d he wrote some pretty poems. But his poems are not of the kind that
call for intellectual analysis or for elaborate description or, indeed,
for any serious discussion at all. They are as unsuited for panegyric as
they are unworthy of censure, and it is difficult to help smiling when
Mr. Robertson gravely tells us that few modern poets have given utterance
to a faith so comprehensive as that expressed in the Psalm of Life, or
that Evangeline should confer on Longfellow the title of
'Golden-mouthed,' and that the style of metre adopted 'carries the ear
back to times in the world's history when grand simplicities were sung.'
Surely Mr. Robertson does not believe that there is any connection at all
between Longfellow's unrhymed dactylics and the hexameter of Greece and
Rome, or that any one reading Evangeline would be reminded of Homer's or
Virgil's line? Where also lies the advantage of confusing popularity
with poetic power? Though the Psalm of Life be shouted from Maine to
California, that would not make it true poetry. Why call upon us to
admire a bad misquotation from the Midnight Mass for the Dying Year, and
why talk of Longfellow's 'hundreds of imitators'? Longfellow has no
imitators, for of echoes themselves there are no echoes and it is only
style that makes a school.

Now and then, however, Mr. Robertson considers it necessary to assume a
critical attitude. He tells us, for instance, that whether or not
Longfellow was a genius of the first order, it must be admitted that he
loved social pleasures and was a good eater and judge of wines, admiring
'Bass's ale' more than anything else he had seen in England! The remarks
on Excelsior are even still more amazing. Excelsior, says Mr. Robertson,
is not a ballad because a ballad deals either with real or with
supernatural people, and the hero of the poem cannot be brought under
either category. For, 'were he of human flesh, his madcap notion of
scaling a mountain with the purpose of getting to the sky would be simply
drivelling lunacy,' to say nothing of the fact that the peak in question
is much frequented by tourists, while, on the other hand, 'it would be
absurd to suppose him a spirit . . . for no spirit would be so silly as
climb a snowy mountain for nothing'! It is really painful to have to
read such preposterous nonsense, and if Mr. Walter Scott imagines that
work of this kind is 'original and valuable' he has much to learn. Nor
are Mr. Robertson's crit