John does his duty, makes the sacrifice, and pleads eloquently for his friend; the damsel is froward, and bids him speak for himself. He returns, and tells the Captain how he has fared. Miles is furious, insults poor John, and meditates further mischief, but is called out to fight the Indians, who, after a long campaign, cut him off and kill him; the lovers incontinently rush into each other's arms, and at the weddingday the dead man, who has never been dead at all, re-appears in the character of heavy father, and blesses the bridegroom and the bride; and so the scene closes with a tableau of Priscilla sitting like Europa on a white ox, and John leading her home.

The Puritanism of Miles was not inconsistent with "apostolic blows' and knocks;" he maintained twelve men all equipped with matchlocks, and paid

"Eighteen shillings a month, together with diet and pillage.”

He had also a little library, in which were three great books,

"Bariffe's Artillery Guide, and the Commentāries of Cæsar.

And as if guarded by these, between them was standing the Bible." Cæsar was his favourite, and he naturally turned to the dogs'eared pages,

66

where thumb-marks, thick on the margin, Like the trample of feet, proclaimed where the battle was hottest;" and which would therefore have been a capital book for a schoolboy, as the dirt would have warned him what parts to miss, and would at the same time evince to his confiding parent the care he bestowed on solving difficulties. Miles was a small sententious man, fiery, "like a little chimney, soon hot" and soon cool again; passionate, but forgiving; hasty, but seldom forgetting himself so far as to use scriptural slang, and when he did, giving it a touch of profanity rather than of piety, and replying to the arguments of the puritan elder with a rather irreverent parody of the pentecostal gift:

"Is it to shoot red squirrels you have your howitzer planted There on the roof of the church, or is it to shoot red devils? Truly the only tongue that is understood by a savage

Must be the tongue of fire that speaks from the mouth of the cannon!" A sentiment that draws down a mild rebuke from the only old man in the council

66

the hill that was nearest to heaven, Covered with snow but erect, the excellent elder of Plymouth." It is this old gentleman's trade to live in a kind of judaical

world, and to speak with the tongues of Gideons and Othniels. But the young gentleman John also comes out very strongly in this line, and by his copious use of scriptural imagery, that can hardly (in our altered circumstances) be the natural language of passion, but must be the "sweat of the brain," distilled chemically by thought rather than gushing spontaneously from the heart, nearly succeeds in making us take him for a hypocrite. On his embassy, when he thinks he must give up Priscilla, and determines to do so, after a few natural lines, such as

"Must I relinquish it all-the joy, the hope, the illusion ?"

he soon lapses into divinity, and puts on the nightcap of John Knox-" truly the heart is deceitful;" "Satan appears like an angel of light;" "this is the hand of the Lord'

"For I have followed too much the heart's desires and devices, Worshipping Astaroth blindly, and impious idols of Baal:"

all these idols being apparently the poor unconscious Priscilla. As he approaches her house "in the solitude of the forest," he hears her

"Singing the hundredth psalm, the grand old puritan anthem ;" and as he opens the door he sees her spinning, with her psalm-book on her lap-a Dutch-printed volume:

Rough-hewn, angular notes, like stones in the wall of a churchyard, Darkened and overhung by the running vine of the verses." She makes a very graceful picture; but if the outward sign was present, we are afraid that the inward grace was not there. As soon as she sees him, she owns that she was not thinking of what a pretty Puritan should think when she sings psalms:

“For I was thinking of you when I sat there singing and spinning." Bump went John's heart when he heard the maiden's artless avowal; and there he stood

"Awkward and dumb with delight, that a thought of him had been mingled

Thus in the sacred psalm that had come from the heart of the maiden."

No wonder the girl liked the " dewy youth" better than the grisly old hero; no wonder that John trembled, and did his friend's behest awkwardly, and bluntly gave his message with no more phrases than the Captain himself could have commanded. Poor Priscilla had been prettily confiding her sorrows to John; John answers by delivering his mes

sage: "her eyes dilated with wonder, feeling his words like a blow that stunned her;" but she at last plucked up courage to say, "If the Captain wants me, why does he not woo me himself?" John explains, "He had no time for such things." Unfortunate John! he is yet deeper in the mire; Priscilla is offended.

"That is the way with you men; you don't understand us, you cannot. When you have made up your minds, after thinking of this one and

that one;

Choosing, selecting, rejecting, comparing one with another,

Then you make known your desire, with abrupt and sudden avowal, And are offended and hurt, and indignant, perhaps, that a woman Does not respond at once to a love that is never suspected,

Does not attain at a bound the height to which you have been climbing. This is not right nor just; for surely a woman's affection

Is not a thing to be asked for, and had for only the asking.

When one is truly in love, one not only says it but shows it.
Had he but waited a little, had he only showed that he loved me,
Even this captain of yours-who knows?-at last might have won me,
Old and rough as he is; but now it never can happen."

The maiden's is not a very consistent character; so simple on the one hand that she as good as pops the question to John without meaning it, that she is quite at a loss to comprehend John's consequent awkwardness, and that she mistakes his flutter and trembling for anger: on the other hand, so wise that she has generalised love-making into a law, has argued herself into being an advocate for the woman's right of taking the initiative in that delicate proceeding, and can utter solemn saws about it like a matron of forty.

After the platonic discourse of the damsel, the swain begins, in simple and eloquent language, to set forth the praises of Miles; and it is now that the maiden coyly asks him why he does not speak for himself. He rushes out from her presence like a man insane, and takes a good dose of the infallible poetical nostrum for all heartaches—a sight of a sunset on the sea-shore:

"Like an awakened conscience, the sea was moaning and tossing, Beating, remorseful and loud, the mutable sands of the sea-shore; Fierce in his soul was the struggle and tumult of passions contending; Love triumphant and crowned, and friendship wounded and bleeding, Passionate cries of desire, and importunate pleadings of duty."

John's position is a painful one, doubtless; and his conduct under it, if not very strong or very sensible, is not at all unnatural; his somewhat chivalrous sense of duty pulls him one way, and his ever-growing passion another. Does he go out for a walk? against his will he is run away with by his legs to Priscilla's cottage, where he sits and spoons, but never with any intention to supplant the redoubtable, the fiery

Miles, who is all the while slaying Indians in the forest. At last, as they are sitting together, the news of Miles's death is brought in. And here we must certainly protest against the conduct of the lovers: we should have thought that a revulsion of feeling would have been the immediate effect on minds decently constituted; that they would have put off for a moment the triumph of their liberation, while they took shame to think that it required the annihilation of a hero, the sacrifice of the Hector who was the palladium of Plymouth, to smooth their way into each other's arms. But no; their eyes are open only to themselves; for others they have scarcely a thought; they are lovers after the model of those that Pope laughed at for their modest request

"Ye gods, annihilate both space and time,

And make two lovers happy ;"

and when the news of Miles's death is told, and there is a panic about the Indians coming to burn all the town and murder all the people, John Alden, freed once and for ever from his chains,

"Wild with excess of sensation, the awful delight of his freedom Mingled with pain and regret, unconscious of what he was doing, Clasped, almost with a groan, the motionless form of Priscilla; Pressing her close to his heart, as for ever his own, and exclaiming, "Those whom the Lord hath united, let no man put them asunder.""

We protest with all our might against Mr. Longfellow's joining the stream of sentimental romancists, and bringing in sacred names to justify the view they give us of the Divine nature and of the relative importance of human actions in the eyes of Providence. The god of novelists is a kind of official Hymen, complacent even to crime, provided it is a means of attaining the hymeneal end, to which all other ends in this life and the next are subordinate. He is a being whose business it is to raise valleys, level mountains, and bridge seas that separate moaning lovers; by any means, fair or foul, to bring the pretty creatures together, no matter whether they walk over the ruins of burnt towns, or drive, like Tullia, over their fathers' dead bodies. He is a being not to our taste; we don't look down the "hatched, matched, and despatched" column in the Times for the most interesting news of the day. We think that even in the individual life there are more important duties than love-making, more significant crises than a sentimental marriage. So we confess that we do not like the conduct of John and Priscilla, and that poor old Miles Standish remains our hero, as probably Mr. Longfellow intended he should remain.

Nearly half the volume is occupied with fugitive pieces,

"birds of passage," as the poet names them. Some of these
are very pretty. That called "St. Augustine's Ladder" con-
tains good philosophy-" of our vices we can frame a ladder,
if we will but tread beneath our feet each deed of shame."
"We have not wings, we cannot soar;

But we have feet to scale and climb,
By slow degrees, by more and more
The cloudy summits of our time.

The heights, by great men reached and kept,
Were not attained by sudden flight;
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upwards in the night.'

In a country like America men of sound minds, who recognise in the family the great constituent element of social safety, see more clearly the value of the local associations which in old countries we enjoy but do not reason upon :

"All houses wherein men have lived and died

Are haunted houses. Through the open doors
The harmless phantoms on their errands glide
With feet that make no sound upon the floors.
We meet them at the doorway, on the stair,
Along the passages they come and go,
Impalpable impressions on the air,

A sense of something moving to and fro.

There are more guests at table than the hosts
Invited; the illuminated hall

Is throng'd with quiet inoffensive ghosts
As silent as the pictures on the wall.

The stranger at my fireside cannot see

The forms I see, nor hear the sounds I hear;
He but perceives what is, while unto me

All that has been is visible and clear."

For the same reason Mr. Longfellow calls the domestic hearth, or the chimney of each man, his "golden milestone," from which he measures every distance; "the central point" which he keeps in view in his farthest wanderings, where lives the crackling blaze whose sounds he hears as he heard them when he sat with those that were and are not:

66 Happy he whom neither wealth nor fashion,
Nor the march of the encroaching city,

Drives an exile

From the hearth of his ancestral homestead.

We may build more splendid habitations,

Fill our rooms with paintings and with sculptures;

But we cannot

Buy with gold the old associations !"

There are many pretty conceits and images in these short