make frequent allusion to those thoughts which are the common seed, as well as the "common soil of song," and which "bloom the wide world over," boyhood's early home and love, and nature's "immortal freshness" and varying beauty. Here he permits the great and unutterable voices of nature, love, human sympathy, and fellowship, to sing themselves in good old English words, the best adapted to poetry, because the best and most speedily understood by the people, and because they do, in fact, bear in themselves a part of the very life and soul of that people. In this division are "The Bridal of Pennacook," and "Mogg Megone," the two longest pieces in the volumes, and the two, apparently, least valued by the author himself.

The Bridal of Pennacook is strictly an Indian legend, and is, in form, a series of pictures and incidents, all having reference to the marriage of the daughter of Passiconnaway, chief and conjurer, or bashaba, of the Pentucket Indians, who dwelt on the Merrimack, in New-Hampshire, to Winneparkit, sachem of the Saugus tribe, who dwelt on the sea-shore to the east of Boston. These pictures are strung together very loosely, though naturally, by connecting them with the history of the maiden who was the Bride of Pennacook. This is the history and plan.

The poet and four companions-two brothers, one a lawyer, the other a clergyman, and a merchant with his daughter-have been wandering among the White Mountains, and are detained by a storm in an excellent inn in Conway. The poet reads an Indian tradition,

This the poet proceeds to do in a series of beautiful descriptive songs. First he sings "The Merrimack :"

"The child of that white-crested mountain, whose springs
Gush forth in the shade of the cliff-eagle's wings."

Next he sings the "Bashaba," whose wigwam is thus set before us:

"Roof of bark and walls of pine,

Through whose chinks the sunbeams shine,
Tracing many a golden line

On the ample floor within,

Where, upon the earth-floor stark,
Lay the gaudy mats of bark,

With the bear's skin, rough and dark,
And the red deer's hide.

"Window tracery, small and slight,
Woven of the willow white,
Lent a dimly-checker'd light,

And the night-stars glimmer'd down,
Where the lodge-fire's heavy smoke,
Slowly through the opening broke,
In the low roof, ribb'd with oak,
Sheathed with hemlock brown."

After relating the wonderful tales of the might and power of this bashaba, who could do all things, according to the current tradition among the Indians of the wilderness, he thus proceeds to speak of the power of a resolute will:

"Still, to such, life's elements

With their sterner laws dispense,
And the chain of consequence
Broken in their pathway lies,

Time and change their vassals making,
Flowers from icy pillows waking,
Tresses of the sunrise shaking
Over midnight skies.

"Still, to earnest souls, the sun
Rests on tower'd Gibeon,

And the moon of Ajalon

Lights the battle-ground of life;

To his aid the strong reverses,

Hidden powers of giant forces,

And the high stars in their courses,

Mingle in his strife."-Vol. i, pp. 12, 13.

Another rhyme very enthusiastically sings the "Daughter" of the bashaba; how, when her mother was dead, she grew up to be her father's only joy, a light-hearted Indian maiden, simple and in sympathy with nature:

"Enough for her to be

Of common, natural things a part;

To feel, with bird, and stream, and tree,
The pulses of the same great heart."

But with all her fondness for her cold, stern father and for nature, there

"Rose on the ground of her young dreams

The light of a new home-the lover and the wife!"

Wherefore the next pearl of the string commemorates the "Wedding," in a very tripping, hurried measure, full of liquid Indian names. It sings the feast and the dance in a spirit worthy of the

olden time. Then comes the "New Home" on the sea-shore, where, instead of mountain and waterfalls, the bride saw

"A wild and broken landscape, spiked with firs;"

yet her woman's heart was content with the cold love of her stern warrior husband, and her affection throve still,

"As o'er some granite wall,

Soft ivy leaves open to the morning dew

And warm bright sun, the love of that young wife

Found on a hard, cold breast the dew and warmth of life."

But when spring came the bashaba, who had pined the winter through, sent for his daughter to visit his wigwam. Winneparkit sent her with a brave escort, but was too proud to go for her when Passaconnaway sent to tell him the visit was done. So she remained, joyless, among the summer flowers and autumn fruits of her childhood-home. All this is told in a song, "At Pennacook." During the winter, too, she sighed for her new home; and when spring snows were melting, and spring floods were plowing the mountains, her heart can no longer restrain her purpose, and she takes her "Departure," in her frail canoe, down the freshet-swollen Merrimack. The canoe is found whirling idly in an eddy, and the Indian women sing their sad "Lament:"

"We shall hear thee or see thee no more!"

Such is the brief and imperfect outline of a very sweet story of that olden time which we would gladly remember more of, but which is fast fading from the sight of history. May it never fade from the imagination of poesy! Had Whittier written more on such topics, and introduced a greater variety of incidents, as he undoubtedly has power to do, he might have been more widely beloved as a poet; but he could hardly have been so influential as a teacher of truth or so highly valued as a friend and helper of humanity.

"Mogg Megone" is a poem written, says the author, "in early life; and its subject is not such as he would have chosen at any subsequent period." The design is simply to describe early NewEngland scenery and incidents. While, therefore, the story is of no account, the descriptions are very fine, and painted with the enthusiasm of an artist. With such a purpose in view, the incidents may be very common, and even indifferent, and the whole structure may be as rude as the wigwam of the Indian described. All a lover of good poetry will ask is, that the pictures hung up in it shall be such

as would be prized anywhere, in a temple or in a church. To be sure, men do not build a cabin to hang pictures in, and this is probably why the author is disposed to undervalue this tale. It is, however, to be judged not as a whole thing, but as a series of descriptive poems, connected by the accident of having reference to a particular locality; and the poem should be held sacred as long as it holds some of the most lovely paintings of New-England scenery. There is no plot or art about the thing, for it is the old tale of maiden innocence and unsophisticated trustfulness, of womanly, self-forgetting passion, betrayed and deserted, turned to gall and wormwood, and bursting out into demoniac desire for revenge. An Indian chief, Mogg Megone, is hired to destroy the seducer. When the deed is accomplished and the scalp is laid at her feet, all the maiden's love returns, and in revenge, she, with her own hand, kills the chief, who was intimately connected with the plots of the French for the extirpation of the English settlers from that coast. Ruth Bonython then becomes mad, and wanders forth in the forests alone; and finally, after confessing her crimes to a priest, and being spurned by him on account of his disappointed hopes, she dies beneath a maple, on the banks of a stream, just when the trees are putting forth leaves, and the birds are building nests and filling the grove with their melody. The various characters that figure in the story are not numerous. Ruth and her father, an outlawed Englishman, Mogg Megone, the Catholic priest, and Boomazeen, another Indian chief, if indeed a company of soldiers, who are described rather than introduced, be excepted, are all whom we see or hear. Almost any other story would have answered the same purpose as this, though few would have suited so well to the wild, wierd scenery to be described; rough and rugged rocks, fretted by foaming streams and overhung by somber pines and wierd spruce, are well adapted to the unnatural passions bred by the outlaw in the bosom of his companionless daughter, and to the fierce conflicts of rival settlers with the untamed natives. And then the versification is in varied measure, now sweeping in a galloping pace through long lines of anapestics, and then tripping in nimble trochees; weaving rhymes in all possible patterns, and tying the whole into one brilliant piece of antique tapestry, making light and beautiful pictures of scenery on the dark and gloomy ground of the melancholy tale. Hear the song of forest worship, and see this picture, while the Indian chief, still bloody with the murder of the betrayer of innocence, and the outlawed Bonython, even now plotting the death of that Indian and the plunder of his lands, are together seeking the girl whom the father has promised to that chief as his bride:

ocean.

"Quickly glancing to and fro,
Listening to each sound, they go
Round the column of the pine,
Indistinct in shadow seeming,
Like some old and pillar'd shrine;
With the soft and white moonshine,
Round the foliage-tracery shed,
Of each column's branching head,
For its lamps of worship gleaming!
And the sounds awaken'd there,
In the pine leaves, fine and small,
Soft and sweetly musical,

By the fingers of the air,
For the anthem's dying fall
Lingering round some temple's wall!
Niche and cornice round and round
Wailing like the ghost of sound!
Is not nature's worship thus
Ceaseless ever, going on?

Hath it not a voice for us

In the thunder, or the tone
Of the leaf-harp faint and small,
Speaking to the unseal'd ear

Words of blended love and fear,

Of the mighty soul of all ?”—Vol. i, p. 35.

The first part, in which lies the chief part of the dramatic action and incident, closes with the death of the chief. The second part opens with a gorgeous scene of Indian Summer, on the coasts of Maine, with her thousand islands reflected in the restless waves of The maiden meets the priest in a rude wilderness chapel, and makes her confession and asks absolution, which the priest, hearing the name of the murdered chieftain, denies; and she wanders again in sadness and loneliness, bearing her own burden, which no hand but one can lift. The third and last part tells how Norridgewock was taken in battle by the English, and plundered; and how the girl wandered, and at last was found by a band of soldiers, sleeping beneath the maple that long calm sleep that knows no waking.

Following Mogg Megone is the division called "Legendary," consisting of short poems, mostly relating to Indian legends and Quaker traditions. And these are just such poems as a descendant of the Newbury witches, bred up a farmer boy, ought to write when grown to be a man, among the posterity of the old Salem Quakers; and they will thrill many a heart that burns with the hate of oppression. Cassandra Southwick is just such another hymn in spirit as the Hebrew children might have sung after their deliverance from the fire; and is such as the persecuted of all ages have delighted in when their foes have been baffled and overthrown by the might of the Lord. "The Fountain" is clear as crystal itself, and grateful as