Standish. This, I think, will be a better treatment of the subject than the dramatic one I wrote some time ago;" and the next day: "My poem is in hexameters; an idyl of the Old Colony times. What it will turn out I do not know; but it gives me pleasure to write it; and that I count for something." It is not unlikely that the change of name was due in part to the impression made upon him not long before by a Quakeress from England, Priscilla Green, whom he heard speak at a public meeting. "She spoke," he says, "with a sweet voice and a very clear enunciation; very deliberately, and breaking now and then into a rhythmic chant, in which the voice seemed floating up and down on wings. I was much interested, and could have listened an hour longer. It was a very great pleasure to hear such a musical voice." The identity of the name with the historic one of his heroine may easily have served to transfer something of the personality of the living woman into the poet's fancy of the Puritan maiden when he came to resume his treatment of the subject of Miles Standish's courtship. The pages of his diary, and extracts from his correspondence, give glimpses of the poet at work on his poem, and afterwards enjoying the reception which it had at the hands of the public. "December 29, 1857. Work a little at Priscilla. Toward evening, walk in a gently falling snow, under the shaded lamp of the moon. “January 29, 1858. Began again on Priscilla and wrote several pages, finishing the second canto. "February 17. Have worked pretty steadily for the last week on Priscilla. To-day finish canto four. “March 1. Keep indoors, and work on Priscilla, which I think I shall call The Courtship of Miles Standish. But not feeling much in the mood, took to reading Homer; the death of Hector, and Priam's visit to Achilles in his tent. “ March 16. Rowse resumes portrait. But I find time, notwithstanding, to write a whole canto of Miles Standish, namely, canto eight. "March 22. The poem is finished, and now only needs revision, which I begin today. But, in the main, I have it as I want it. "April 23. Printing Miles Standish, and seeing all its defects as it stands before me in type. It is always disagreeable, when the glow of composition is over, to criticise what one has been in love with. We think it is Rachel, but wake to find it Leah. "May 27. Get all the plate-proofs of Miles Standish, and look it over with a keen eye to its defects. It is not pleasant to go over a work in this way. "June 3. [In a letter to Charles Sumner.] And now of more private matters. I have just finished a poem of some length, idyl of the Old Colony times; a bunch of Mayflowers from the Plymouth woods. an "July 10. [To the same.] I wrote you about my new poem, Miles Standish, founded on the well-known adventure of my maternal ancestor, John Alden. The heroine's name is Priscilla; and so you have the chief characters, and the chief incident before you, - taking it for granted that you remember the traditional anecdote. I am now going upon something more important. "August 12. To the same.] Miles Standish will not be out till next month. I get in England one hundred and fifty pounds for the advance sheets; a good round sum for a small book. I hope you will like it. "October 7. Fields comes out to make a new proposition about Miles Standish. They have printed ten thousand copies, and want to print ten thousand more without delay. "October 16. The Courtship of Miles Standish published. At noon Ticknor told me he had soid five thousand in Boston, besides the orders from a distance. He had printed ten thousand, and has another ten thousand in press. Met George Vandenhoff, who reads the poem in public to-night. “October 23. Between these two Saturdays, Miles Standish has marched steadily on. Another five thousand are in press; in all, an army of twenty-five thousand, in one week. Fields tells me that in London ten thousand were sold the first day. “November 6. I give a dinner to Ticknor and Fields, the publishers, in honor of the success of Miles Standish; the other guests, T. Starr King and Whipple. “ November 28. Ehninger has sent me a beautiful illustration of Miles Standish. It is the bridal procession going through the Plymouth woods, and is full of feeling." In this, as in other of his poems, Mr. Longfellow drew his material from near rather than from recondite sources. As intimated above, the incident on which the story of the poem turns was a tradition in his family, and had been freshly brought to notice in Mr. Elliott's The New England History. From this book, which aims to reconstruct the interior household life, as well as to record the more public events, of New England, Mr. Longfellow gathered a number of details which give color to the poem. Dr. Alexander Young's Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers also was at his hand, and Winslow's Relation, included in it, furnished him with an explicit narrative of Standish's expedition against the Indians. Between the first projection of the poem and its final form occurred the important publication of Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantations, with Dr. Charles Deane's Notes. The poet did not think it necessary to follow the early Plymouth history with scrupulous regard to chronological sequence, nor was he writing a merely metrical version of the results of antiquarian research. It was sufficient to him to catch the broad features of the colonial life and to reproduce the spirit of the relations existing between Plymouth and the Indians. There is, so to speak, a universal history underlying that which concerns itself with the local affairs of men. It is the business of the historian to record with scrupu |