Everywhere that the English language is read Evangeline has passed as the most beautiful folk-story that America has produced, and the French Canadians, the far-away brothers of the Acadians, have included Longfellow among their national poets. Among them Evangeline is known by heart, and the cases are not rare where the people have learned English expressly for the purpose of reading Longfellow's poem in the original, a wonderful tribute to the poet who could thus touch to music one of the saddest memories of their race.
In Hiawatha Longfellow gave to the Indian the place in poetry that had been given him by Cooper in prose. Here the red man is shown with all his native nobleness still unmarred by the selfish injustice of the whites, while his inferior qualities are seen only to be those that belong to mankind in general.
Hiawatha is a poem of the forests and of the dark-skinned race who dwelt therein, who were learned only in forest lore and lived as near to nature's heart as the fauns and satyrs of old. Into this legend Longfellow has put all the poetry of the Indian nature, and has made his hero, Hiawatha, a noble creation that compares favorably with the King Arthur of the old British romances. Like Arthur, Hiawatha has come into the world with a mission for his people; his birth is equally mysterious and invests him at once with almost supernatural qualities. Like Arthur, he seeks to redeem his kingdom from savagery and to teach the blessing of peace.
From first to last Hiawatha moves among the people, a real leader, showing them how to clear their forests, to plant grain, to make for themselves clothing of embroidered and painted skins, to improve their fishing-grounds, and to live at peace with their neighbors. Hiawatha's own life was one that was lived for others. From the time when he was a little child and his grandmother told him all the fairy-tales of nature, up to the day when, like Arthur, he passed mysteriously away through the gates of the sunset, all his hope and joy and work were for his people. He is a creature that could only have been born from a mind as pure and poetic as that of Longfellow.
All the scenes and images of the poem are so true to nature that they seem like very breaths from the forest. We move with Hiawatha through the dewy birchen aisles, learn with him the language of the nimble squirrel and of the wise beaver and mighty bear, watch him build his famous canoe, and spend hours with him fishing in the waters of the great inland sea, bordered by the pictured rocks, painted by nature herself. Longfellow's first idea of the poem was suggested, it is said, by his hearing a Harvard student recite some Indian tales. Searching among the various books that treated of the American Indian, he found many legends and incidents that preserved fairly well the traditional history of the Indian race, and grouping these around one central figure and filling in the gaps with poetic descriptions of the forests, mountains, lakes, rivers, and plains, which made up the abode of these picturesque people, he thus built up the entire poem. The metre used is that in which the Kalevala, the national epic of the Finns is written, and the Finnish hero, Wainamoinen, in his gift of song and his brave adventures, is not unlike the great Hiawatha. Among Longfellow's other long poems are: The Spanish Student, a dramatic poem founded upon a Spanish romance; The Divine Tragedy, and The Golden Legend, founded upon the life of Christ; The Courtship of Miles Standish, a tale of Puritan love-making in the time of the early settlers, and Tales of a Wayside Inn, which were a series of poems of adventure supposed to be related in turn by the guests at an inn.
But it is with such poems as Evangeline and Hiawatha, and the shorter famous poems like A Psalm of Life, Excelsior, The Wreck of the Hesperus, The Building of the Ship, The Footsteps of Angels that his claim as the favorite poet of America rests. Evangeline and Hiawatha marked an era in American literature in introducing themes purely American, while of the famous shorter poems each separate one was greeted almost with an ovation. The Building of the Ship was never read during the struggle of the Civil War without raising the audience to a passion of enthusiasm, and so in each of these shorter poems Longfellow touched with wondrous sympathy the hearts of his readers. Throughout the land he was revered as the poet of the home and heart, the sweet singer to whom the fireside and family gave ever sacred and beautiful meanings.
Some poems on slavery, a prose tale called Kavanagh, and a translation of The Divine Comedy of Dante must also be included among Longfellow's works; but these have never reached the success attained by his more popular poems which are known by heart by millions to whom they have been inspiration and comfort.
Longfellow died in Cambridge in 1882, in the same month in which was written his last poem, The Bells of San Blas, which concludes with these words: