The book received every form of attention; it was admired, laughed at, parodied, set to music, and publicly read, and his fame unquestionably rests far more securely on this and other strictly American poems than on the prolonged labor of the "Golden Legend." He himself writes that some of the newspapers are "fierce and furious" about "Hiawatha," and again "there is the greatest pother over 'Hiawatha.'" Freiligrath, who translated the poem into German, writes him from London, "Are you not chuckling over the war which is waging in the 'Athenæum' about the measure from 'Hiawatha'?" He had letters of hearty approval from Emerson, Hawthorne, Parsons, and Bayard Taylor; the latter, perhaps, making the best single encomium on the book in writing to its author, "The whole poem floats in an atmosphere of the American 'Indian summer.'" The best tribute ever paid to it, however, was the actual representation of it as a drama by the Ojibway Indians on an island in Lake Huron, in August, 1901, in honor of a visit to the tribe by some of the children and grandchildren of the poet. This posthumous tribute to a work of genius is in itself so picturesque and interesting and has been so well described by Miss Alice Longfellow, who was present, that I have obtained her consent to reprint it in the Appendix to this volume. Longfellow's next poem reverted to hexameters once more, inasmuch as "Evangeline" had thoroughly outlived the early criticisms inspired by this meter. The theme had crossed his mind in 1856, and he had begun to treat it in dramatic form and verse, under the name it now bears; but after a year's delay he tried it again under the name of Priscilla, taking the name, possibly, from an attractive English Quakeress, Priscilla Green, whose sweet voice had charmed him in a public meeting, "breaking now and then," as he says, "into a kind of rhythmic charm in which the voice seemed floating up and down on wings." It has been thought that he transferred in some degree the personality of this worthy woman to the heroine of his story, their Christian names being the same; but he afterwards resumed the original title, "The Courtship of Miles Standish." He wrote it with great ease between December, 1857, and March, 1858, and perhaps never composed anything with a lighter touch or more unmingled pleasure. Twenty-five thousand copies were sold or ordered of the publishers during the first week, and ten thousand in London on the first day. In both theme and treatment the story was thoroughly to his liking, and vindicated yet further that early instinct which guided him to American subjects. Longfellow was himself descended, it will be remembered, from the very marriage he described, thus guaranteeing a sympathetic treatment, while the measure is a shade crisper and more elastic than that of "Evangeline," owing largely to the greater use of trochees. It is almost needless to say that no such effort can ever be held strictly to the classic rules, owing to the