this with little fear of contradiction. Yet the spirit of our assertion must be more heeded than the letter. Mankind have seemed to define Poesy in a thousand, and in a thousand conflicting definitions. But the war is one only of words. Induction is as well applicable to this subject as to the most palpable and utilitarian; and by its sober processes we find that, in |