He

besieged city-such joy is mingled with the great sorrow of his country's defeat and dismemberment. is sustained by his confidence in the future, and in the ultimate victory of the democratic ideas which form his faith; though once or twice this confidence seems for a moment shaken by the rude assault of facts. The extravagance of his love and devotion to France, the extravagance of his scorn and hatred of the invader, must be pardoned, if they need pardon-and passed by. When will a poet arise who shall unite the most accurate perception of facts as they really are-exaggerating nothing, diminishing nothing-with the most ardent passion; who shall be judicial and yet the greatest of lovers ? He indeed will make such passion as that of Victor Hugo look pale. Yet the wisdom and charity and moderation of many poems of "L' Année terrible" must not be overlooked: nor the freedom of the poet from party spirit. He is a Frenchman throughout; not a man of the Commune, nor a man of Versailles. The most precious poems of the book are those which keep close to facts rather than concern themselves with ideas. The sunset seen from the ramparts, the floating bodies of the Prussians borne onward by the Seine, caressed and kissed and still swayed on by the eddying water, the bomb which fell near the old man's feet while he sat where had been the convent of the Feuillantines, and where he had walked under the trees in Aprils long ago, holding his mother's hand, the petroleuse dragged like a chained beast through the scorching streets of Paris, the gallant boy who came to confront death beside his friends, -memories of these it is which haunt us when we have

and of the little limbs, and

closed the book. Of these transparent fingers and baby smile and murmur like the murmur of bees, and the face changed from rosy health to a pathetic paleness, of the one-year-old grandchild, too soon to become an orphan.

In the works of 1877 no new direction has been taken; but splendours and horrors, heroisms and shames still fill up the legendary record of the centuries; and amidst these glories and dishonours of adult manhood, shines the divine innocence of the child.

THE POETRY OF DEMOCRACY: WALT

WHITMAN.

THAT school of criticism which has attempted in recent years to connect the history of literature and art with the larger history of society and the general movement of civilizations, creeds, forms of national life and feeling, and which may be called emphatically the critical school of the present century, or the naturalist as contradistinguished from the dogmatic school, has not yet essayed the application of its method and principles to the literature and art of America. For a moment one wonderingly inquires after the cause of this seeming neglect. The New World, with its new presentations to the senses, its new ideas and passions, its new social tendencies and habits, must surely, one thinks, have given birth to literary and artistic forms corresponding to itself in strange novelty, unlike in a remarkable degree those sprung from our old-world, and old-world hearts. A moral soil and a moral climate so different from those of Europe must surely have produced a fauna and flora other than the European, a fauna and flora which the writers of literary natural history cannot but be curious to classify, and the peculiarities of which they must endeavour to account for by the special conditions of existence and of the development of species in the new country. It is as much to be expected that

poems and pictures requiring new names should be found there as that new living things of any other kind, the hickory and the hemlock, the mocking-bird and the katydid, should be found. So one reasons for a moment, and wonders. The fact is, that while the physical conditions, fostering certain forms of life, and repressing others, operated without let or hindrance, and disclosed themselves in their proper results with the simplicity and sureness of nature, the permanent moral powers were met by others of transitory or local, but for the time, superior authority, which put a hedge around the literature and art of America, enclosing a little paradise of European culture, refinement, and aristocratic delicatesse from the howling wilderness of Yankee democracy, and insulating it from the vital touch and breath of the land, the winds of free, untrodden places, the splendour and vastness of rivers and seas, the strength and tumult of the people.

Until of late indigenous growths of the New World showed in American literature like exotics, shy or insolent. We were aware of this, and expected in an American poet some one to sing for us gently, in a minor key, the .pleasant airs we know. Longfellow's was a sweet and characteristic note, but, except in a heightened enjoyment of the antique a ruined Rhine castle, a goblet from which dead knights had drunk, a suit of armour, or anything frankly mediæval -except in this, Longfellow is one of ourselves-an European. 'Evangeline" is an European idyl of American life, Hermann and Dorothea having emigrated to Acadie. "Hiawatha" might have been dreamed in

Kensington by a London man of letters who possessed a graceful idealizing turn of imagination, and who had studied with clear-minded and gracious sympathy the better side of Indian character and manners. Longfellow could amiably quiz, from a point of view of superior and contented refinement, his countrymen who went about blatant and blustering for a national art and literature which should correspond with the large proportions and freedom of the Republic. "We want," cries Mr Hathaway in " Kavanagh," "a national drama, in which scope enough shall be given to our gigantic ideas, and to the unparalleled activity and progress of our people. . . . We want a national literature, altogether shaggy and unshorn, that shall shake the earth, like a herd of buffaloes, thundering over the prairies!" And Mr Churchill explains that what is best in literature is not national but universal, and is the fruit of refinement and culture. Longfellow's fellow-countryman, Irving, might have walked arm-inarm with Addison, and Addison would have run no risk of being discomposed by a trans-Atlantic twang in his companion's accent. Irving, if he betrays his origin at all, betrays it somewhat in the same way as Longfellow, by his tender, satisfied repose in the venerable, chiefly the venerable in English society and manners, by his quiet delight in the implicit tradition of English civility, the scarcely-felt yet everywhere influential presence of a beautiful and grave Past, and the company of unseen beneficent associations. In Bryant, Europe is more in the background; prairie and immemorial forest occupy the broad spaces of his canvas, but he feels pleasure in