From the "NONCONFORMIST."
"Amazingly clever.... Besides its pure tone deserves warm recognition. The humour is never coarse. There is a high delicacy, which is sufficient to colour and sweeten the whole, as the open spring breeze holds everything in good savour."
From the "SPECTATOR."
We believe that the new book which has just appeared, 'St. Abe and His Seven Wives,' will paralyze Mormon resistance far more than any amount of speeches in Congress or messages from President Grant, by bringing home to the minds of the millions the ridiculous-diabolic side of the peculiar institution. The canto called 'The Last Epistle of St. Abe to the Polygamists,' with its humorous narrative of the way in which the Saint, sealed to seven wives, fell in love with one, and thenceforward could not abide the jealousy felt by the other six, will do more to weaken the last defence of Mormonism—that after all, the women like it—than a whole ream of narratives about the discontent in Utah. Thousands on whom narrative and argument would make little or no impression, will feel how it must be when many wives with burning hearts watch the husband's growing love for one, when the favourite is sick unto death, and how 'they set their lips and sneered at me and watched the situation,' and will understand that the first price paid for polygamy is the suppression of love, and the second, the slavery of women. The letter in which the first point is proved is too long for quotation, and would be spoiled by extracts; but the second could hardly be better proved than in these humorous lines.
The descriptions of Saint Abe and his Seven Wives will be relished by roughs in California as much as by the self-indulgent philosophers of Boston.... Pope would have been proud, we fancy, of these terrible lines, uttered by a driver whose fiancée has just been beguiled away by a Mormon saint.
From the "ATHENÆUM."
"'Saint Abe and his Seven Wives' has a freshness and an originality, altogether wanting in Mr. Longfellow's new work, 'The Divine Tragedy.' In quaint and forcible language—language admirably suited to the theme; the author takes us to the wondrous city of the saints, and describes its inhabitants in a series of graphic sketches. The hero of the story is Saint Abe, or Abraham Clewson, and in giving us his history the author has really given us the inner life of the Mormon settlement. In his pages we see the origin of the movement, the reasons why it has increased, the internal weakness of the system, and the effect it produces on its adherents. We are introduced to the saints, whom we see among their pastures, in their homes, in their promenades, and in their synagogue."
From the "FREEMAN."
"A remarkable poem.... The production is anonymous, but whoever the author may be there can be no question that he is a poet, and one of vast and varied powers. The inner life of Mormondom is portrayed with a caustic humour equal to anything in 'The Biglow Papers'; and were it not for the exquisite elegance of the verse we should think that some parts of the poem were written by Robert Browning. The hero of the poem is a Mormon, who fares so badly as a polygamist that he elopes with one of his seven wives—the one whom he really loves; and the story is a most effective exposure of the evils which necessarily attach to polygamy."
From the "WEEKLY REVIEW."