_Hiawatha_ was not intended for a poetic commentary on the manners and customs of the North American Indians, though that impression sometimes obtains. It is a free handling of Ojibway legends drawn from Schoolcraft’s _Algic Researches_ and supplemented by other accounts of Indian life. The grossness of the red man’s character, his cruelty, his primitive views of cleanliness, are wisely kept in the background, and his noble and picturesque qualities brought to the front. The psychology is extremely simple. This Indian edda must be enjoyed for its atmosphere of the forest, its childlike spirit, and its humor. Hiawatha was a friend of animals (when he was not their enemy), and understood them even better than writers of modern nature-books. One does not need to be young again to enjoy the account of Hiawatha’s fishing in company with his friend the squirrel. The sturgeon swallows them both, and the squirrel helps Hiawatha get the canoe crossways in the fish, a timely service in recognition of which (after both have been rescued) he receives the honorable name of Tail-in-air. In fact, the poem abounds in observations of animal life which as yet await the sanction of John Burroughs. Taking a series of poems on the half-real, half-mythical King Olaf, adding thereto a group of contrasting tales from Spanish, Italian, Jewish, and American sources, assigning each narrative to an appropriate character, binding the whole together with an Introduction, Interludes, and a Conclusion, Longfellow produced the genial _Tales of a Wayside Inn_. The device of the poem is old, but it can always be given a new turn. Adapted to prose as well as verse, it may be used ‘in little,’ as Hardy has done in _A Few Crusted Characters_, or in larger form, as in _A Group of Noble Dames_. No secret was made of the fact that the ‘Wayside Inn’ was the ‘Red Horse Inn’ of Sudbury, Massachusetts, or that the characters, the Sicilian, the Poet, the Student, the Spanish Jew, the Musician, and the Theologian, were real people, friends of Longfellow.[34] The reader who takes up _Tales of a Wayside Inn_ knows by instinct that he may not look for the broad and leisurely treatment, the wealth of beauty and harmony, which characterize _The Earthly Paradise_ of Morris. That need not, however, prevent him from enjoying the _Tales_ on quite sufficient grounds. The poems are often too brief; some are mere anecdotes ‘finished just as they are fairly begun.’ We are prepared for a more generous treatment.