to find an adequate expression of it in the burning language of the poet.
We marvelled that he who could so touch the heart by his description of
the sad suffering of the Acadian peasants should have permitted the
authors of that suffering to escape without censure. The outburst of the
stout Basil, in the church of Grand Pre, was, we are fain to acknowledge,
a great relief to us. But, before reaching the close of the volume, we
were quite reconciled to the author's forbearance. The design of the
poem is manifestly incompatible with stern "rhadamanthine justice" and
indignant denunciation of wrong. It is a simple story of quiet pastoral
happiness, of great sorrow and painful bereavement, and of the endurance
of a love which, hoping and seeking always, wanders evermore up and down
the wilderness of the world, baffled at every turn, yet still retaining
faith in God and in the object of its lifelong quest. It was no part of
the writer's object to investigate the merits of the question at issue
between the poor Acadians and their Puritan neighbors. Looking at the
materials before him with the eye of an artist simply, he has arranged
them to suit his idea of the beautiful and pathetic, leaving to some
future historian the duty of sitting in judgment upon the actors in the
atrocious outrage which furnished them. With this we are content. The
poem now has unity and sweetness which might have been destroyed by
attempting to avenge the wrongs it so vividly depicts. It is a psalm of
love and forgiveness: the gentleness and peace of Christian meekness and
forbearance breathe through it. Not a word of censure is directly
applied to the marauding workers of the mighty sorrow which it describes
just as it would a calamity from the elements,--a visitation of God. The
reader, however, cannot fail to award justice to the wrong-doers. The
unresisting acquiescence of the Acadians only deepens his detestation of
the cupidity and religious bigotry of their spoilers. Even in the
language of the good Father Felician, beseeching his flock to submit to
the strong hand which had been laid upon them, we see and feel the