The readers of this charming poem, whatever may be their judgment of its merits as compared with “The Spanish Student” and “Evangeline,” will be compelled to acknowledge its originality of plan, and the new impression it conveys of the author’s genius. Whatever it may be, it is most assuredly no repetition of any of his former works, for the mark it leaves upon the imagination is essentially novel. The poem is a succession of highly colored pictures of life in the middle ages; and though the fortunes of Prince Henry and Elsie give a certain unity to the whole, it is a unity that admits of more variety than “Evangeline”—a variety which, though purchased at some expense of interest in the story, produces a more pleasing impression in the end. Though the poem has not the continuous richness and warmth of fancy, diction, and melody which commonly distinguish Longfellow’s writings, it is by no means deficient in those qualities, and has scenes and passages on which his imagination has expended the full pomp of its luxurious images and subtle melodies. Though filled with vivid pictures of the middle ages, the poem can hardly be called picturesque, for the picturesque implies not succession but combination; and “The Golden Legend” is a succession of pictures, not a combination of many into one. The picturesque, as defined by Coleridge, is the “union, harmonious melting-down and fusion of the different in kind and the disparate in degree” and it is in this meaning of the word that Coleridge denies the quality to Spenser, thereby much puzzling even Hallam, who could not conceive why a poem so full of pictures as the Faery Queene, was not in an eminent degree picturesque. The volume opens with a scene representing the spire of the Strasburg Cathedral, and Lucifer with the Powers of the Air, trying to tear down the cross. This scene has a quaint sublimity which prepares the mind for the strangeness of the representations of religion which follow; for Longfellow, in his pictures of Catholicism, presents it, not in its abstract doctrines, but in its concrete life—presents it as it really existed in institutions, customs, and men, during the middle ages. This idea must be perceived at the commencement, or else the reader, judging not merely as a modern Protestant, but as a modern Catholic, will condemn the poem at once as irreverently extravagant and bizarre. The next scene introduces Prince Henry, sitting alone in his castle, tormented with baffled aspiration and weariness of life—a sort of Faust, but a Faust of sentiment rather than a Faust of intellect. In a beautiful soliloquy, the prince mourns over the graves of his departed hopes, loves, and aspirations, in a style very different from the sharp, short, electric curses on the deceptions of life, which leap from the lips of Goethe’s hero. We give a short extract, which is a poem in itself: