Longfellow was one of the most bookish men in our literature. His knowledge of others’ thoughts and writings was so great that he became, instead of a creator in his poems, a painter of things already created. It is said that he never even owned a style of his own like Bryant and Poe, but assimilated what he saw or heard or read from books, reclothing it and sending it out again. This does not intimate that he was a plagiarist, but that he wrote out of the accumulated knowledge of others. “Evangeline,” for instance, was given him by Hawthorne, who had heard of the young people of Acadia and kept them in mind, intending to weave them into a romance. The forcible deportation of 18,000 French people touched Hawthorne as it perhaps never could have touched Longfellow except in literature, and also as it certainly never would have touched the world had not Longfellow woven the woof of the story in the threads of his song. “Evangeline” was brought out the same year with Tennyson’s “Princess” (1847), and divided honors with the latter even in England. In this poem, and in “The Courtship of Miles Standish” and other poems, the pictures of the new world are brought out with charming simplicity. Though Longfellow never visited Acadia or Louisiana, it is the real French village of Grand Pré and the real Louisiana, not a poetic dream that are described in this poem. So vivid were his descriptions that artists in Europe painted the scenes true to nature and vied with each other in painting the portrait of Evangeline, among several of which there is said to be so striking a resemblance as to suggest the idea that one had served as a copy for the others. The poem took such a hold upon the public, that both the poor man and the rich knew Longfellow as they knew not Tennyson their own poet. It was doubtless because he, though one of the most scholarly of men, always spoke so the plainest reader could understand. Illustration: THE WAYSIDE INN. Scene of Longfellow’s Famous “_Tales of the Wayside Inn_.” In “The Tales of a Wayside Inn” (1863), the characters were not fictions, but real persons. The _musician_ was none other than the famous violinist, Ole Bull; Professor Luigi Monte, a close friend who dined every Sunday with Longfellow, was the _Sicilian_; Dr. Henry Wales was the _youth_; the _poet_ was Thomas W. Parsons, and the _theologian_ was his brother, Rev. S. W. Longfellow. This poem shows Longfellow at his best as a story teller, while the stories which are put into the mouth of these actual characters perhaps could have been written by no other living man, for they are from the literature of all countries, with which Longfellow was so familiar.