greater favorite with the
few; but he whose verse is in sympathy with moods that are human and not
personal, with emotions that do not belong to periods in the development
of individual minds, but to all men in all years, wins the gratitude and
love of whoever can read the language which he makes musical with solace
and aspiration. The present volume, while it will confirm Mr.
Longfellow's claim to the high rank he has won among lyric poets,
deserves attention also as proving him to possess that faculty of epic
narration which is rarer than all others in the nineteenth century. In
our love of stimulants, and our numbness of taste, which craves the red
pepper of a biting vocabulary, we of the present generation are apt to
overlook this almost obsolete and unobtrusive quality; but we doubt if,
since Chaucer, we have had an example of more purely objective narrative
than in "The Courtship of Miles Standish." Apart from its intrinsic
beauty, this gives the poem a claim to higher and more thoughtful
consideration; and we feel sure that posterity will confirm the verdict
of the present in regard to a poet whose reputation is due to no
fleeting fancy, but to an instinctive recognition by the public of that
which charms now and charms always,--true power and originality, without
grimace and distortion; for Apollo, and not Milo, is the artistic type
of strength.

TALES OF A WAYSIDE INN

It is no wonder that Mr. Longfellow should be the most popular of
American, we might say, of contemporary poets. The fine humanity of his
nature, the wise simplicity of his thought, the picturesqueness of his
images, and the deliciously limpid flow of his style, entirely justify
the public verdict, and give assurance that his present reputation will
settle into fame. That he has not _this_ of Tennyson, nor _that_ of
Browning, may be cheerfully admitted, while he has so many other things
that are his own. There may be none of those flashes of lightning in his
verse that make day for a moment in this dim cavern of consciousness
where we grope; but there is an equable sunshine that touches the
landscape of life with a new charm, and lures us out into healthier air.
If he fall short of the highest reaches of imagination, he is none the
less a master within his own sphere--all the more so, indeed, that he is
conscious of his own limitations, and wastes no strength in striving to
be other than himself. Genial, natural, and original, as much as