In the journal of 1849 appears the entry, "And now I hope to try a loftier strain, the sublimer Song whose broken melodies have for so many years breathed through my soul in the better hours of life." This was a reference to "The Golden Legend," which appeared in 1851, and which was in the end to become part of "Christus," completed not until 1872. In a sense this was the most ambitious and least effective of all his undertakings. It was too scholastic for the public; it was not a fit avenue to the feelings of "the _people_" whom in 1840 he had resolved to stir. By 1854 Longfellow entered in the journal, "I have at length hit upon a plan for a poem on the American Indians, which seems to me the right one and the only." This was to do with the traditions of the red man what Malory had done with the Arthurian story and what Tennyson was soon to be reweaving into the "Idylls of the King." Schoolcraft's Indian researches put the material into his hands, and the Finnish epic "Kalevala" supplied the suggestion for the appropriate measure. It appeared in 1855 and was demanded by the public in repeated printings. "Hiawatha" has a double assurance of wide and lasting fame in the fact that it appeals to young and old in different ways. It appeals to children because it is made up of a succession of picturesque stories of action. Their lack of plots is no defect to the youthful reader--nothing could be more plotless then the various parts of "Gulliver's Travels"--and on the other hand few children detect or care for the scheme underlying them as a whole. They are as vivid and circumstantial as "Gulliver" or as "Pilgrim's Progress." Furthermore they deal with human types which belong to all romantic legend: Hiawatha, the hero; Minnehaha, the heroine; Chibiabos, the sweet singer, or artist; Kwasind, the strong man, or primitive force; Pau-Puk-Keewis, the mischief-maker, or the comic spirit,--any child will recognize them for example in Robin Hood, Maid Marian, Allan-a-Dale, Will Scarlet, and Friar Tuck. Again, these human types are extended over into the animal world and even to the forces of nature, the latter, by the way, supplying frequently the place of the indispensable villain or obstacle between the hero and the achievement of his purposes.