The
interest excited lies in our admiration of the sacrifice, and of the
love that could make it; but this interest immediately and
disagreeably subsides when we find that the sacrifice has been made to
no purpose. "You are no more a Gipsy" dissolves the charm, and
obliterates the whole impression which the author has been at so
much labour to convey. Our romantic sense of the hero's chivalry
declines into a complacent satisfaction with his fate. We drop our
enthusiasm, with the enthusiast, and jovially shake by the hand the
mere man of good luck. But is not the latter feeling the more
comfortable of the two? Perhaps so; but "comfortable" is not exactly
the word Mr. Longfellow might wish applied to the end of his drama,
and then why be at the trouble of building up an effect through a
hundred and eighty pages, merely to knock it down at the end of the
hundred and eighty-first?
We have already given, at some length, our conceptions of the nature
of plot- and of that of "The Spanish Student", it seems almost
superfluous to speak at all. It has nothing of construction about
it. Indeed there is scarcely a single incident which has any necessary
dependence upon any one other. Not only might we take away
two-thirds of the whole without ruin- but without detriment- indeed
with a positive benefit to the mass.
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