review of this poem, urges with some force a single objection, which we
are induced to notice, as it is one not unlikely to present itself to the
minds of other readers:--

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

"It is true that the wrong in this case is in a great degree fathered
upon our own Massachusetts; and it maybe said that it is afoul bird that
pollutes its own nest. We deny the applicability of the rather musty
proverb. All the worse. Of not a more contemptible vice is what is
called American literature guilty than this of unmitigated self-
laudation. If we persevere in it, the stock will become altogether too
small for the business. It seems that no period of our history has been
exempt from materials for patriotic humiliation and national self-
reproach; and surely the present epoch is laying in a large store of that
sort. Had our poets always told us the truth of ourselves, perhaps it
would now be otherwise. National self-flattery and concealment of faults
must of course have their natural results."

We must confess that we read the first part of Evangeline with something
of the feeling so forcibly expressed by Professor Wright. The natural
and honest indignation with which, many years ago, we read for the first
time that dark page of our Colonial history--the expulsion of the French
neutrals--was reawakened by the simple pathos of the poem; and we longed