The Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Volume 2); Evangeline, Song of Hiawatha, Courtship of Miles Standish (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1886. Excerpt: ... after all, a substantial agreement between the poem and the documents. Mr. Longfellow gave to a Philadelphia journalist a reminiscence of his first notice of the material which was used in the conclusion of the poem. "I was passing down Spruce Street one day toward my hotel, after a walk, when my attention was attracted to a large building with beautiful trees about it, inside of a high enclosure.1 I walked along until I came to the great gate, and then stepped inside, and looked carefully over the place. The charming picture of lawn, flower-beds and shade which it presented made an impression which has never left me, and when I came to write Evangeline I placed the final scene, the meeting between Evangeline and Gabriel, and the death, at the poor-house, and the burial in an old Catholic grave-yard not far away, which I found by chance in another of my walks." It will have been noticed that Mr. Longfellow from the outset had no hesitation in the choice of a metre. He had before experimented in it in his translation of The Children of the Lord's Supper, and in his lines To the Driving Cloud. While engaged upon Evangeline he chanced upon a specimen in Blackwood of a hexameter translation of the Iliad, and expressed himself very emphatically on its fitness. "Took down Chapman's Homer" he writes later, "and read the second book. Rough enough; and though better than Pope, how inferior to the books in hexameter in Blackwood The English world is not yet awake to the beauty 1 The Pennsylvania Hospital. of that metre." After his poem was published, he wrote: "The public takes more kindly to hexameters than I could have imagined," and referring to a criticism on Evangeline by Mr. Felton, in which the metre was considered, he said: "I am more than ever glad that I...