It is lous accuracy the acts and circumstances of history, more anxious to furnish all the evidence to be won from documents, monuments, and tradition than to put his own interpretation upon the bearings of this evidence; and yet the historian, unless he be a mere annalist,- and even then he will inevitably select from fuller material in accordance with his own judgment,— is quite sure to impart something of his own rationalizing and generalizing to his record of fact. the business of the poet, on the other hand, to be, first of all, an interpreter, to take of the material which the historian furnishes and to disclose its relations to universal experience, its spiritual import, its meaning as read in the light of the history of human nature; and yet, in doing this, the poet finds he cannot stray from the concrete, actual occurrence without introducing an error into his calculations. It is not possible to say how far Mr. Longfellow would have modified his Evangeline if he had had access to the historical material now so copious, instead of being shut up to the Abbé Raynal and Haliburton, but it is quite certain that the popular judgment of the deportation of the Acadian is determined by Longfellow, and not by Parkman. There has been no such accession to our knowledge of Plymouth affairs since The Courtship of Miles Standish was written, and the historical questions involved in it are the trifles of antiquarianism, but the popular conception of life in the Old Colony, in the early years, may be said to follow, in some measure, upon this poem, though in writing it Mr. Longfellow played variations upon a familiar theme rather than composed a new melody. new melody. Those who are curious to note the superficial discrepancies between the narrative contained in this poem and that which has been sifted by scholars from contemporaneous documents, will find suggestions in the notes which are appended to this volume, and which relate chiefly to the historic basis of the poem. |