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CRITICISM

BY
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER

CONTENTS:

EVANGELINE MIRTH AND MEDICINE FAME AND GLORY FANATICISM THE POETRY OF THE NORTH

CRITICISM

EVANGELINE

A review of Mr. Longfellow's poem.

EUREKA! Here, then, we have it at last,—an American poem, with the lackof which British reviewers have so long reproached us. Selecting thesubject of all others best calculated for his purpose,—the expulsion ofthe French settlers of Acadie from their quiet and pleasant homes aroundthe Basin of Minas, one of the most sadly romantic passages in thehistory of the Colonies of the North,—the author has succeeded inpresenting a series of exquisite pictures of the striking and peculiarfeatures of life and nature in the New World. The range of thesedelineations extends from Nova Scotia on the northeast to the spurs ofthe Rocky Mountains on the west and the Gulf of Mexico on the south.Nothing can be added to his pictures of quiet farm-life in Acadie, theIndian summer of our northern latitudes, the scenery of the Ohio andMississippi Rivers, the bayous and cypress forests of the South, themocking-bird, the prairie, the Ozark hills, the Catholic missions, andthe wild Arabs of the West, roaming with the buffalo along the banks ofthe Nebraska. The hexameter measure he has chosen has the advantage of aprosaic freedom of expression, exceedingly well adapted to a descriptiveand narrative poem; yet we are constrained to think that the story ofEvangeline would have been quite as acceptable to the public taste had itbeen told in the poetic prose of the author's Hyperion.

In reading it and admiring its strange melody we were not without fearsthat the success of Professor Longfellow in this novel experiment mightprove the occasion of calling out a host of awkward imitators, leading usover weary wastes of hexameters, enlivened neither by dew, rain, norfields of offering.

Apart from its Americanism, the poem has merits of a higher and universalcharacter. It is not merely a work of art; the pulse of humanity throbswarmly through it. The portraits of Basil the blacksmith, the oldnotary, Benedict Bellefontaine, and good Father Felician, fairly glowwith life. The beautiful Evangeline, loving and faithful unto death, isa heroine worthy of any poet of the present century.

The editor of the Boston Chronotype, in the course of an appreciativereview of this poem, urges with some force a single objection, which weare induced to notice, as it is one not unlikely to present itself to theminds of other readers:—

"We think Mr. Longfellow ought to have expressed a much deeperindignation at the base, knavish, and heartless conduct of the Englishand Colonial persecutors than he has done. He should have put far bolderand deeper tints in the picture of suffering. One great, if not thegreatest, end of poetry is rhadamanthine justice. The poet should meteout their deserts to all his heroes; honor to whom honor, and infamy towhom infamy, is due.

"It is true that the wrong in this case is in a great degree fatheredupon our own Massachusetts; and it maybe said that it is afoul bird thatpollutes its own nest. We deny the applicability of the rather mustyproverb. All the worse. Of not a more contemptible vice is what iscalled American literature

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