The muse of Mr. Longfellow owes little or none of her success to those great national sources of inspiration which are most likely to influence an ardent poetic temperament. The grand old woods--the magnificent mountain and forest scenery--the mighty rivers--the trackless savannahs--all those stupendous and varied features of that great country, with which, from his boyhood, he must have been familiar, it might be thought would have stamped some of these characteristics upon his poetry. Such, however, has not been the case. Of lofty images and grand conceptions we meet with few, if any, traces. But brimful of life, of love, and of truth, the stream of his song flows on with a tender and touching simplicity, and a gentle music, which we have not met with since the days of our own Moore. Like him, too, the genius of Mr. Longfellow is essentially lyric; and if he has failed to derive inspiration from the grand features of his own country, he has been no unsuccessful student of the great works of the German masters of song. We could almost fancy, while reading his exquisite ballad of the "Beleaguered City," that Goethe, Schiller, or Uhland was before us; and yet, we must by no means be understood to insinuate that he is a mere copyist--quite the contrary. He has become so thoroughly imbued with the spirit of these exquisite models, that he has contrived to produce pieces marked with an individuality of their own, and noways behind them in point of poetical merit. In this regard he affords another illustration of the truth of the proposition, that the legendary lore and traditions of other countries have been very serviceable toward the formation of American literature.