thought out, and as an exemplification of the purer and more mystical elements of human love, is really original. The hypochondriac craze of Prince Henry is just such an affliction as these gloomy times produced in the cases of minds diseased by religion or by the possession of excessive power, or by both; but the Prince is quite a detestable young gentleman, with whom no reader could have sympathy. He certainly was not worth so much of Elsie's blood as a needle's prick could draw. Lucifer is the mildestmannered devil that ever showed a hoof. The various scenes scarcely pretend to hang together by any natural sequence, and as a play, "The Golden Legend" is devoid of any dramatic interest save the religious devotion of the heroine. But the poem has another side. Longfellow designed it as a vehicle for illustrations of us people and customs of the Middle Ages; the mediævalism is certainly kept up at every point, and its note is sounded with prodigious effect in the very first scene, where we have a storm around Strasburg Cathedral spire, from which Lucifer and his devils try to tear the cross in fight with a band of angels, while to the clangorous bells is given Latin speech, and the choir within the church ends all with its vigil-chant— "Nocte surgentes It is strange, by the by, that Longfellow makes his bells talk Latin in the singular person— "Defunctos ploro! Pestem fugo!" etc. A miracle play and a friar's sermon are introduced, and many of the places visited by the pilgrims are described with fulness and force. Scraps of Latin hymns are introduced throughout, but they are not remarkable; and they serve to suggest the question how it is Longfellow died without giving the world a real hymn in English, designed for use in worship. This "Golden Legend" was framed from the theme of "Der Arme Heinrich," a metrical tale by the minnesinger Hartmann von der Aue. The draft of it was written in a month, and it took six months to correct and cut this down. It will interest some to know that the monk's sermon is in part adapted from a fulminating discourse by Fra Gabriella Barletta, an Italian of the fifteenth century. The Miracle Play is based upon the Apocryphal Gospels of James and the Infancy of Christ. Turning to the poet's private life, we have to note that shortly after he had returned home from Pittsfield, with "Kavanagh" finished, he had the sorrow of losing his little daughter Fanny, who died in September, 1848. In August of 1849 his father passed away, in his seventyfourth year-full of honour as of years. Within two years the poet's mother died also, quite suddenly. T CHAPTER X. HERE was a time in the earlier part of Longfellow's career when Margaret Fuller criticised him frankly in "The Dial,”—told him that he was not going the right way about making himself a national poet, and called his poems exotic flowers, with no smell of American soil about them. Longfellow did not take these sayings kindly, but he profited by them nevertheless. Probably but for Margaret Fuller we should never have had "Evangeline," or "Kavanagh," or "Hiawatha." The construction of "Evangeline" was a courageous effort, but the experiment of "Hiawatha" was actually daring. The red-skinned natives of the States-these bloody barbarian Indians whom Mr. Edward Johnson and his coadjutors tried to clear out of the land-left among their descendants a body of rude traditions tinged with poetry. Longfellow raised for himself the question whether these traditions, or any one tradition among them, would furnish sufficient material for a monumental poem, in which should be preserved some record of the nobler qualities of the savage aborigines. Inquiry proved that although a considerable mass of tales had been collected from the original inhabitants of New England, these tales were garnished by little fancy of a high kind. The red man, in truth, had never been the rhapsodical, sentimental being that ignorance had imagined him; and beyond a few stock metaphors about mountains and thunders, sunsets, buffaloes, waterfalls, hatchets, tobacco-pipes, and council-fires, his sense of beauty in thought or nature was not betrayed by traditions of any sort. Nevertheless, the more Longfellow pored over this new subject, the more he felt that he had an opportunity for doing an original thing in literature. It is said that the first suggestion for "Hiawatha" was derived from some Indian tales recited to him by a Harvard pupil. There may be noted also in Longfellow's diary several references to an Ojibway chief called Kah-ge-ga-gah'-bowh, an educated and loquacious Red-skin, whom he had to tea of an evening, and whom he possibly questioned a good deal about the legends of his people. But most of the poet's preliminary notes were made from Schoolcraft's "Algic Researches," and "Indian Tribes of the United States." There he hit upon a rude hero named Manabozho, and by this name he first thought of calling his Indian Edda. Some of the incidents of Indian life preserved in the "Algic Researches" reminded the well-read poet of Finnish legends, and turning to the great epic of Finland-the "Kalevala "—he at once found a solution of the problem, how to adapt his language and metres to subjects so primitive as these Indian myths. The "Kalevala" is composed, like all the older Finnish poems, in unrhymed trochaic dimeter, with two forms of elaboration to satisfy the ear in place of rhyme-alliteration similar to that of Icelandic and Anglo-Saxon sagas-and what has come to be called "parallelism," that is, reduplication of a line, or part of a line, in slightly varied form. These characteristics, and especially the peculiarity of parallelism, may be found fully developed in the Finnish collection of ballads called the "Kanteletar;" and in this collection, moreover, we find the prevailing note to be just the tender melancholy that makes the faint diapason of "Hiawatha." Selecting a specimen from the older "Kalevala" (this specimen is from a translation, without attempt at alliteration, by William Howitt), we can see how much Longfellow was indebted to the Finns for the structure of "Hiawatha's" verse "And there lives not such a hero, Weep the young and weep the aged; So his tears drop in the waters, Tears of ancient Wäinämöinen; |