"Chrysaor rising out of the sea
Showed tints glorious and thus emulous,
Leaving the arms of Callirrhoe,
Forever tender, soft, and tremulous.
"Thus o'er the ocean faint and far
Trailed the gleam of his falchion brightly:
Is it a god, or is it a star,
That, entranced, I gaze on nightly?"
The blending of the poetical faculty and scholarly taste is seen, also,
in his translations; and would not a translation of Dante's great poem
be the crowning work of Longfellow's literary life?
But while we chat along the road, and pause to repeat these simple and
musical poems, each so elegant, so finished, as the monk finished his
ivory crucifix, or the lapidary his choicest gem, we have reached the
Wayside Inn. It is the title of Longfellow's new volume, "Tales of a
Wayside Inn." They are New-England "Canterbury Tales." Those of old
London town were told at the Tabard at Southwark; these at the Red Horse
in Sudbury town. And although it is but the form of the poem, peculiar
neither to Chaucer nor to Longfellow, which recalls the earlier work,
yet they have a further likeness in the sources of some of the tales,
and in the limpid blitheness of the style and the pure objectivity of
the poems.
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