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 in these latter days it is given to be, he holds a place among our poets like that of Irving among our prose-writers.  Make whatever deductions and qualifications, and they still keep their place in the hearts and minds of men.  In point of time he is our Chaucer—­the first who imported a finer foreign culture into our poetry.

His present volume shows a greater ripeness than any of its predecessors.  We find a mellowness of early autumn in it.  There is the old sweetness native to the man, with greater variety of character and experience.  The personages are all drawn from the life, and sketched with the light firmness of a practised art.  They have no more individuality than is necessary to the purpose of the poem, which consists of a series of narratives told by a party