The Sun.
London, England, 1863-11-23 00:00:00

FRANCE.

BOURSE, Nov. 21.—The market has lost a little
of its firmness, and the business done shows a
slight decline. Threes, for the Account, are now at
67f. 30c. Mobilier has also slightly receded.
Railway Market quiet, but firm. The market
closed as follows :-
4t per Cents. 95 45
Do. end month
3 per Cents
Do. end month 67 20
Credit Mobilier 1095
Do, end month 1093 75
Bank Shares 3350
Credit lioneier I2SS
Roman
RAIL

Italian Loan 72 25
Do. end month 72 15
New ditto
Do. end mouth....
Russian
Austrian
Spanish Threes s3i
fl MD ft Debt
Deferred
VAYB.
Cash. Account.

980 ~ - 977 50
977 50 .. 980 --

Orleans
Northern ..
New ditto —
Lyons and AleditNri-anean 951 25 .. 955
New ditto 9OO
Geneva.. — • e
S althorn
Western -
Eastern ..... 488 75
Sardinian
Austrian
Lombard
North of Spain
Saragossa 628 75 631 25
Ditto to Barcelona 318 75 .. 322 50

LITERATURE,

longfellow's New Poems.

Tales of a lVayside Inn, By Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow. One Vol. Pp. 214. Routledge.
Than many of the poems in this ingenious col-
lection, Professor Longfellow has written nothing
more beautiful. " King Robert of Sicily" would
of itself make the antende for a hundred abortive
" Golden Legends," and for a whole multitude of
jingling " Hiawathas." There is the ring of the
true metal in these melodious verses. As we listen
to the voice that now sings to us, weare delightedly
conscious of its being that of no other than the
author of " Evangeline." The collection here
linked together into a harmonious whole by a suc-
cession of graceful " interludes" we have advisedly
designated ingenious. For, besides being far more
than simply ingenious, it is, in the midst of a crowd
of other, and many of them muzh loftier, merits,
conspicuous in a remarkable degree for its inge-
nuity. The design of it is accurately enough ex-
plained upon the title-page. The time of the poem
is an autumn evening. A Wayside Inn "at Sud-
bury town"—" a kind of old Hobgoblin Hall"—is
the scene of the narrative, or rather is the spot
in which the several narratives are related. It is
one of those picturesque specimens of an " ancient
hostelry" of which The Maypole at Chigwell, in
Charles Dickens's tale of the Gordon Riots—that
enthralling, inimitable story of Barnaby Budge—is
the very architype or delightfuLest of all possible
examplare. The trailing woodbines festooned from
the overhanging eaves, the very gleaming of the
ruddy firelight through the crimson curtains
at the lattice, these and various other minute par-
ticulars in regard to the Wayside Inn of Longfellow
recall vividly to our recollection the dear old May-
pole Tavern of Epping Forest, as pourtrayed by
the wonderfully realistic pencil of Dickens. Here,
in the American auberge, Professor Longfellow de-
scribes a cluster of strangely contrasting wayfarers,
at the outset of his little transatlantic Decameron.
And as motley a groupe they make, as even the im-
mortal train of Pilgrims pourtrayed by old Geoffrey
Chaucer, as setting out, several centuries back, on
the road from the •Tabard, in Southwark, to the
shrine of the holy martyr St. Thomas it Becket, in
the Cathedral at Canterbury. The landlord of the
Wayside Inn, dubbed by reason of his gentle birth,
and in spite of his fallen fortunes, " The Squire"—
in this, something like our old friend " Barring-
ton" in Charles Lever's charming little fic-
tion so entitled—leads off the list of these
assembled interlocutors. Among his guests or
customers are—a young Sicilian, a Poet, a Theologian
of Cambridge, a Musician who delights them all
with his improvisations on his beloved instrument,
"An Angel with a violin I" as he is apostrophised
by his lyrical celebrant, one in whose warbling
notes the listeners hear by turns the Sti 6mkarl
sing, the:cataract booming downwards, the scream of
seabirds on the wing—
" The rumour of !he forest trees,
The plunge of the implacable seas!"

these, with a Spanish Jew from Alicant, make up
the singular concourse in the inn house-room at
Sudbury, on the autumn evening when the Tales are
told. Seven tales they are in all, each told by
one of the personages above enumerated. To the
landlord) being a patriotic landlord) we owe the
opening tale of the series, entitled " Paul
Revere's Ride," an incident of the old war,
relating to the lighting up of a beacon
and the rousing of whole country side by the
midnight gallop of a single horseman. Brief though
the story is, it is "full of fire and fary," and yet,
for once, "signifying" something ! The Student's
tale is a charming version of that painful little
love-tale of Boccaccio's about " The Falcon
of Ser Federigo." Tenderly though it is here
related in these lovely verses of Longfellow, it
comes to us now, as painfully as ever. We grieve as
poignantly at the close of it, as ever we did of yore,
over the evil fate of the poor gerfalcon whose neck is
wrung by his master, and whose smoking
body, stuffed with spice, is feasted upon
by the beautiful widow, the lost love
of old of Ser Federigo, but who is won
back to him thus in his poverty and dejection by
this exquisitely painful evidence of hospitality
towards her under his cottage-roof ! Monne Gio-
vanna is the youthful widow in this familiar
love story of Florence. Charmingly, when her
little boy is prattling to Ser Federigo, does the
poet sing—
., The voice was hers, and made strange echoes start
Through all the haunted chambers of his heart,
As an Eolian harp through gusty door:"
Of some old ruin its wild music pours.
Even, however, the bewitching poetic atmos-
phere here thrown
around the tender
legend of " The Falcon of Ser Fedexige
fails to reconcile us to it. Of the Legend

of Rabbi Ben Levi, the tale related by the Spanish
Jew, we think nothing whatever. We pass it by
with indifference. It is literally as nothing when
brought into comparison with a similar legend
told years and years ago by our lamented
Leigh Hunt. As for the Theologian's Tale of
Torquetnada, it is, from first to last, simply
hideous and utterly loathsome. The incident
it recounts, is, in effect, one too fearful of its
kind to have been selected as a subject for the
imagination to dwell upon. We pass it by with a
shudder of abhorrence. Curiously apropos to the
discussions about "Small Bird Murder," which have
been of late maintained in the public journals in
this country, and probably also on the other side of
the Atlantic, is the tale, prettily told here, at the
close of this series of poems—told, too, by the Poet,
►neet:ing the poet who is described as among the guests
in the Wayside Inn at Sudbury—a wonderfully
logical, and, to our mind, entirely convincing little
apologue, about " The Birds of Railing worth," lairds
that were certainly not worth killing ! Five
out of the seven stories told in the Wayside Inn
have now been briefly particularised—namely, those
of the Landlord, the Poet, the Student, the
Spanish Jew, and the Theologian. Two others,
as representing, the one, the chief merit, the other,
the chief demerit of the book, have yet to
be specified. One of them it is true has already
been casually glanced at as, to our mind, the
principal beauty and glory of the collection. The
other, is by far the longest poem in the book, sub-
divided as it is into as many as two-and-twenty
minor poems, making► up the whole tale told
by the incoherent Musician. He it is who
sings to us through upwards of 100 out of
the 244 pages—sacred here only to "The Way-
side Inn," and "Birds of Passage"—sings to
us joltingly, confusedly, unmusically, unsatisfac•
torically in every imaginable way—" The Saga of
King Olaf." Coming to us, as this, the chief poem
of the book does at the very centre of it, it is only
comparable, according to our fancy, to a very
dry, choking, husk, as the_ core of some delicious
blooming, nectarious, ambrosial fruit dropped
ripely into our hands, a fruit that we
are otherwise disposed to luxuriate over with a
sort of rapture. Drinking in the whole flavour
and succulence of it with unmarred delight, but
for this same unwelcomed husk of " The Sage of
King Olaf," we can make nothing of that—at
least, we certainly cannot swallow it! It is a
husky core and a very large one in proportion
to the dimensions of the fruit itself, that we
should dearly like to cut out of it altogether and
throw aside as valueless, as worse than valueless,
as entirely intolerable. How Professor Longfellow
could ever have taken the trouble to write it, how
any one among his most infatuated admirers could
ever effect, as some, we observe, are actually doing,
to take even the smallest modicum of pleasure
in reading it, alike passes our comprehension. To
our palate it is, just in one plain word, unendurable.
By way of compensation, however, we have the
poet's lovely vers;on of that beautiful old legend
about " King Robert of Sicily," here already
spoken of by us in terms of unrestricted
and now deliberately reiterated admiration. A
legend it is that Leigh Hunt some years ago told
very gracefully in prose in his elegant Christmas
volume entitled, deliciously, "A Jar of Honey from
Mount Hybla," Never yet, however, by poet old
or young, English or Italian, has the bewitching
tale been told so exquisitely as it has been here
told by Professor Longfellow. As told by him,
it will take its place henceforth amongst the
cherished gems of American literature. From
first to last we fail to detect a flaw In it. Very
recently though the book has been published,
in which it is contained—a very opal in a setting of
gold—we have read it again and yet again. ft is too
long for quotation by us entire, and it would be
a cruelty to tear it up piecemeal, as fragmentary
quotations. The incident will probably be remem-
bered by many as being the ordeal imposed b 3
Heaven in punishment, according to the lovely old
Sicilian legend, upon King Robert of Sicily, the
brother of the reigning Pontiff Pope Urbane and
of the German Emperor Valroond—in punish-
ment to King Robert of Sicily, for his
impious pride in scouting as treasonous to himself
the chaunt by the priests, one evening at Vespers, of
the awful words, "deposuit potentes de sede et ex-
ultarit bundles," words so familiar to us as a portio❑
of the beautiful Al agnifieat ! How the ordeal is
passed through by King Robert, and with what
effect, let Longfellow's new poem be turned to by
the reader in order to learn„ Having said which—
let us pass on to the seven minor poems clustered
together at the close of the volume, under the title of
" Birds of Passage—Flight the Second !" Recalling
to mind thereby—on reading that mention of flight
the second—the minor poems at the close of " Miles
Standish," among which appeared Longfellow's
lovely verses upon Children, verses which have since
then been dear to our very heart's remembrance. A
companion to that beautiful little Poem on Children
we here give, as, altogether, about the choicest
jewel of the present collection. It is entitled—
THE CHILDREN'S HOUR.
Between the dark and the daylight,
When the night is beginning to lower,
Comes a pause in the day's occupations,
That is known as the Children's Hour.
I hear in the chamber above me
The patter of little feet,
The sound of a door that is opened,
And voices soft and sweet.
From my study I see in the lamplight,
Descending the broad hall-stair,
Grave Alice, and laughing Allegro,
And Edith with golden hair.
A whisper, and then a silence :
Yet I know by their merry eyes
They are plotting and planning together
To take me by surprise.
A sudden rush from the stairway,
A sudden raid from the hall I
By three doors left unguarded
They enter my castle wall!
They climb up into my turret
O'er the arms and back of my chair;
If I try to escape they surround me;
They seem to be everywhere.
They almost devour me with kisses,
Their arms about me entwine,
Till I think of the Bishop of Bingen
In his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine I
Do you think, 0 blue-eyed banditti,
Because you have scaled the wall,
Such an old moustache as I am
Is not a match for you all I
I have you fast in my fortress,
And will not let you depart,
But put you down into the dungeon
In the round-tower of my heart.
And there will I keep you forever,
Yes, forever and a day,
Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,
And moulder in dust away I
Of the " old moustache" who sings these delicious
verses—verses filled full of that home tenderness
which has already made the name cf Henry
Longfellow " familiar as household words" on so
many hearths here in Old England—the charming
little volume now under notice presents to us as its
frontispiece a delightful portraiture. It is evi-
dently from a photograph. It represents the
author as he is now—bearded, " moustache " and
all—precisely the very countenance we should have
wished to recognise as that of the poet Longfellow.