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.