HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
It is a matter of common practice to mention Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
(1807-1882) as a member of "the Cambridge group," with the suggestion
that there was some such agreement in point of view as existed between
the men who lived and wrote in Concord. Yet there was no such oneness
of mind among Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes as among Emerson and his
younger associates. Between Longfellow and Lowell the real point of
contact was their scholarship, and particularly their enthusiasm for
the writings of Dante; between Lowell and Holmes there was neighborly
regard but no real intimacy of feeling. The Cambridge men, to be sure,
were different from the men of Concord. The fathers of all three
were professional gentlemen of some distinction, all were college
bred, ripened by residence abroad, and holders of professorships in
Harvard College. All enjoyed and deserved social position as members
of the "Brahmin caste,"[17] all were frequenters of the celebrated
Saturday Club, and all contributed to the early and lasting fame of the
_Atlantic Monthly_. But as far as their deeper interests in life were
concerned they went their several ways. Lowell was a representative
first of New England and the North and later of the country as a whole;
Holmes belonged far more to Boston than to the college town across
the Charles; so that, of the three, Longfellow, the only one not born
there, was most closely associated with Cambridge, less clearly allied
with any other part of the world. In the literary vista, therefore, the
local relationship should not loom too large. Longfellow should be
considered as belonging to the same decades with Poe and Hawthorne; his
greatest productive period was at its height when Poe was living, and
was over before the death of Hawthorne, and his attitude toward life
was similar to theirs in its sentimental fervor and in its artistic
detachment. Lowell, in contrast, was a factor in the issues leading
into and out of the Civil War, and Holmes's richest years bridged the
'60's.
[17] See the first chapter of Holmes's "Elsie Venner" for a
discussion of this New England aristocracy of birth and learning
rather than of wealth.
Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, in 1807, the second of eight
children. The matters of conventional record are that on his mother's
side he was descended from John and Priscilla Alden, and that his
father was a lawyer with a good practice and a modestly well-equipped
library. Able tutoring fitted the boy to matriculate as a sophomore in
Bowdoin, in the class with Hawthorne, who was three years older. For a
coming man of letters his record as a student was exceptionally good.
Instead of being unsettled by vague dreams, he was stirred by a very
definite ambition for "future eminence in literature." His whole soul,
he wrote to his father at the age of seventeen, burned most ardently
for it, and every earthly thought centered in it. Then, just at the
time when he was resigning himself to the law, in order not to be,
like Goldsmith, "equally irreclaimable from poetry and poverty," the
trustees of Bowdoin, emulating the example of Harvard, established a
professorship of modern languages, offered it to Longfellow, and set
as a condition that he should prepare himself by study abroad. In the
three years from 1826 to 1829 his mastering of the Romance languages
was perhaps less important than his breathing the cultural atmosphere
of the Old World. Life in America up to the nineteenth century had
been a busy and self-centered experience. The chief consciousness of
England and Europe had been a consciousness of other governments and
of unsympathetic and conflicting loyalties; and now was beginning to
arise an awareness not only of how other peoples were ruled but also of
how they lived and what they were thinking about. Longfellow had little
to say of foreign unfriendliness which was still disturbing Irving
and Cooper and Bryant (see pp. 111-114). In preparing to teach foreign
languages and literatures he yielded to the spell of their richly
picturesque traditions; and his first work, "Outre-Mer" (1833), was an
effort to expound these to his countrymen. This, too, Irving and Cooper
had done, and from now on the refrain was to be taken up by most of the
widely read American writers.[18]
[18] A short list of the chief titles will include Longfellow's
"Hyperion" (1839), Willis's "Loiterings of Travel" (1840),
Taylor's "Views Afoot" (1846), Curtis's "Nile Notes of a
Howadji" (1851), Mrs. Stowe's "Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands"
(1854), Emerson's "English Traits" (1856), Bryant's "Letters
from Spain and Other Countries" (1859), Norton's "Notes of
Travel and Study in Italy" (1859), Hawthorne's "Our Old
Home" (1863), Howells's "Venetian Life" (1866), Mark Twain's
"Innocents Abroad" (1869), and so on down to and beyond Holmes's
"Our Hundred Days in Europe" (1887).
As an impressionable young American he fell into the declining
sentimentalism of the period and wrote characteristically to his
mother: "I look forward to the distant day of our meeting until my
heart swells into my throat and tears into my eyes. I cannot help
thinking that it is a pardonable weakness." He was so absorbed by all
he was seeing and learning that he wrote no verse, letting the days go
by until he concluded with the overwhelming seriousness of twenty-two
that his poetic career was finished. As a matter of fact he was just
complementing his native American feeling with a sense of the glamour
of Old World civilization, and was on the way toward combining the two
as poet and professor. Returning to his old college he taught there
until in 1836 he was invited to succeed Professor George Ticknor at
Harvard, again with the condition--implied if not imposed--that he go
abroad for study. On his second sojourn he extended his knowledge to
the Germanic languages, mastering them as thoroughly as he had French,
Spanish, and Italian. In the end he is said to have had a fluent
speaking control of eight tongues, with the power to "get along in"
six more, and to read yet another six. Until 1854 he was engaged in
his duties at Harvard, giving no little instruction, engaging all
his assistants, and personally supervising their teaching. It was an
irksome routine against which he began to rebel many years before he
shook himself free. "It is too much to do for one's daily bread, when
one can live on so little," he wrote in 1839. "I must learn to give up
superfluous things and devote myself wholly to literature." And in the
same year he referred in another letter to "poetic dreams shaded by
French irregular verbs."
If the distractions of his professorship had actually prevented all
writing, he would doubtless not have held it eighteen years; but
in spite of handicaps his output was fairly steady throughout, and
his most richly productive period--1847-1863--half overlapped his
Harvard service. Aside from his fruitful activities in formulating
books and methods for language study, and aside from his unimpressive
prose volumes "Outre-Mer," "Hyperion," and "Kavanagh," his poetry was
abundant and in a way progressive. Most memorable among the early types
was a sizeable group to which he referred in his diary and letters as
"psalms." Of these, of course, "A Psalm of Life" is best known. Like
all the others of its sort, it has the traits that are sure to endear
it to the multitude. It is in a conventional ballad meter, alternating
lines of four and three stresses with alternating rimes, it is easy to
understand, it is constructed around one vivid picture, and it conveys
a wholesome moral lesson. It is a general counsel to industry and
fortitude. Its message is formulated in a closing stanza of "The Light
of Stars,"
And thou, too, whosoe'er thou art,
That readest this brief psalm,
As one by one thy hopes depart,
Be resolute and calm,
and its "act in the living present" is echoed in the daily achievement
of the village blacksmith.
Longfellow's labors as a translator began early and continued
throughout his career, but it is interesting to see that in the
earlier efforts a sober ethical note prevails, whereas many of the
later translations are marked by simple charm and some by sheer
frivolity. "The Coplas de Don Jorge Manrique" is a transparently
veiled homily on the vanity of human wishes; others from the Spanish
are on "The Good Shepherd" and "The Image of God" and from Dante on
"The Celestial Pilot" and "The Terrestrial Paradise"; there is an
Anglo-Saxon passage on "The Grave" and a fragment from a German ballad
in which a ribald discussion of "The Happiest Land" is interrupted by
the landlord's daughter who points to heaven and says:
... "Ye may no more contend,--
There lies the happiest land!"
In January, 1840, the poet wrote to his friend George Greene:
I have broken ground in a new field; namely, ballads; beginning with
the "Wreck of the Schooner Hesperus" on the reef of Norman's Woe....
I think I shall write more. The _national ballad_ is a virgin soil
here in New England; and there are great materials. Besides, I have a
great notion of working on the _people's_ feelings.
In 1841, consequently, there appeared his "Ballads and Other Poems."
Longfellow had first intended calling the volume "The Skeleton
in Armor," but the collection grew in number until this poem was
overbalanced by the weight of the whole, and until--which is more
significant--the native ballads were crowded by the introduction of
poems from the German and Swedish and Danish. The change of plan,
though slight, was indicative of what was taking place in Longfellow's
development. He inclined, in the fashion of his day, to foster American
subject matter, but he was full of the spirit and content of European
literature which was unknown to his countrymen. Some years were to pass
before he could hold his gaze away from "outre-mer." Another letter to
George Greene shows how he was vacillating at this time.
A national literature is the expression of national character and
thought; and as our character and modes of thought do not differ
essentially from those of England, our literature cannot. Vast
fields, lakes and prairies cannot make great poets. They are but
the scenery of the play, and have much less to do with the poetic
character than has been imagined.... I do not think a "Poets'
Convention" would help the matter. In fact the matter needs no
helping.
"Excelsior" is a complete poetic fulfillment of this idea. There is
nothing essentially American in the aspiration of youth. Longfellow
therefore "staged" the ballad in the Alps, partly because the Alps
doubtless first occurred to mind and partly because in America no
mountain heights were topped by the symbolic monastery from which
the traveler could be found still aspiring in death. Again, lyrics
like "The Day is Done," "The Old Clock on the Stairs," and "The Arrow
and the Song" belong to no time or place but are meditative moments
in the life of any thoughtful man. And finally, "The Bridge" is a
representative combination of native and foreign material. The bridge
with wooden piers used to stand exactly as described over the Charles
River between Boston and Cambridge. It was so near the ocean that the
tides swept back and forth under it as they do not under any bridge in
London or Paris or on the German Rhine. Yet in the second stanza the
likeness of the moonlight to "a golden goblet falling and sinking into
the sea" is evidently an allusion to a picture in Schiller's "König
von Thule," a literary allusion but not a false one, for the moonlight
might well look the same on the tide-tossed Charles as on the streaming
Rhine. In his "Seaweed" Longfellow seems to have been half explaining
and half defending such poetic processes:
So when storms of wild emotion
Strike the ocean
Of the poet's soul, erelong
From each cave and rocky fastness,
In its vastness,
Floats some fragment of a song.
The one point to accept with caution from all Longfellow's poems of
self-analysis is the oft-recurring reference to heroic strife. Whatever
heroism he felt or displayed "in the world's broad field of battle" was
more quietly enduring than spectacular. The real Longfellow learned "to
labor and to wait"; if wild emotion ever struck the ocean of his soul
he possessed himself for the tumult to subside. The finest of all his
lyrics, "Victor and Vanquished," cannot be confirmed from the visible
evidences of his career. The "Poems on Slavery," for example, attest
only to the passive courage of his convictions. In 1842 it was no small
matter to come out clearly in public opposition to human bondage (see
p. 257). Longfellow did not hesitate to risk his growing popularity by
issuing this little volume. He was, and he continued to be, the devoted
friend of Charles Sumner. Yet his antislavery heroism began and ended
with these seven poems, and their value lay more in the bare fact that
he had written them than in any ethical or emotional appeal.
The period from 1847 to 1863 was, all things considered, quite the most
fruitful for Longfellow; and this contained no five titles to rival
"Evangeline" (1847), "The Song of Hiawatha" (1855), "The Courtship
of Miles Standish" (1858), "The New England Tragedy" (first form,
1860), and "Tales of a Wayside Inn" (1863). Thus, although he by no
means abandoned Europe and the thoughts of Europe, he came at last
and altogether naturally to the development of American tradition and
the American scene. The immediate success of "Evangeline" (for five
thousand copies were sold within two months) is easy to understand.
The material was fresh and the story was lovely. Longfellow's
reading-public, accustomed to certain charms and qualities in his work,
found these no less attractively displayed in the long story than in
his brief lyrics. The pastoral scene at the start, the dramatic episode
of the separation, the long vista of American scenes presented in
Evangeline's vain search, and the final rounding out of the story plot,
all belong to a "good seller"; and as it happened there was in America
in 1847 no widely popular novelist. The field belonged to the author of
"Evangeline" even more completely then a half century earlier it had
belonged to the author of "Marmion," on the other side of the sea.
In the journal of 1849 appears the entry, "And now I hope to try a
loftier strain, the sublimer Song whose broken melodies have for so
many years breathed through my soul in the better hours of life." This
was a reference to "The Golden Legend," which appeared in 1851, and
which was in the end to become part of "Christus," completed not until
1872. In a sense this was the most ambitious and least effective of
all his undertakings. It was too scholastic for the public; it was not
a fit avenue to the feelings of "the _people_" whom in 1840 he had
resolved to stir. By 1854 Longfellow entered in the journal, "I have at
length hit upon a plan for a poem on the American Indians, which seems
to me the right one and the only." This was to do with the traditions
of the red man what Malory had done with the Arthurian story and what
Tennyson was soon to be reweaving into the "Idylls of the King."
Schoolcraft's Indian researches put the material into his hands, and
the Finnish epic "Kalevala" supplied the suggestion for the appropriate
measure. It appeared in 1855 and was demanded by the public in repeated
printings.
"Hiawatha" has a double assurance of wide and lasting fame in the
fact that it appeals to young and old in different ways. It appeals
to children because it is made up of a succession of picturesque
stories of action. Their lack of plots is no defect to the youthful
reader--nothing could be more plotless then the various parts of
"Gulliver's Travels"--and on the other hand few children detect
or care for the scheme underlying them as a whole. They are as
vivid and circumstantial as "Gulliver" or as "Pilgrim's Progress."
Furthermore they deal with human types which belong to all romantic
legend: Hiawatha, the hero; Minnehaha, the heroine; Chibiabos, the
sweet singer, or artist; Kwasind, the strong man, or primitive
force; Pau-Puk-Keewis, the mischief-maker, or the comic spirit,--any
child will recognize them for example in Robin Hood, Maid Marian,
Allan-a-Dale, Will Scarlet, and Friar Tuck. Again, these human types
are extended over into the animal world and even to the forces of
nature, the latter, by the way, supplying frequently the place of the
indispensable villain or obstacle between the hero and the achievement
of his purposes.
Unhappily the average adult who has read it in early life assumes
that he has advanced beyond "Hiawatha," that he can put it away with
other childish things, not realizing how much more than meets the eye
resides within its lines. Moreover, some grown-ups who do attempt
a second reading are dissatisfied because their minds have stopped
between childhood and maturity, stunted by too heavy a diet on obvious
fiction and the daily newspapers. For the later reading of "Hiawatha"
demands the kind of intellectual maturity that can cope with "Paradise
Lost" or "Sartor Resartus" or "In Memoriam" or the classics which are
quite beyond the child. The genuinely mature reader appreciates that
the legends and the ballads of a people are never limited to external
significance and that, whoever may happen to be the hero, it is the
people who are represented through him. So the epic note emerges for
him who can hear it. A peace is declared among the warring tribes;
Hiawatha is sent by Mudjekeewis back to live and toil among his people;
he is commended by Mondamin because he prays "For advantage of the
nations"; he fights the pestilence to save the people; he divides
his trophies of battle with them; and he departs when the advent of
the white man marks the doom of the Indian. And so the ordering of
the parts is ethnic, tracing the Indian chronicle through the stages
that all peoples have traversed, from the nomad life of hunting and
fishing to primitive agriculture and community life; thus come song and
festival, a common religion and a common fund of legend, and finally,
in the tragic life of this people, come the decline of strength, in
the death of Kwasind, the passing of song with Chibiabos, and the
departure of national heroism as Hiawatha is lost to view,
In the glory of the sunset,
In the purple mists of evening.
It is no mean achievement to write a children's classic, but the
enduring fact about "Hiawatha" is that it is a genuine epic as well.
No other poem of Longfellow's is so well adjusted in form and content.
The fact of first importance is not that Longfellow derived the measure
from a Finnish epic but that the primitive epic form is perfect because
it is the natural, unstudied way of telling a primitive story. The
forms of literature that go back nearest to the people in their origins
are simple in rhythm and built up of parallel repetitions. This marks
a distinction between the epics about nations written in a later age,
such as the Iliad and the Æneid and the works of Milton, and the epics
of early and unknown authorship, such as the "Nibelungenlied" and
"Beowulf." It was Longfellow's gift to combine the old material with a
fittingly primitive measure, joining as only poet and scholar could
... legends and traditions
With the odors of the forest,
With the dew and damp of meadows,
With the curling smoke of wigwams,
With the rushing of great rivers,
With their frequent repetitions,
And their wild reverberations,
As of thunder in the mountains.
With "The Courtship of Miles Standish" Longfellow returned to New
England and told his first long story of his own district and of his
own immediate people. Both "Evangeline" and "Hiawatha" were narratives
that ended with themselves. The glory of the Acadians and of the
Indians was departed. But "Miles Standish" was like the "New England
Tragedies" in dealing with a people who were very much alive. For the
early Puritan, Longfellow felt a thorough and abiding respect which was
not untinged with humor. For his self-righteousness, his stridency,
and his arid lack of feeling for beauty the poet showed an amused
contempt, but for the essential qualities of rectitude and abiding
persistence he was quite ready to acknowledge his admiration. There
is a pleasant personal application in this story which he who runs is
likely to overlook. Miles Standish was a worthy man, says Longfellow;
he was stalwart, vigorous, practical, and when put to the test he was
magnanimous, too. But he was sadly one-sided. It was not enough to be
like his own howitzer,
Steady, straightforward, and strong, with irresistible logic,
Orthodox, flashing conviction right into the hearts of the heathen.
He was of the sort who banished the birds of Killingworth with costly
consequence. The worthier character was John Alden--"my ancestor"--who
was like the Preceptor of Killingworth in his feeling for beauty in
nature and in poetry and in song. "Miles Standish" is his most amiable
picture of the Puritans. In "The New England Tragedies" Governor
Endicott's death is a poetic and divine retribution for his persecution
of the Quakers, and Giles Corey's sacrifice to the witchcraft mania is
a horrid indictment of bigotry unbridled.
From 1863 on Longfellow continued in the various paths which he had
already marked out, but his work in the main was in sustained narrative
and in translation. His rendering of Dante is the preëminent piece
of American translation, at once more poetic and more scholarly than
Bryant's "Iliad" or Bayard Taylor's "Faust." It was a labor of love,
extending over many years, the fruit of his teaching as well as of his
study, and in its final form the product of nightly counsels with his
learned neighbors, Charles Eliot Norton and James Russell Lowell. Age,
fame, and the affectionate respect of the choicest friends saw him
broaden and deepen in his philosophy of life. Little psalms and ballads
no longer expressed him. Life had become a great outreaching drama at
which he hinted in his cyclic "Christus: a Mystery." His last lyrics
opened vistas instead of supplying formulas, and quite appropriately
he left behind as an uncompleted fragment his dramatic poem on the
greatest of dreamers and workers, Michael Angelo.
There is no possibility of debate as to Longfellow's immense
popularity. The evidence of the number of editions in English and in
translation, the number of works in criticism, the number of titles in
the British Museum catalogue, the number of poems included in scores of
"Household" and "Fireside" collections, and the confidence with which
booksellers stock up in anticipation of continued sales,[19] tells the
story. But these facts in themselves do not establish Longfellow's
claim to immortality, for there is no necessary connection between
such popularity and greatness. There was little evidence in him of
the genius which takes no thought for the things of the morrow. Until
after the height of his career he never wrote in disregard of the
public. "The fact is," he sent word to his father, when he was but
seventeen, "I most eagerly aspire after future eminence in literature."
And even earlier he had laid down his program when he wrote, "I am
much better pleased with those pieces which touch the feelings and
improve the heart, than with those which excite the imagination only."
He had the good sense and the honesty not to pretend to inspiration.
On the contrary he was continually projecting poems and continually
sitting down, not to write what he had thought but to think what he
should write. He was an omnivorous but acquiescent reader, and what
his reading yielded him was literary stuff rather than vital ideas. He
accepted and reflected the ways of his own time and did not modify them
in any slightest degree. He was never iconoclastic, rarely even fresh.
He had something of Pope's gift for well-rounded utterances on life,
something of Scott's ability to tell a good story well, and withal his
own benevolent serenity.
[19] See pages 2-7 in T. W. Higginson's "Longfellow," _American Men
of Letters Series_.
This was not a supreme endowment, but it was a very large one, and
he developed it to a lofty degree. There will always be a case for
Longfellow in the hands of those who value the inspirer of the many
above the inspirer of the wise. There are ten who read Longfellow
to every one who reads Whitman or Emerson. His wholesomeness, his
lucidity, his comfortable sanity, his very lack of intense emotion,
endear him to those who wish to be entertained with a story or soothed
and reassured by a gentle lyric. Edmund Clarence Stedman wrote finely
of him: "His song was a household service, the ritual of our feastings
and mournings; and often it rehearsed for us the tales of many lands,
or, best of all, the legends of our own. I see him, a silver-haired
minstrel, touching melodious keys, playing and singing in the twilight,
within sound of the rote of the sea. There he lingers late; the curfew
bell has tolled and the darkness closes round, till at last that tender
voice is silent, and he softly moves unto his rest."
BOOK LIST
=_Individual Author_=
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. Works. Riverside Edition. 1886. 11 vols.
Poetry, Vols. I-VI, IX-XI. Prose, Vols. VII, VIII. Standard
Library Edition. 14 vols. (Includes content of Riverside Edition
plus the life by Samuel Longfellow.) The best single volume is
the Cambridge Edition. His work appeared in book form originally
as follows: Miscellaneous Poems from the _United States Literary
Gazette_ (with others), 1826; Coplas de Manrique, 1833; Outre-Mer,
Vol. I, 1833, Vol. II, 1834; Hyperion, 1839; Voices of the Night,
1839; Ballads and Other Poems, 1842; Poems on Slavery, 1842; The
Spanish Student, 1843; Poems, 1845; The Belfry of Bruges and
Other Poems, 1846; Evangeline, 1847; Kavanagh, 1849; The Seaside
and the Fireside, 1850; The Golden Legend, 1851; Hiawatha,
1855; Prose Works, 1857; The Courtship of Miles Standish, 1858;
The New England Tragedy, 1860; Tales of a Wayside Inn, 1863;
Flower-de-Luce, 1867; Dante's Divina Commedia (translated), 1867;
The New England Tragedies, 1868; The Divine Tragedy, 1871; Three
Books of Song, 1872; Aftermath, 1873; The Masque of Pandora, 1875;
Kéramos, 1878; Ultima Thule, 1880; In the Harbor, 1882; Michael
Angelo, 1883.
=Bibliography=
A bibliography of first editions compiled by Luther S.
Livingston. Privately printed 1908. See also Cambridge History
of American Literature, Vol. II, pp. 425-436.
=Biography and Criticism=
The standard life is by Samuel Longfellow. 3 vols. These first
appeared as The Life, 1886 (2 vols), and Final Memorials, 1887
(1 vol).
AUSTIN, G. L. Longfellow: his Life, his Works, his Friendships.
1883.
CARPENTER, G. R. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 1901.
DAVIDSON, THOMAS. H. W. Longfellow. 1882.
FIELDS, MRS. ANNIE. Authors and Friends. 1896.
GANNETT, W. C. Studies in Longfellow, etc. 1898. (_Riv. Lit.
Ser., No. 12._)
HENLEY, W. E. Views and Reviews. 1890.
HIGGINSON, T. W. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 1902.
HOWELLS, W. D. My Literary Friends and Acquaintances. 1900.
HOWELLS, W. D. The Art of Longfellow. _North American Review_,
March, 1907.
KENNEDY, W. S. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 1882.
LAWTON, W. C. A Study of the New England Poets. 1898.
LOWELL, J. R. A Fable for Critics, passim. 1848.
NORTON, C. E. H. W. Longfellow: a Sketch. 1907.
PERRY, BLISS. Park Street Papers, The Centenary of Longfellow.
1908.
POE, E. A. In Literati: Mr. Longfellow and Other Plagiarists;
Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Willis, and the Drama; Longfellow's
Ballads.
RICHARDSON, C. F. American Literature, Vol. II, chap. iii.
ROBERTSON, E. S. Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 1887.
ROSSETTI, W. M. Lives of Famous Poets. 1878.
STEDMAN, E. C. Poets of America. 1885.
TRENT, W. P. Longfellow and Other Essays. 1910. Cambridge
History of American Literature, Vol. II, Bk. II, chap. xii.
UNDERWOOD, F. H. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: a Biographical
Sketch. 1882.
WINTER, WILLIAM. Old Friends. 1909.
TOPICS AND PROBLEMS
Read fifty pages at random from "Outre-Mer." Compare them in tone and
style with a passage of equal length from the essays on English life
in "The Sketch Book" or from "Innocents Abroad" or from Howells's
"London Films."
Apply the tests for popular fireside poetry referred to on pages
263 and 270 to the poems of Longfellow which you regard as general
favorites.
Read from three to six of Longfellow's ballads and compare them with a
similar number by Tennyson or Dante Gabriel Rossetti or Whittier.
What was there in Longfellow's education and profession to lead him to
the contention in 1840 that there was no difference in the characters
and modes of thought of Englishmen and Americans?
See Whitcomb's "Chronological Outlines of American Literature" for the
years 1845 to 1850 for the absence of any strikingly popular fiction in
the period when "Evangeline" was published.
Read "Hiawatha" for the broad view of ethnic life which naturally
escapes the attention of the child reader. Compare in general the
measures of "Hiawatha" and of "Beowulf" (in the original or in metrical
translation).
Note Longfellow's characterizations of the Puritans in the poems
mentioned on page 277 and compare these with Hawthorne's.
Read "The Prelude," "The Day is Done," "Seaweed," and "Birds of
Passage" for Longfellow's comments on the poet and the poetic art.