"And then at furious speed he rode
Along the Niger's bank,

His bridle-reins were golden chains,

And, with a martial clank,

At each leap he could feel his scabbard of steel
Smiting his stallion's flank."

The fertility of Mr. Longfellow's mind, and the variety of his powers, were manifested in his thirty-sixth year, when he published the "Poems on Slavery," of which I have just spoken, and "The Spanish Student," -a dramatic poem, the actors in which were the antipodes of the dusky figures which preceded them. Judged by the laws of its construction, and by the intention of its creator, " The Spanish Student " is a beautiful production. It should be read for what it is,—a poem, and without the slightest thought of the stage, which was not in the mind of the author when he wrote it. So read, it will be found radiant with poetry, not of a passionate or profound kind, which would be out of place; for the plot is in no sense a tragic one, but of a kind that suggests the higher walks of serious poetic comedy. The characters of the different actors in this little closet play are sketched with sufficient distinctness, and the conversation, which is lively and bustling, is suited to the speakers and their station in life. The gipsy dancing girl, Preciosa, is a lovely creation of the poet's fancy.

แ

In 1843, Mr. Longfellow was married for the second time, and became the possessor of the Craigie house. Three years later he published "The Belfry of Bruges and other Poems." Traces of his early manner, as unsuccessfully manifested in "The Beleaguered City," appear in "Carillon," the prologue to the volume, and in "The Arrow and the Song," which is perhaps the most perfect of all his smaller pieces. "The Belfry of Bruges" is a picturesque description of that quaint old city, as seen from the belfry-tower in the market-place one summer morning, and an imaginative remembrance of its past history, which passes like a pageant before the eyes of the poet. Everything is clearly conceived and in orderly succession, and in no poem that he had previously written had the hand of the artist been so firm. "Nuremberg," a companion-piece in the same measure, is distinguished by the same precision of touch and the same broad excellence. There is an indescribable charm, a grace allied to melancholy, in " A Gleam of Sunshine,"

which is one of the few poems that refuse to be forgotten. "The Arsenal at Springfield" is in a certain sense didactic, I suppose, but I do not quite see how it could be otherwise, and be a poem at all. A poet should be a poet first, but he should also be a man, and a man who concerns himself with the joys and sorrows of his fellow-creatures. There was a great lesson in the burnished arms at Springfield, and a lesser poet than Mr. Longfellow would not have guessed it.

"Were half the power that fills the world with terror,
Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts,

Given to redeem the human mind from error,
There were no need of arsenals and forts:
The warrior's name would be a name abhorred,
And every nation that should lift again
Its hand against a brother, on its forehead

Should wear for evermore the curse of Cain !"

"The Norman Baron" is a study of the medieval age, and "Rain in Summer," a fresh and offhand description of a country shower.

Not many English-writing poets, good fathers as most of them were, have addressed poems to their children. Ben Jonson wrote some lines about his first daughter, who died in infancy. Coleridge sang a serious cradle-song over his son Hartley, in "Frost at Midnight." Shelley bewailed the early death of his son William; and Leigh Hunt celebrated twe of his children in two characteristic poems, the most natural of which he inscribed to his son John, "A Nursery Song for a Four-YearOld Romp." These are some of the best-known English poets, to whom childhood was a source of inspiration. Mr. Longfellow distanced all of them, and apparently without an effort, in the volume under consideration. His poem "To my Child," has no superior of its kind in the language. We have a glimpse of the poet's house for the first time in verse, and of the chamber in which he wrote so many of his poems, which had now become the child's nursery. Its chimney was adorned with painted tiles, among which he enumerates :

"The lady with the gay macaw,

The dancing girl, the grave bashaw
With bearded lip and chin;

And, leaning idly o'er his gate,
Beneath the imperial fan of state,

The Chinese mandarin."

The child shakes his coral rattle with its silver bells, and is content for the moment with its merry tune. The poet listens to other bells than these, and they tell him that the coral was growing thousands of

VIEW ACROSS THE LAWN, NORTH-WEST OF THE HOUSE.

years in the Indian seas, and that the bells once reposed as shapeless ore in darksome mines, beneath the base of Chimborazo or the overhanging pines of Potosi.

"And thus for thee, O little child,

Through many a danger and escape,
The tall ships passed the stormy cape;
For thee, in foreign lands remote,

Beneath a burning, tropic clime,

The Indian peasant, chasing the wild goat,
Himself as swift and wild,

In falling, clutched the frail arbute,
The fibres of whose shallow root,
Uplifted from the soil, betrayed
The silver veins beneath it laid

The buried treasures of the miser Time."

He turns from the child to the memory of one who formerly dwelt

within the walls of his historic mansion:

"Up and down these echoing stairs
Heavy with the weight of cares,

Sounded his majestic tread :
Yes, within this very room

Sat he, in those hours of gloom,

Weary both in heart and head."

These grave thoughts are succeeded by pictures of the child at play, now in the orchard and now in the garden-walks, where his little carriagewheels efface whole villages of sand-roofed tents that rise above the secret homes of nomadic tribes of ants. But, tired already, he comes back to parley with repose, and, seated with his father on a rustic seat in an old apple-tree, they see the waters of the river, and a sailless vessel dropping down the stream:

The poet speculates gravely on the future of his child, and bids him remember that if his fate is an untoward one, even in the perilous hour,

"When most afflicted and oppressed

From labour there shall come forth rest."

In this poem, and in "The Occultation of Orion," Mr. Longfellow has reached a table-land of imagination not hitherto attained by his Muse. "The Bridge" is a revealment of his personality, and a phase of his genius which has never ceased to charm the majority of his readers.

The train of thought which it suggests is not new, but what thought that embraces mankind is new? Enough that it is natural, and sympathetic, and tender. The lines to "The Driving Cloud" are an admirable specimen of hexameters, and a valuable addition to America's scanty

store of aboriginal poetry-the forerunner of an immortal contribution not yet transmuted into verse.

Under the head of "Songs" we have eight poems, two of which are modelled after a fashion that Mr. Longfellow had succeeded in making