ely divided into two parts; in the
first, a story is told or a natural phenomenon described; in the
second, the spiritual application of the parable is formally set forth.
This method became with him almost a trick of style, and his readers
learn to look for the _hoec fabula docet_ at the end as a matter of
course. As for the prevailing optimism in Longfellow's view of
life--of which the above passage is an instance--it seems to be in him
an affair of temperament, and not, as in Emerson, the result of
philosophic insight. Perhaps, however, in the last analysis optimism
and pessimism are subjective--the expression of temperament or
individual experience, since the facts of life are the same, whether
seen through Schopenhauer's eyes or through Emerson's. If there is any
particular in which Longfellow's inspiration came to him at first hand
and not through books, it is in respect to the aspects of the sea. On
this theme no American poet has written more beautifully and with a
keener sympathy than the author of _The Wreck of 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, 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 _