Where did your wisdom come from, Lizzy?"

Oh!-you see-dear me! how silly I am! Tom, I am going to be married to George Stanton, and that is what I brought you out here to tell you, and then wasted two mortal hours telling you that you were in love with his sister! It is too absurd!"

Lizzy's words came like rockets, and her face drooped in her hands, as she finished-no-in one hand, for I had taken the other, and absolutely was kissing it, I was so very glad. George Stanton was the finest fellow in the county, fully worthy of Lizzy, had just finished his theological course, and was to be installed in Colebrook next month. It was exactly the best thing, and, as soon as I found words, I told her so, adding, somewhat ruefully, "I hardly expected to be congratulating you on this subject, two hours ago, but I am sincerely glad, Lizzy."

She looked up, with a little, sweet laugh, and thanked me; so, rising from the turf, we gathered up the basket and the columbines, and threaded our way homeward through the woods, silently enough.

That night I went down to Mr. Stanton's, and persuaded Helen to go to singing-school with me. I don't know if they had the class without the master, or not. I never asked; for instead of being in the red school-house, Helen and I were sitting on a pine log, by the

edge of the river, in the moonlight; and after a great many devices of speech, I had at last managed to ask her the same question I put to Lizzy in the morning, only in rather a different way, and much more uneasily.

She, too, hid her face, but tears came dropping through the slender fingers, and she did not forbid me to take away the hands or dry the tears; but looked up at me with her clear eyes, so full of unutterable love, that they seemed to have grown blue, instead of gray, and said, softly, "I wonder what I have ever done, to be made so happy!" Well for me that I felt, with no slight heart-ache, what the tender humility of her speech implied, though she did not know it herself. If I could not now efface the past, I would try faithfully to make her future blessed.

We were married last autumn. First old Father Mather married George and Lizzy; then George did the same kind office for Helen and me. My wildpigeon still keeps that name; and Lizzy and I have once in a while a little clash that Helen cannot understand. Only yesterday, when I asked Mrs. Stanton to admire the comfortable arrangements of my new house (one of Deacon Mather's), she informed me she "could not sympathize with the life-long misery of a fellow-creature!" I had to laugh, in spite of myself.

That, patient reader, is the way I came to be married.

VOL. VI.-37

a free and fruitful reproduction, can only repel us when we recognize in the work the immorality, the ungenerousness, and the deceitfulness of the artist. And this, of course, in the immense majority of cases we do not say in all, for we fully believe that there are instances in which the animus of the artist is to be subtly and inexplicably apprehended in the very atmosphere, the presence and the influence of his work-must be the result of studies extraneous to the work itself.

When, for instance, we find that nearly the whole of Pascal's celebrated book of "Thoughts" is made up of passages taken from Timæus, from Charron and, above all, from Montaigne, and when, on further examination, we find that, in the time of Pascal, Montaigne was but little read, and that Pascal himself, whenever he has occasion to speak of Montaigne, treats him disdainfully, and seems desirous of still further discouraging readers from turning the pages of the wise old humorist, a conviction grows up in us that Pascal, great, gifted, and accomplished artist in letters as he was, meant deliberately to put Montaigne to death, after robbing him on the highway; and, thereupon, we shun the once favorite book of the Pensées, as we should decline a bran-new overcoat and boots, pressed upon us for purchase, at a vile price, by a one-eyed Irishman, in a baize jacket, with a big stick. Coleridge's treatment of Schelling, in the Biographia Literaria, is only in so much better than this conduct of Pascal towards Montaigne, that the Englishman takes the money, but spares the life of his victim.

How different is the case with such reproductions, for example, as those of Raphael, which, from the very nature of the case, could never have been expected to be overlooked, and which simply contribute to enhance the beauty of his own beautiful works. When we find in the "Preaching at Athens" a distinct reproduction of Masaccio's noble figure of St. Paul at the window of St. Peter's prison, the interest and the charm of Raphael's picture are far from being diminished for us by the discovery. The figure is introduced so appropriately, it is in itself so grand, and harmonizes so grandly with the figures grouped about it, that we at once admit the legitimacy of the reproduction.

Or, again, when not Raphael only, but all the great artists of the sixteenth century, content themselves, for the most part, with working, in their religious pictures, upon ideas imperfectly and rudely expressed, three centuries before them, by the Mosaic workers of the East, what man, in his senses, would think of saying that they lacked originality, and that their compositions had lost their interest for him?

So, too, in literature, when, as Jeremy Taylor says (and no man had more need, than this Shakespeare of divines, to establish in the minds of his readers a clear and catholic rule of criticism on such matters), the piece of purple cloth, the purpureus pannus, which has been borrowed, is apt to the place which it fills in a web of equal hue and splendor, there can no fault be found with him who takes it. Look at the magnificent web into which Shelley has woven what he calls the one plagiarism of the "Cenci!" The sublime thought which Calderon puts into the mouth of Patricio, questioning of the soul and the soul's fate,

"Quanda ha de volver, queda
En estado de viadora:
Y asi le queda suspensa
En el universo, como

Parte del sin que en el tenga
Determinado lugar,"

certainly loses nothing of its sublimity when it wears the imagery of Shelley:

"In its depth there is a mighty rock, Which has, from unimaginable years, Sustained itself, with terror and with toil, Over a gulf, and, with the agony With which it clings, seems slowly coming down:

Even as a wretched soul, hour after hour, Clings to the mass of life; yet, clinging, leans

And, leaning, makes more dark the dread abyss

In which it fears to fall."

When the literary reproduction, like the reproduction of the Byzantine types by the Italian painters, consists simply in giving a new form and a new finish to ideas inadequately embodied, to question the legitimacy of the process, or to arrest it by the strong arm of critical law, would be the most absurd imaginable proceeding.

Johanna Bothmer was a very estimable German lady, and her letters from Switzerland were, no doubt, highly interesting to her friends; but should we have thought of her with much complacency, had she or her heirs, executors,

and assigns interfered to annihilate Coleridge's Hymn to Mont Blanc ? or how should we like to sacrifice Milton's "Airy shapes that syllable men's names

On sands, and seas, and desert wildernesses," to the memory of the quaintly mendacious Sir John Mandeville?

Of course, there should be a limit in these matters as in all others; and we do not advocate that ancient temper of mind which lauded Epictetus for having plundered three hundred books without one quotation, and which savors somewhat too strongly of the Spartan passions. Neither can we agree with the Cavaliere Marini, that, while it is petty larceny to steal from one's countrymen, it is good conquest to take from foreigners; nor with Scudery, that what is robbery from modern books is only study from the ancients.

Our code is simple and clear-we hold that the memory of a man of genius is as much bound to the service of his imagination as are any of his other faculties; and that if, in the honest creation of a beautiful work, he finds a contribution to a required effect offered him by his memory, he is at perfect liberty to use it. If he is at work dishonestly, if he is laboring not to create a beautiful work, but to bring about some deceptive result which shall redound to his own profit and glory, and in so laboring deliberately casts about to rob some one for the easier furtherance of his aims, then, of course, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a picaroon, a freebooter, a larcener, great or small. Or if the artist contents himself with emulating the method of another artist, then, of course, he is simply animitator, and, as the case may be, either a child learning to talk, and destined one day to speak his own thoughts, in his own fashion, or a parrot, who will never get beyond his lesson. All great writers have begun with this kind of imitation-Shakespeare sat for a little while at the feet of Spenser; Spenser never wholly forgot the Italian accent of his own teacher; Milton took Shakespeare's hand to guide himself and the lovely Egerton safely through the woods. All little writers are apt to end with this kind of imitation-there is —, and

and but, after all, Tennyson, and the Brownings, and Keats are such sweet singers, one cannot wonder the parrots try to learn their fine fashions! But given

; we name no names;

honesty, feeling, and imagination, we find that, in our experience, the use of reminiscences and studies by artists whose method is their own, never interferes with our enjoyment of their works. And so we liked Mr. Faed's Evangeline. And so we like still better the Evangeline of Mr. Longfellow, and certain other works of that distinguished poet.

Our friend, of course, likes these works of the poet no better than the work of the painter. For, as Mr. Faed's picture displeases him by recalling Scheffer's Mignon, so the works of Mr. Longfellow displease him by continually recalling something done by somebody else. He reads the Voices of the Night, and throws them down with a "Pshaw! Novalis!" He looks over our shoulder while we are reveling in Hyperion, and cries out, "Let me send you Tieck's Sternbald at once, and have done with it!" or, "do you so much prefer rosewater to roses, that you can't be contented with Richter's flowers as they grow in his garden?" While for us the bells of old cathedrals toll, and their solemn organs peal along the cadences of the Golden Legend, our friend sits, muttering to himself, "Faust and the Coventry Plays! when a thing has once been done, why disturb chaos afresh ?" And all the sorrow of Evangeline cannot touch him, so faithful is he to that homely German Dorothea, who really had no very great troubles of her own, and who made such a happy and arcadian ending of it in a great comfortable farm-house!

If our friend were not something of a quietist, we should expect him to write a book on the "Reminiscences of Longfellow," in which he would hunt down the poet as fiercely and as steadily as if he were the Benedictine Cahot, at the heels of Jean Jacques Rousseau.

Now, nothing is more true than that Mr. Longfellow constantly calls his memory into the service of his genius. He is at the mercy of an unscrupulous anatomist, and our readers cannot yet have forgotten how savagely he was treated but a few years since by a writer, since deceased, who lacked only goodness and nobility of heart to have made him as admirable in creation as he was skillful in dissection.

But, if our theory be well founded, Mr. Longfellow's reminiscences do not militate against his claim to originality. He is not given to servile reproductions

of other men's works; he is not, systematically, an imitator of the styles of other men-he has a passion and a method of his own. Whatever he takes he moulds, and his conquests become integral parts of his dominion. The works of a genuine plagiarist resemble those pictures which came in fashion during the latter days of the reign of Louis XIV., and which were made by clipping out a figure here and a figure there from the finest engravings and the poorest, to paste them together upon a bit of canvas, in paltry groups! Such are, for example, the dramas of Alexander Dumas, who whips you up in a moment a Duke of Guise, by beating in together half a Verrina with half a Fiesco; or cribs a passionate lover's question from Schiller, and the lady's reply from Walter Scott. Not such are the poems of Mr. Longfellow. Take the Psalm of Life-than which a more remarkable accumulation of reminiscences is not to be found among his writings. The poem begins with Goethe: "Tell me not in mournful numbers," is nothing more than a translation of "Singet nicht in Trauertönen;" the title of one of Calderon's finest plays, "La Vida es Sueño" furnishes the very next line; Schiller comes next, to tell us "Ernst ist das Leben!" and so on, with now a contribution from a Roman priest, and now from an English theologian, now from a Latin, and now from a Teuton, till we end with an old family motto. Some of these reminiscences are simple versions, "conquered from the foreigners," as Voltaire conquered from Parnell his episode of the Hermit. Some, and particularly that famous adaptation of the fine passage in which Soame Jennyns compares the throbbing of our hearts to the beating of drums on a funeral march, are perfectly legitimate embodiments in verse, of thoughts which had before been only clothed in prose; but the essential fact is that there is not one striking image, and hardly one striking phrase, in Mr. Longfellow's Psalm of Life, which originated absolutely with himself. More than this, the philosophy, the morale of the poem belongs rather to Mr. Emerson than to Mr. Longfellow. And yet if you should read the Psalm of Life to a person of tolerable perceptions, who had never seen it, but was familiar with the rest of Mr. Longfellow's minor poems, we would wager largely upon his rapid recognition of

the author. The rhythm of the poem, and the way in which the thoughts are linked together, are both so thoroughly characteristic, that the man who could mistake their origin would deserve a place in history with the soldier to whom the Emperor Gallienus gave a medal for showing more talent in missing a mark than anybody he had ever seen!

When the motif of a poem is more truly congenial with the constitution of Mr. Longfellow's mind, his originality of sentiment and of perception vindicates itself still more triumphantly. Who would take to pieces the "Arsenal at Springfield," or the Gleam of Sunshine"? So natural in feeling are they, so exquisite in utterance, that their completeness satisfies us; and we should as soon think of questioning the genuineness of their author's genius, as of questioning the genuineness of a pear-tree, with one of its perfect fruits just melting into fragrance on our palate.

Talent can do a great deal: it can make a capital waxen pear, or an admirable cento. But give the pear to your youngest child, or read the cento to your wife-if you dare!

This charge of plagiarism against Mr. Longfellow is a favorite with our domestic critics. Foreigners, and especially Frenchmen, come to their help with another. Mr. Longfellow, say these latter, is an un-American poet-his nationality does not colour his poetry. "His works," says M. Montégut, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, "resemble those of an emigrant. He imitates all the poets of the olden countries; he translates a great deal; and his poems are all echoes. In this respect he resembles M. Washington Irving, whose works are perfectly literary, and perfectly puerile." You see how these irreverent Parisians speak of our mightiest men. "Mr. Longfellow," says M. Amperè, a man of fine culture and of fine taste," Mr. Longfellow is more cosmopolite than Mr. Bryant-he is somewhat like a German. He is European, and complete in his training." Nay, even M. Philarète Chasles, the friend of virtue, and the patron of opinions rather rashly expressed, on all sorts of subjects, while he lauds Evangeline, must have his fling. He, too, could desire that Mr. Longfellow might be more national and vigorous. The study of Tegner and the Swedes is toc apparent in him. Evangeline, even, is