admiration. He is too fastidious to be natural. His hymns to

his Goddess breathe too strongly of the lamp.

"Pleasant it was, when woods were green,

And winds were soft and low,

To lie amid some sylvan scene,

Where, the long drooping boughs between,
Shadows dark and sunlight sheen
Alternately come and go.

"Or where the denser grove receives
No sunlight from above,
But the dark foliage interweaves
In one unbroken roof of leaves,
Underneath whose sloping eaves
The shadows hardly move.

"Beneath some patriarchal tree
I lay upon the ground;
His hoary arms uplifted he,

And all the broad leaves over me

Clapped their little hands in glee,
With one continuous sound.

"A slumberous sound-a sound that brings

The feeling of a dream,

As of innumerable wings,

As when a bell no longer swings,

Faint the hollow murmur rings,

O'er meadow, lake, and stream."

All this, though reminding us strongly of Coleridge, both in

thought and expression, is a very favorable specimen of that elegant sympathy with nature which is so distinguishing a feature in our author's poetry. It lacks that freshness which

has made Wordsworth so great a writer. Listen for a moment to the great High Priest of the open air:

We should, however, be doing Mr. Longfellow injustice were we to confine our extracts to his descriptions of nature. He is a firm believer in the better part of human kind. In his Psalm of Life he has declared this faith.

"Life is real-life is earnest !

And the grave is not its goal!

This "psalm" is eminently poetical, and has doubtless in the future much fine effect locked up in it. The acorn holds the oak, and the oak in time floats a palace o'er the ocean. How often has the unregarded phrase of one time been the inspirer to the glorious deed of another! We remember one instance, in which a father named his child

after a celebrated man, in the express hope that should he at any time feel sinking to the degradation of a mean action, the sound of his name might recall him to the path of honor!

There are, notwithstanding, many happy instances of Mr. Longfellow's talent for applying a fact to a feeling, and of illustrating the processes of duty by metaphors drawn from outside life. This very facility is sometimes fatal: it very often becomes common-place, so that we feel inclined now and then to resent a truism as though it were a falsehood; at all events, to treat it as an impertinence or an intrusion. This strikes us as the prevailing defect in many otherwise very fine poems. We may instance as a proof of this, some otherwise very fine lines which are spoiled by this obtrusive subjectiveness.

This sounds more like Watts's hymns than a philosophical reflection modified by the spirit of poetry, the highest expression of philosophy. Although somewhat out of keeping, we cannot help here quoting a ludicrous explanation which Leigh Hunt once gave of the difference between philosophy and poetry. He said it was the difference between mutton and venison and apostrophized "venison as the poetry of mutton!"

In the commencement of the "Hymn to the Night" there is an instance of bad taste in the selection of metaphors, which rarely happens to our author.

"I heard the trailing garments of the night
Sweep through her marble halls;

I saw her sable skirts all fringed with light
From the celestial walls."

He redeems this artificial imagery by the following verse:

We must, however, warn Mr. Longfellow against the indis