ess to the stage character to
be dealt with and the type of legend to be treated. "Hiawatha" was begun
on June 25, 1854, and published on November 10 of that year. He enjoyed
the work thoroughly, but it evidently seemed to him somewhat tame before
he got through, and this tendency to tameness was sometimes a subject of
criticism with readers; but its very simplicity made the style
attractive to children and gave a charm which it is likely always to
retain. With his usual frankness, he stated at the outset that the metre
was not original with him, and it was of course a merit in the legends
that they were not original. The book received every form of attention;
it was admired, laughed at, parodied, set to music, and publicly read,
and his fame unquestionably rests far more securely on this and other
strictly American poems than on the prolonged labor of the "Golden
Legend." He himself writes that some of the newspapers are "fierce and
furious" about "Hiawatha," and again "there is the greatest pother over
'Hiawatha.'" Freiligrath, who translated the poem into German, writes
him from London, "Are you not chuckling over the war which is waging in
the 'Athenaeum' about the measure from 'Hiawatha'?" He had letters of
hearty approval from Emerson, Hawthorne, Parsons, and Bayard Taylor; the
latter, perhaps, making the best single encomium on the book in writing
to its author, "The whole poem floats in an atmosphere of the American
'Indian summer.'" The best tribute ever paid to it, however, was the
actual representation of it as a drama by the Ojibway Indians on an
island in Lake Huron, in August, 1901, in honor of a visit to the tribe
by some of the children and grandchildren of the poet. This posthumous
tribute to a work of genius is in itself so picturesque and interesting
and has been so well described by Miss Alice Longfellow, who was
present, that I have obtained her consent to reprint it in the Appendix
to this volume.

Longfellow's next poem reverted to hexameters once more, inasmuch as
"Evangeline" had thoroughly outlived the early criticisms inspired by
this meter. The theme had crossed his mind in 1856, and he had begun to
treat it in dramatic form and verse, under the name it now bears; but
after a year's delay he tried it again under the name of Priscilla,
taking the name, possibly, from an attractive English Quakeress,
Priscilla Green, whose sweet voice had charmed him in a public meeting,
"breaking now and then,