so simply, that his narration, a chef-d'œuvre of our language, has caused the book of Madame Cottin to be forgotten.

The Acadians relate, that a young girl of Port-Royal, affianced the night before the order of Chatham arrived, and sent on board another frigate than that which carried her betrothed and her family, was set ashore upon the coasts of Pennsylvania, far from her kindred and friends; an old Catholic priest disembarked with her, and aided her by his councils and cares. They crossed together Delaware, Massachusetts, Maine, in hopes of finding the father and the betrothed -they were now and then helped by some good Catholic souls, and at last, at the mouth of the Wabash, discovered a fragment of their old colony.

Going on board the boat which carried the wrecks of their people, they descended the great Mississippi. It was the month of May. The boat, rowed by Acadian oarsmen, followed the yellow current, and bore the troop of exiles, poor beings who had lost their country, their kin, their fair prairies of Opelousas, and their beloved homes. They were seeking their dispersed families, and for many days, floating down those dangerous waters, they travelled through the solitudes of the profound forest. At night they kindled a fire and encamped upon the shore. Sometimes they encountered a rapid, and their bark shot on like an arrow; sometimes they glided into a lagoon, amid green isles covered with cotton, and the white pelican stalked beside them.

Soon a vast horizon was discovered, the landscape grew flat; they saw the white houses of the planters, the huts of the negroes and the dove-cotes. The majestic river curved towards the Orient, and the boat entered the bayou of Plaquemine. There all changes; the wandering waters spread above the clay soil like a vast coat of mail-the cypresses along the bank droop in mournful arches above them; their gloomy boughs covered with eternal moss the black banners and draperies of nature's cathedral. No sound, save where from time to time is heard the measured plash of the heron's foot, or the cry of the screech owl. The cedar and the cypress colonnades are blanched by the irregular gleam of the moonlight upon the waters; all is vague, strange, pleasant as a dream.

Evangeline is sad, says the poet, with

-Strange forebodings of ill, unseen and that cannot be compassed. As at the tramp of a horse's hoof on the turf of the prairies Far in advance are closed the leaves of the shrinking mimosa,

So at the hoof beats of fate, with sad forebodings of evil

Shrinks and closes the heart, ere the stroke of doom has attained it.”

The Voyage of the young girl to Louisiana is told with a really admirable truth and sentiment of nature. Yet it is spoiled by many affectations and the faded tints of which we have already spoken. A more consummate artist would have avoided big words, and touches of trivial melancholy, thorns of existence, desert of life, and particularly the moonlight reveries. Still the sentiment, the invention, the movement are true, powerful, and new. What a delicious picture is that of the young girl asleep with her head upon the knee of the old priest, while the rowers sing an old French chant, and strike in cadence the waters of the Mississippi. "Alas, father," says Evangeline, "my love is lost;" and the old priest said:

"Talk not of wasted affection, affection never was wasted;

If it enrich not the heart of another, its waters returning Back to their springs like the rain, shall fill them full of refreshment, That which the fountain sends forth, returns again to the fountain."

This is doubtless very refined for an old Norman priest, but the thought is beautiful and the expression just.

The poor child, escorted by her guide, looks everywhere for some trace of her family and her betrothed. She visits the fertile bayous of New Orleans, the green shores of the Delaware, the sterile and stormy plains that lie at the foot of the Ozarks; from time to time, some gleams of hope appear; she learns that Gabriel has become a trapper. She knows even that he has passed her in a boat, one autumn night; but days, months and years pass away. In the search youth has faded, Evangeline grows older, becomes a Sister of Mercy, and gives up her life to the sick. At last, one day, she finds her lover stretched upon a hospital bed and dying; he opens his eyes, sees her, and dies consoled: she soon follows him.

"Still stands the forest primeval; but far away from its shadow,
Side by side, in their nameless graves, the lovers are sleeping,
Under the humble walls of the little Catholic church-yard,
In the heart of the city, they lie, unknown and unnoticed.
Daily the tides of life go ebbing and flowing beside them,
Thousands of throbbing hearts, where theirs are at rest and forever,
Thousands of aching brains, where theirs no longer are busy,

Thousands of toiling hands, where theirs have ceased from their labors,
Thousands of weary feet, where theirs have completed their journey!

Still stands the forest primeval; but under the shade of its branches
Dwells another race, with other customs and language.
Only along the shore of the mournful and misty Atlantic
Linger a few Acadian peasants, whose fathers from exile
Wandered back to their native land to die in its bosom.
In the fisherman's cot the wheel and the loom are still busy

Maidens still wear their Norman caps and their kirtles of homespun, And by the evening fire repeat Evangeline's story.

While from its rocky caverns the deep-voiced, neighboring ocean Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest."

There is, in this poem, a singular mingling of the factitious and the natural-two contrasting elements, the real and the permitted, one moving the heart by its truth, the other wounding the mind by affectation. All the American portion merits praise. We are carried down the vast Mississippi to the music of mocking birds. The new, magnificent world is not merely described and analyzed, but the poet reproduces it, and communicates to the reader its peculiarity, its vivifying sap, its inner emotion. We have the "red ears of corn, which, signifying lovers, make the girls blush during harvest." We have the Mission vespers, sung in the midst of the wilderness; the Crucifix hangs upon an old oak, only dweller in that solitude; all heads are bared, and the Christ regards them with a look of divine pity, while the sound of the even song mingles with the rustling of the boughs, and the vine clusters droop downward on the forehead of the crucified Saviour. We have the hunter's camp, in the same prairies, amid seas of verdure, and profound bays of vegetation, which mingled with the wild rose and the purple amorphia, float like waves in the light and shade. There go headlong bands of buffaloes, wolves, wild deer, and armies of riderless steeds. There, near the rivers, under clusters of holm, a smoke announced a robber camp, who stain with blood the solitudes of God, and circling above their heads, the vulture expects his prey. Then you have the Acadian farmer, a king, like the good Evander: then when the twilight comes, and the labor hours are over, and stars appear in heaven, you see the flocks and herds, with nostrils open, breathing the freshness of the night, their heads upon each other's necks: patient and self

important, after them comes the dog, marching right and left in his instinctive pride, proud of governing all these, happy to be their protector at night, when the wolves howl and the lambs tremble. Then the moon rises, and the wagons laden with fodder come home. The horses, their manes wet with the dews, neigh joyously, and shake with their robust shoulders the red fringed harness. The patient cows are milked: the laugh of the farmer's men is heard, and the singing of young girls, and the long lowings of the kine. and the doors are barred.

Then silence,

As an American idyll this poem is admirable. All that it lacks is passion. The love of the betrothed, its birth and progress, are not indicated. It appears that all the ardor of the poet's inspiration can direct itself only to the country itself, towards the sublime and virgin nature which surrounds it.

In this Anglo-American poet two tendencies are visible; the one, religious, towards the Catholic creed, towards vaster and more liberal Christian ideas: the second, literary, towards the Scandinavian Teutonism. His hexameter verse, which flows with sad solemnity, is filled with numerous, irregular alliterations.

The first effect of this upon an ear accustomed to the rapid English iambics is unpleasant, but one gets used to it. And then one endures the echo of the same consonant at the beginning and in the middle of words, strange as it is to the poetic habits of the South; you find examples in the old Latin and Greek poets, but it is generally avoided by the English.

We in France have never been able to adopt this rhythm, although the ridiculous Guilliaume Cretin tried to naturalize it, and which comes from the German Meistersänger of the fifteenth century; a curious fact, to be found in no history of literature. Mr. Longfellow knows Icelandic and Danish