87 89 98 99 - Portrait of Miles Standish. - Autograph of Miles Stand- Ainsworth's Psalm Book. Wool Spinning - Wheel. Flax Spinning-Wheel.-Duxbury Hall, England. - Auto- 3 INTRODUCTORY NOTE MR. LONGFELLOW's Evangeline was published in 1847, and the discussion which his use of hexameters aroused was renewed repeatedly in the following years. His next important poetical work was The Golden Legend, published in 1851, and he was still brooding over the full conception of Christus when his reading of the Finnish epic Kalevala gave impulse to a desire he had long had to weave the Indian legends into a connected poem. The result was Hiawatha, at which he worked with great enthusiasm; not only because the theme interested him, but because he felt the exhilaration of release from daily academic duties, his resignation of his professorship having taken place in 1854. Hiawatha appeared in 1855, and then his mind reverted to Christus, and he began to consider the subjects which afterward took form in The New England Tragedies. Possibly the sombre character of the material he was working in caused a reaction, and led him to look about for a subject of a lighter cast, but in the same general vein. At any rate, he notes in his diary, under the date of December 2, 1856: "In the evening, wrote the first scene in The Courtship of Miles Standish." There is no evidence that he ever completed this dramatic representation of the subject. He went back in a few days to his Puritans and Quakers, and during the next few weeks was reading books which bore on this subject. But in March he struck upon. Charles Wyllis Elliott's The New England History, then just issued, which he characterizes as "done cleverly, with a light hand, but depth of research enough," and the next day the desire returned to him to produce some comedy drawn from early New England life. He seems to have continued, however, to work fitfully at The New England Tragedies, and by the end of August had made a rough draft of Wenlock Christison, the title which he gave to the first form of John Endi cott. Exactly a year after he wrote the first scene in The Courtship of Miles Standish, on the second of December, 1857, we find this entry in his diary: "Soft as spring. I begin a new poem, Priscilla, to be a kind of Puritan pastoral; the subject, the courtship of Miles |