CRITICISM: EVANGELINE

A review of Mr. Longfellow's poem.

EUREKA! Here, then, we have it at last,--an American poem, with the lack
of which British reviewers have so long reproached us. Selecting the
subject of all others best calculated for his purpose,--the expulsion of
the French settlers of Acadie from their quiet and pleasant homes around
the Basin of Minas, one of the most sadly romantic passages in the
history of the Colonies of the North,--the author has succeeded in
presenting a series of exquisite pictures of the striking and peculiar
features of life and nature in the New World. The range of these
delineations extends from Nova Scotia on the northeast to the spurs of
the Rocky Mountains on the west and the Gulf of Mexico on the south.
Nothing can be added to his pictures of quiet farm-life in Acadie, the
Indian summer of our northern latitudes, the scenery of the Ohio and
Mississippi Rivers, the bayous and cypress forests of the South, the
mocking-bird, the prairie, the Ozark hills, the Catholic missions, and
the wild Arabs of the West, roaming with the buffalo along the banks of
the Nebraska. The hexameter measure he has chosen has the advantage of a
prosaic freedom of expression, exceedingly well adapted to a descriptive
and narrative poem; yet we are constrained to think that the story of
Evangeline would have been quite as acceptable to the public taste had it
been told in the poetic prose of the author's Hyperion.

In reading it and admiring its strange melody we were not without fears
that the success of Professor Longfellow in this novel experiment might
prove the occasion of calling out a host of awkward imitators, leading us
over weary wastes of hexameters, enlivened neither by dew, rain, nor
fields of offering.

Apart from its Americanism, the poem has merits of a higher and universal
character. It is not merely a work of art; the pulse of humanity throbs
warmly through it. The portraits of Basil the blacksmith, the old
notary, Benedict Bellefontaine, and good Father Felician, fairly glow
with life. The beautiful Evangeline, loving and faithful unto death, is
a heroine worthy of any poet of the present century.

The editor of the Boston Chronotype, in the course of an appreciative
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 M