On account of his old-fashioned, camel’s-hair coat;
And the Penitent Thief, who died on the cross,
Was reminded that all his bones were broken!
Till at last, when each in turn had spoken,
The company being still at a loss,
The Angel, who rolled away the stone,
Was sent to the sepulchre, all alone,
And filled with glory that gloomy prison,
And said to the Virgin, “The Lord has arisen!”
We think we have sufficiently quoted from this delightful volume to give our readers an idea of its poetical merit. But no analysis or quotation can do justice to the wealth of knowledge it evinces of the middle ages, and to the various scholarship it displays. Longfellow, with a true poetic insight and power of assimilation, has given us here the life and spirit as well as the form of a by-gone age, so that the reader of the poem can obtain more of the substance of knowledge from its pictured page than from history itself. The work is not only one of uncommon poetical excellence, but it is a triumph over difficulties inherent in the subject, and over the subjective limitations of the author’s own mind. It is broader if not higher than any thing he has previously written, promises to be more permanently popular, and has the great merit of increasing in the reader’s estimation with a second or even a third perusal.