Yours faithfully

HENRY W. LONGFELLOW{84}

His retirement was not a matter of ill health, for he was perfectly
well, except that he could not use his eyes by candle-light. But friends
and guests and children and college lectures had more and more filled up
his time, so that he had no strength for poetry, and the last two years
had been very unproductive. There was, moreover, all the excitement of
his friend Sumner's career, and of the fugitive slave cases in Boston,
and it is no wonder that he writes in his diary, with his usual guarded
moderation, "I am not, however, very sure as to the result." Meanwhile
he sat for his portrait by Lawrence, and the subject of the fugitive
slave cases brought to the poet's face, as the artist testified, a look
of animation and indignation which he was glad to catch and retain. On
Commencement Day, July 19, 1854, he wore his academical robes for the
last time, and writes of that event, "The whole crowded church looked
ghostly and unreal as a thing in which I had no part." He had already
been engaged upon his version of Dante, having taken it up on February
1, 1853,{85} after ten years' interval; and moreover another new
literary project had occurred to him "purely in the realm of fancy," as
he describes it, and his freedom became a source of joy.

He had been anxious for some years to carry out his early plan of works
upon American themes. He had, as will be remembered, made himself
spokesman for the Indians on the college platform. His list of proposed
subjects had included as far back as 1829, "Tales of the Quoddy
Indians," with a description of Sacobezon, their chief. After
twenty-five years he wrote in his diary (June 22, 1854), "I have at
length hit upon a plan for a poem on the American Indians which seems to
be the right one and the only. It is to weave together their beautiful
traditions into a whole. I have hit upon a measure, too, which I think
the right one and the only one for the purpose." He had to draw for this
delineation not merely upon the Indians seen in books, but on those he
had himself observed in Maine, the Sacs and Foxes he had watched on
Boston Common, and an Ojibway chief whom he had entertained at his
house. As for the poetic measure, a suitable one had just been suggested
to him by the Finnish epic of "Kalevala," which he had been reading; and
he had been delighted by its appropriaten