of travellers gathered in Sudbury Inn, and each suited, either by its scene or its sentiment, to the speaker who recites it.  In this also there is a natural reminiscence of Chaucer; and if we miss the rich minuteness of his Van Eyck painting, or the depth of his thoughtful humor, we find the same airy grace, tenderness, simple strength, and exquisite felicities of description.  Nor are twinkles of sly humor wanting.  The Interludes, and above all the Prelude, are masterly examples of that perfect ease of style which is, of all things, the hardest to attain.  The verse flows clear and sweet as honey, and with a faint fragrance that tells, but not too plainly, of flowers that grew in many fields.  We are made to feel that, however tedious the processes of culture may be, the ripe result in facile power and scope of fancy is purely delightful.  We confess that we are so heartily weary of those cataclysms of passion and sentiment with which literature has been convulsed of late,—­as if the main object were, not to move the reader, but to shake the house about his ears,—­that the homelike quiet and beauty of such poems as these is like an escape from noise to nature.

As regards the structure of the work looked at as a whole, it strikes us as a decided fault, that the Saga of King Olaf is so disproportionately long, especially as many of the pieces which compose it are by no means so well done as the more strictly original ones.  We have no quarrel with the foreign nature of the subject as such,—­for any good matter is American enough for a truly American poet; but we cannot help thinking that Mr. Longfellow has sometimes mistaken mere strangeness for freshness, and has failed to make his readers feel the charm he himself felt.  Put into English, the Saga seems too Norse; and there is often a hitchiness in the verse that suggests translation with overmuch heed for literal closeness.  It is possible to assume alien forms of verse, but hardly to enter into forms of thought alien both in time and in the ethics from which they are derived.  “The Building of the Long Serpent” is not to be named with Mr. Longfellow’s “Building of the Ship,” which he learned from no Heimskringla, but from the dockyards of Portland, where he played as a boy.  We are willing, however, to pardon the parts which we find somewhat ineffectual, in favor of the “Nun of Nidaros,” which concludes, and in its gracious piety more than redeems, them all.

WHITTIER

IN WAR TIME, AND OTHER POEMS

It is a curious illustration of the attraction of opposites, that, among our elder poets, the war we are waging finds its keenest expression in the Quaker Whittier.  Here is, indeed, a soldier prisoner on parole in a drab coat, with no hope of exchange, but with a heart beating time to the tap of the drum.  Mr. Whittier is, on the whole, the most American of our poets, and there is a fire of warlike patriotism