INTRODUCTION. ONE thinks of Longfellow, perhaps, first of all, as the maker of many a tender song, many a lyric of music and imagination, many a stirring ballad of by-gone days and deeds. Then a few more ambitious works come to mind: Evangeline, a narrative poem of native subject, told in a metre which at the time had all the merit of bold innovation; Hiawatha, another spirited and successful venture into the native field, and using a rhythmic vehicle at once fresh and happy; the Tales of a Wayside Inn, linking together in a song-sequence narratives of old times and new; The Spanish Student, dewy with a young poet-scholar's sense of the romantic tragedy inherent in that fateful land. But as one meditates upon the full exercise of his poetic gift, one is likely to feel that this beloved singer's just claim upon the affectionate memory of after time is due to his felicitous handling of subjects, humorous or tragic, which get their rootage in American soil. Despite much culture and a cosmopolitan range of themes, Longfellow stands forth as a representative poet of our earlier period, because he drew the inspiration for his best work from motives lying ready to hand in his own country. Neither Whittier nor Holmes, neither Emerson nor Lowell, are more V American in this sense; a poet like Poe is seen to be hardly American at all. It is true that art is something vastly larger than nationality; and it is, there.. fore, foolish to invoke a self-conscious attempt on the writer's part to reflect his environment in his literary production. The expression of country and locality in literature should be instinctive and not come of observation. But it is also true and the truth may be emphasized that the people will only ratify as their exponent in song the man whom they recognize as thus interpreting their personal and collective life. This service Longfellow, linguist, translator, traveller, and professor as he was, has performed, and hence it is that he has always been - it is hardly too much to say our most widely cherished bard. The presentday critic who dismisses him carelessly as pleasing rather than great, must reckon with this not unimportant fact in any attempt at a proper valuation. So, too, all estimates which bear down on Longfellow as the product of scholarship, travel, and world-culture, unfairly minimize the more popular aspect of his accomplishment. The delightful narrative poem of The Courtship of Miles Standish is one of these typical creations we have in mind. It is a rendering playful, yet tender, realistic in setting, yet touched with romance, of a story from our early colonial history, in which characters who are in danger of being names and nothing more in the hands of the formal chronicler are brought near to us and made warm and sympathetic by means of imaginative presentation. This, by the |