clean and elegantly crnamented streets and trim gardens of his verse. But he is still more a man of cultivated taste, delicate though not deep feeling, and some, though not much, poetic force.
Mr. Longfellow has been accused of plagiarism. We have been surprised that any one should have been anxious to fasten special charges of this kind upon him, when we had supposed it so obvious that the greater part of his mental stores were derived from the works of others. He has no style of his own growing out of his own experiences and observations of nature. Nature with him, whether human or external, is always seen through the windows of literature. There are in his poems sweet and tender passages descriptive of his personal feelings, but very few showing him as an observer, at first hand, of the passions within, or the landscape without.
This want of the free breath of nature, this perpetual borrowing of imagery, this excessive, because superficial, culture which he has derived from an acquaintance with the elegant literature of many nations and men out of proportion to the experience of life within himself, prevent Mr. Longfellow’s verses from ever being a true refreshment to ourselves. He says in one of his most graceful verses:
| From the cool cisterns of the midnight air |
| My spirit drank repose; |
| The fountain of perpetual peace flows there, |
| From those deep cisterns flows. |
Now this is just what we cannot get from Mr. Longfellow. No solitude of the mind reveals to us the deep cisterns.
Let us take, for example of what we do not like, one of his worst pieces, the Prelude to the Voices of the Night—
| Beneath some patriarchal tree |
| I lay upon the ground; |
