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

and has passed some time on the Scandinavian Peninsula; and, without thinking, he has habituated himself to alliteration, an involuntary form with him, voluntary with the old Scalds, and still preserving a popular influence in the North. The Danish poet, Oehlenschlager has written part of his poem on the gods of the North in alliterative verse.

So Longfellow,

Tilgiv tvungne

Trael af Elskov

At han dig atter

Astaeld findet, etc.

Fuller of fragrance than they

And as heavy with shadows and night-dews,

Hung the heart of the maiden,

The calm and magical moonlight

Seemed to inundate her soul.

What is strange is that Mr. Longfellow, in writing, never noticed these multiplied alliterations which flow spontaneously from his pen and fill the poem. This involuntary return of English poetry towards its primitive source in the Scandinavian caves is too curious a fact to be passed over in silence.

Thus then, while old Europe regenerates herself as she can, young and less troubled nations are endeavoring art and poetry. Evangeline is not a chef-d'œuvre, but its beauties. have the gift of life, future life in them. Here are the elements which prevent the death of society and of literature, the most correct notions of justice and morality, the most ardent and thoughtful love of native land.

It is amazing how many frivolous or ironical books have issued from the American presses since 1830. The races inheriting from old civilization, seeing before them an unknown world of industry and politics to conquer and to organise, find themselves face to face with ridiculous contrasts, and are naturally given to irony. Roman Gaul commenced thus.

This irony in the United States is still very rude; it will become refined, but at present it is singularly bitter and coarse. Readers upon this side of the Atlantic can only feel disgust for the odious scenes written by two satiric painters of manners, Messrs. Moore and Matthews, authors of Tom Stapleton and Puffer Hopkins. I read eagerly these sketches of American life by Americans. The impression is a mournful one; it is not popular, but low and aristocratic in the worst sense of that word; faded and corrupted vices, without grace or taste; a coward life which pursues titles, envies fortune, rushes upon success. These manners are destitute of purity,

passion, simplicity, elegance or greatness-'tis the lowest shopkeeper of Whitehall, transported into gilded drawingrooms, and clumsily borrowing the upper vices without forgetting or losing the baser. It is no longer Washington; it has not become Horace Walpole. I cannot express, the disdain and grief produced by these crazy and brutal manners, which belong by their impurity to the scandalous boudoirs of the old world, and smell of the bar-room while claiming to be aristocratic.

Must we look here for the true description of American society. Dickens, Marryatt, Mrs. Trollope, Miss Martineau, being English, should inspire us with little confidence, yet are they much more favorable to America than Messrs. Moore and Matthews, whose highly popular novels, published in a sheet called the "Brother Jonathan," with horrible wood-cuts, give for twelve and a half cents the value of three octavo volumes, of three hundred pages each. It is the ne plus ultra of cheap printing. Let us add that it is impossible to see anything uglier than these cheap impressions; but the form is worthy of the matter. There was an idea in Puffer Hopkins, the man of puff, sailing, with full sheet, the seas of democracy in the bark of charlatanism and fraud, but the grossness of the scenes make the book hideous. Lighter and more frivilous, Tom Stapleton accumulates orgies, fights, scenes of drunkenness, broken chairs, and falls upon staircases, mixed with the blackguard scenes and philosophic liberties of Compere Matthieu. The author desired to paint the deeds of the amiable good-for-naughts of New York: nobody would like to trust himself alone with those fellows. The club plays a principal part in the drama; Tom is the friend and secret protector of a heroine worthy of himself. When they are not drunk, they fight; when not fighting, they are drunk. All finishes by the hero's profitable