o Pond; rafting logs;
tavern scene; a tale connected with the 'Images.'

"2. A New England Village: country squire; the parson; the little
deacon; the farm-house kitchen.

"3. Husking Frolic: song and tales; fellow who plays the fife for the
dance; tale of the Quoddy Indians; description of Sacobezon, their
chief.

"5. Thanksgiving Day: its merry-making, and tales (also of the Indians).

"7. Description of the White Mountains: tale of the Bloody Hand.

"10. Reception of Lafayette in a country village.

"13. Down East: the missionary of Acadie."{12}

A few days after, he wrote from Goettingen to his father, "I shall never
again be in Europe." We thus see his mind at work on American themes in
Germany, as later on German themes in America, unconsciously predicting
that mingling of the two influences which gave him his fame. His earlier
books gave to studious Americans, as I can well recall, their first
imaginative glimpses of Europe, while the poet's homeward-looking
thoughts from Europe had shown the instinct which was to identify his
later fame with purely American themes. It is to be noticed that
whatever was artificial and foreign in Longfellow's work appeared before
he went to Europe; and was the same sort of thing which appeared in all
boyish American work at that period. It was then that in describing the
Indian hunter he made the dance go round by the greenwood tree. He did
not lay this aside at once after his return from Europe, and Margaret
Fuller said of him, "He borrows incessantly and mixes what he borrows."
Criticising the very prelude to "Voices of the Night," she pointed out
the phrases "pentecost" and "bishop's-caps" as indications that he was
not merely "musing upon many things," but on many books which described
them. But the habit steadily diminished. His very gift at translation,
in which he probably exceeded on the whole any other modern poet, led
him, nevertheless, always to reproduce old forms rather than create new
ones, thus aiding immensely his popularity with the mass of simple
readers, while coming short of the full demands of the more critical. To
construct his most difficult poems was thus mainly a serene pleasure,
and something as far as possible from that conflict which kept Hawthorne
all winter, by his wife's testimony, with "a knot in his forehead" while
he was writing "The Scarlet Letter."

It is always to be borne in mind that, as Mr. Scudder has pointed out in
his admirable p