and apparently beneficial to the subject of them, but its ultimate
effects are most injurious to the proper development of his powers.
When the merest trifles that a man throws off are inordinately
praised, he soon becomes content with producing the merest trifles.
Longfellow has grown unaccustomed to do himself justice. Half his
volumes are filled up with translations; graceful and accurate,
indeed; but translations, and often from originals of very moderate
merit. His last original poem, _Evangeline_, is a sort of pastoral
in hexameters. The resuscitation of this classical metre had a queer
effect upon the American quidnuncs. Some of the _critics_ evidently
believed it to be a bran-new metre invented for the nonce by the
author, a delusion which they of the 'Mutual Admiration' rather winked
at; and the parodists who endeavored to ridicule the new measure were
evidently not quite sure whether seven feet or nine made a hexameter.
It is really to be regretted that Longfellow has been cajoled into
playing these tricks with himself, for his earlier pieces were works
of much promise, and, had they been worthily followed out, might
have entitled him to a high place among the poets of the language....
Longfellow's poetry, whenever he really lays himself out to write
poetry, has a definite idea and purpose in it--no small merit
now-a-days. His versification is generally harmonious, and he displays
a fair command of metre. Sometimes he takes a fancy to an obsolete
or out-of-the-way stanza; one of his longest and best poems, _The
Skeleton in Armor_, is exactly in the measure of Drayton's fine
ballad on Agincourt. His chief fault is an over-fondness for simile
and metaphor. He seems to think indispensable the introduction into
everything he writes of a certain (or sometimes a very uncertain)
number of these figures. Accordingly his poems are crowded with
comparisons, sometimes very pretty and pleasing, at others so
far-fetched that the string of tortured images which lead off Alfred