In considering Longfellow as an original poet, we shall not go astray if we remember his own conception of originality. To him the poetic gift meant, not the power of creating new material--as the vulgar suppose--but insight, the power of seeing things according to their eternal values. Doubtless he realised that one needs insight to discover how far the vulgar supposition is blind. At all events, we need not look for new ideas or new sentiments in the poetry of Longfellow, but for an attempt to make us see things as he sees them, after he has tried to see them as they are. In his dramas, and in his narratives--these latter being more important--he frankly took material furnished by his wide reading, or lying ready to his hand, and strove to clothe it in a new and more permanent form. “Evangeline” is an instance of his method. The story was given him by Hawthorne; in elaborating it, Longfellow consulted such works on Nova Scotia and the exile of the Acadians as were accessible to him; he was true to his sources. Had he known of better authorities, he would have read them, and his account of the exile would have been historically more precise. The metre of “Evangeline,” suggested by that of Goethe’s “Hermann und Dorothea,” is one of the rare instances where dactylic hexameter has succeeded in English. One can truthfully say that whatever Longfellow took he really appropriated, that is, made his own. It was but seldom that his materials would not fuse, for he had a thorough command of technique. In “Hiawatha,” which has been called “the nearest approach to an American epic,” he employed a form of verse borrowed from the Finnish “Kalevala,” in which to embody traditions of the Indians. As Freiligrath remarked, there is something odd in the notion of Hiawatha, child of the West Wind, meeting with historical Christian missionaries. However, Longfellow’s daring synthesis of heterogeneous elements pleased that great authority on American antiquities Henry R. Schoolcraft; after many failures, a native poet had at length arisen to portray our aborigines, in a long poem, with fidelity and imagination. Ten thousand copies were sold in this country within four weeks, and the poem was translated into six modern languages.