The tale of Acadie is engrossing in its very nature, and whether told in prose or verse must always invite, even chain, the attention. It is dramatic without being melodramatic. The characters are not mere ‘persons’ of the drama, they are types. Evangeline will always stand for something more than the figure of an unhappy Acadian girl bereft of her lover. As Longfellow has painted her, she is the incarnation of beauty, devotion, maidenly pride, self-abnegation. So too of the other characters, Gabriel, old Basil, Benedict; each has that added strength which a character conceived dramatically is bound to have if it shall prove typical as well. Longfellow gave himself little anxiety about the historic difficulties of the Acadian question. It was enough for him that these unhappy people were carried away from their homes and that much misery ensued. He painted the French Neutrals as a romancer must. Father Felician was not sketched from the Abbé Le Loutre, nor was life in the actual Grand Pré altogether idyllic. _Evangeline_ aroused interest in French-American history. For example, Whewell wrote to Bancroft to say that he feared Longfellow had some historical basis for the story and to ask for information. In the Plymouth idyl of the choleric little captain who believed that the way to get a thing well done was to do it one’s self, and who exemplified his theory by having his secretary make a proposal of marriage for him, Longfellow made one of his most fortunate strokes. _The Courtship of Miles Standish_ showed the poetic possibilities in the harsh, dry annals of early colonial life. The wonder is that so few adventurers have cared to follow the path indicated. Bound up with the story of Priscilla and John Alden is a handful of poems to which Longfellow gave the collective title of ‘Birds of Passage.’ Here are several fine examples of his art: ‘The Warden of the Cinque-Ports,’ ‘Haunted Houses,’ ‘The Jewish Cemetery at Newport,’ ‘Oliver Basselin,’ ‘Victor Galbraith,’ ‘My Lost Youth,’ ‘The Discoverer of the North Cape,’ and ‘Sandalphon.’ It is a question whether in these eight poems we have not a small but well-nigh perfect Longfellow anthology. Certainly no selection of his writings can pretend to be characteristic which does not contain them.