We repeat it--they had better let Lucifer alone. It is dangerous meddling with edge-tools. Temptations enough beset even the best of us, without the realisation of the actual corporeality of the tempter. Most hideously alarmed, we doubt not, would Mr Bailey be, if his poetical imaginations became practical realities, and Lucifer were to enter his study some time about midnight, when every other light in the house was extinguished, in the garb of a travelling _scholasticus_! If not more loftily elevated than the second story, he would bolt through the window like an arrow. We mean no reflection upon his personal valour; under such circumstances we should do the same, and consider it to be our bounden duty, even though a whole legion of cats were serenading beneath. But we have this safeguard against such visits, that we never represented ourselves as intimate with the opinions of Abaddon. Mr Bailey, on the contrary, knows all about him--nay, has no doubt whatever as to his ultimate felicitous destination. He is several universes beyond Milton. He foresees restoration to the whole powers of evil; and having thus, in his philosophy, kindly reinstated the fallen angels, of course those who have fallen by their agency become at once immaculate. But the subject is too grave to be pursued in a light strain. Great allowance is always to be made for poetic license; but there is a bound to everything; and we are compelled to record our deliberate opinion, that nowhere, in literature, can we find passages more hideously and revoltingly presumptuous than occur in the concluding pages of the _Festus_ of Mr Bailey.
We have not now to deal with Mr Bailey. The author before us, Professor Longfellow, is infinitely his superior in poetical accomplishment, in genius, in learning, and in delicacy of sentiment. It was, we think, very well remarked by a former critic in this Magazine, that "he has studied foreign literature with somewhat too much profit." We adopt that observation as rather addressed to the form or shape of his compositions, than to the intrinsic value of his thoughts, or to their expression. For, in perfect candour, we must own that, in our opinion, Longfellow at this moment stands, beyond comparison, at the head of the poets of America, and may be considered as an equal competitor for the palm with any one of the younger poets of Great Britain. We cannot pass a higher eulogy; and it is not the less impartial, because in this his latest poem, _The Golden Legend_, he has laid himself open to censure, not only on the ground of palpable imitation of design, from the model of Goethe, but in other respects more nearly and more seriously affecting his ultimate reputation as a creative poet.