Longfellow gave himself little anxiety about the historic difficulties of the Acadian question. It was enough for him that these unhappy people were carried away from their homes and that much misery ensued. He painted the French Neutrals as a romancer must. Father Felician was not sketched from the Abbé Le Loutre, nor was life in the actual Grand Pré altogether idyllic.
Evangeline aroused interest in French-American history. For example, Whewell wrote to Bancroft to say that he feared Longfellow had some historical basis for the story and to ask for information.
In the Plymouth idyl of the choleric little captain who believed that the way to get a thing well done was to do it one’s self, and who exemplified his theory by having his secretary make a proposal of marriage for him, Longfellow made one of his most fortunate strokes. The Courtship of Miles Standish showed the poetic possibilities in the harsh, dry annals of early colonial life. The wonder is that so few adventurers have cared to follow the path indicated.
Bound up with the story of Priscilla and John Alden is a handful of poems to which Longfellow gave the collective title of ‘Birds of Passage.’ Here are several fine examples of his art: ‘The Warden of the Cinque-Ports,’ ‘Haunted Houses,’ ‘The Jewish Cemetery at Newport,’ ‘Oliver Basselin,’ ‘Victor Galbraith,’ ‘My Lost Youth,’ ‘The Discoverer of the North Cape,’ and ‘Sandalphon.’ It is a question whether in these eight poems we have not a small but well-nigh perfect Longfellow anthology. Certainly no selection of his writings can pretend to be characteristic which does not contain them.
Hiawatha was not intended for a poetic commentary on the manners and customs of the North American Indians, though that impression sometimes obtains. It is a free handling of Ojibway legends drawn from Schoolcraft’s Algic Researches and supplemented by other accounts of Indian life. The grossness of the red man’s character, his cruelty, his primitive views of cleanliness, are wisely kept in the background, and his noble and picturesque qualities brought to the front. The psychology is extremely simple. This Indian edda must be enjoyed for its atmosphere of the forest, its childlike spirit, and its humor. Hiawatha was a friend of animals (when he was not their enemy), and understood them even better than writers of modern nature-books. One does not need to be young again to enjoy the account of Hiawatha’s fishing in company with his friend the squirrel. The sturgeon swallows them both, and the squirrel helps Hiawatha get the canoe crossways in the fish, a timely service in recognition of which (after both have been rescued) he receives the honorable name of Tail-in-air. In fact, the poem abounds in observations of animal life which as yet await the sanction of John Burroughs.
Taking a series of poems on the half-real, half-mythical King Olaf, adding thereto a group of contrasting tales from Spanish, Italian, Jewish, and American sources, assigning each narrative to an appropriate character, binding the whole together with an Introduction, Interludes, and a Conclusion, Longfellow produced the genial Tales of a Wayside Inn. The device of the poem is old, but it can always be given a new turn. Adapted to prose as well as verse, it may be used ‘in little,’ as Hardy has done in A Few Crusted Characters, or in larger form, as in A Group of Noble Dames.
No secret was made of the fact that the ‘Wayside Inn’ was the ‘Red Horse Inn’ of Sudbury, Massachusetts, or that the characters, the Sicilian, the Poet, the Student, the Spanish Jew, the Musician, and the Theologian, were real people, friends of Longfellow.[34]
The reader who takes up Tales of a Wayside Inn knows by instinct that he may not look for the broad and leisurely treatment, the wealth of beauty and harmony, which characterize The Earthly Paradise of Morris. That need not, however, prevent him from enjoying the Tales on quite sufficient grounds. The poems are often too brief; some are mere anecdotes ‘finished just as they are fairly begun.’ We are prepared for a more generous treatment.
Though not written for that complex and formidable entity ‘the child-mind,’ two poems in the collection, ‘Paul Revere’s Ride’ and ‘King Robert of Sicily,’ are beloved of school-children and dear to the amateur elocutionist. The most original of the tales is ‘The Saga of King Olaf,’ drawn from the Heimskringla, and appropriately put into the lips of the Musician. It is a poem redolent of the sea and the forest. The theme was congenial to Longfellow, who loved ‘the misty world of the north, weird and wonderful.’
Prompted by the good fortune of Tales of a Wayside Inn, the poet was led to make additions to it. A second part appeared in Three Books of Song, a third part in Aftermath. With these fifteen additional tales the three parts were then collected into a single volume.