Might stoop to pick them up!
A large portion of the rest of the poem is devoted to representations of the cities, towns, forests through which they pass on their way to Salerno, the cloisters and convents where they stop, and the many-colored and multiform life with which they come slightly in contact or collision. The thread of the story is here spun very fine, and we almost lose memory of the hero and heroine, while rapt in the gorgeous pictures of medieval superstition, manners and character, with which the page is crowded. It is evident that the story itself is too slight for the bulk of the book, and that the majority of the scenes, vivid and delightful as they are in themselves, have not that vital connection with the chief characters and leading event which is demanded in a work of art. And yet, if the reader sharply scrutinizes the whole impression which the poem leaves on his imagination, he will, perhaps, discover that there is a fine thread of union connecting the various parts, and that the incidents and scenery of the journey have not that merely mechanical juxtaposition which characterizes the events and scenes recorded in a tourist’s journal. The prince and Elsie are felt when they are not seen; and we do not know but that the poem may awake the admiration of future critics for the singular refinement of the imaginative power, by which the seemingly heterogeneous parts of the work are subtly organized into a homogeneous whole, by the connection of the profound Catholic sentiment of Elsie with the other expressions, grotesque and besotted, of the operation of the same faith. But such refinements are foreign to our purpose here. It is sufficient to say that the prince and Elsie appear at least on the edges of all the incidents which are so vividly presented. At the conclusion, the prince repents just as Elsie is on the point of being immolated, and then finds that his health recovers more rapidly on the prospect that she will live for him, instead of die for him. They are accordingly married. The account of the return to the cottage of Gottlieb and the castle of the prince, is very beautiful. Elsie is, perhaps, Longfellow’s finest creation, representing a woman so perfectly good, that her principles have become instincts. The devil that appears in the book, though sufficiently Satanic to frighten some sensitive readers, is rather a languid Lucifer, as compared with Milton’s or Goethe’s.
Among the many curiosities of the poem is a play, ingeniously imitated, in form and spirit, from those monstrosities of the early drama, the Miracle Plays. The fourth part is devoted to a convent in the Black Forest, and the soliloquy of Friar Claus, in the wine-cellar—of Friar Pacificus, transcribing and illuminating MSS.—of the Abbot Ernestus, pacing among the cloisters—and the convivial scene in the rectory—are fine descriptions of cloistered life, true both to the ideas and facts of the time. The passionate confession of the Abbess Irmingard to Elsie, is in Longfellow’s most powerful style, and has a fire and fierceness of outright and downright passion, not common to his representations of emotion. All of these would afford many choice passages for quotation; we have but room, however, for Friar Cuthbert’s sermon, delivered in front of the Strasburg Cathedral, on Easter Day. This, with a quaint audacity of its own, elbows out even its betters in verse and sentiment, and vehemently claims the right to be cited:
Friar Cuthbert, gesticulating and cracking a postilion’s whip.
What ho! good people! do you not hear?
Dashing along at the top of his speed,
Booted and spurred, on his jaded steed,
A courier comes with words of cheer.
Courier! what is the news, I pray?
“Christ is arisen!” Whence come you? “From court.”