f the Hesperus_ and of _Seaweed_.

In 1847 was published the long poem of _Evangeline_. The story of the
Acadian peasant girl, who was separated from her lover in the
dispersion of her people by the English troops, and after weary
wanderings and a life-long search found him at last, {484} an old man
dying in a Philadelphia hospital, was told to Longfellow by the Rev. H.
L. Conolly, who had previously suggested it to Hawthorne as a subject
for a story. Longfellow, characteristically enough, "got up" the local
color for his poem from Haliburton's account of the dispersion of the
Grand-Pre Acadians, from Darby's _Geographical Description of
Louisiana_ and Watson's _Annals of Philadelphia_. He never needed to
go much outside of his library for literary impulse and material.
Whatever may be held as to Longfellow's inventive powers as a creator
of characters or an interpreter of American life, his originality as an
artist is manifested by his successful domestication in _Evangeline_ of
the dactylic hexameter, which no English poet had yet used with effect.
The English poet, Arthur Hugh Clough, who lived for a time in
Cambridge, followed Longfellow's example in the use of hexameter in his
_Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich_, so that we have now arrived at the
time--a proud moment for American letters--when the works of our
writers began to react upon the literature of Europe. But the beauty
of the descriptions in _Evangeline_ and the pathos--somewhat too drawn
out--of the story made it dear to a multitude of readers who cared
nothing about the technical disputes of Poe and other critics as to
whether or not Longfellow's lines were sufficiently "spondaic" to
truthfully represent the quantitative hexameters of Homer and Vergil.

In 1855 appeared _Hiawatha_, Longfellow's most {485} aboriginal and
"American" book. The tripping trochaic measure he borrowed from the
Finnish epic _Kalevala_. The vague, childlike mythology of the Indian
tribes, with its anthropomorphic sense of the brotherhood between men,
animals, and the forms of inanimate nature, he took from Schoolcraft's
_Algic Researches_, 1839. He fixed forever, in a skillfully chosen
poetic form, the more inward and imaginative part of Indian character,
as Cooper had given permanence to its external and active side. Of
Longfellow's dramatic experiments the _Golden Legend_, 1851, alone
deserves mention here. This was in his chosen realm; a tale taken from
the ecclesiastical