And here let me premise that it was the habit of Longfellow, as I think the unfortunate habit, to improvise,--so to speak, to evolve from his inner consciousness,--the local atmosphere and conditions of those poems of his in which he dealt with history and historical happenings. It was so with the “Ride of Paul Revere;” it was so with the episodes made use of in the “Tales of a Wayside Inn;” it is notorious it was so in the case of “Evangeline” and Acadia; it was strikingly, and far more inexcusably, so in the case of “Miles Standish” and Plymouth. While preparing a poem which has deservedly become an American classic, as such throwing a glamour of romance over that entire region to which it has given the name of the “Evangeline Country,” Longfellow never sought to draw inspiration from actual contact with that “forest primeval” of which he sang; nor again, when dealing with the events of our own early history, did he once visit, much less study, the scene of that which he pictured. He imagined everything. I gravely question whether he even knew that the conflict he describes in the lines I have just quoted took place on the shores of Boston bay, and at a point not twenty miles from the historic mansion in which he lived, and the library where he imagined. He certainly, and more’s the pity, never stood on King-oak hill, or sailed up the Fore-river. What actually occurred here in April, 1623, I have endeavored elsewhere to describe in detail, just as it appears in our early records. Those curious on the subject will find my narrative in a chapter (vi) entitled “The Smoking Flax Blood-Quenched,” in a work of mine, the matured outcome of my address here in 1874, called “Three Episodes of Massachusetts History.” To that I refer them. Meanwhile, suffice it for me now to say, the actual occurrences of those early April days were stronger, more virile, and infinitely more dramatic and better adapted to poetic treatment,--in one word, more Homeric,--than the wholly apocryphal, and somewhat mawkish, cast given them in the lines I have quoted. Indeed, so far as the incidents drawn from the history of Weymouth are concerned, the whole is, in the original records, replete with vigorous life. It smacks of the savage; it is racy of the soil; it smells of the sea. It begins with the flight of Phineas Pratt from Wessagusset to Plymouth, his loss of the way, his fear lest his foot-prints in the late-lingering snow banks should betray him, his nights in the woods, his pursuit by the Indians, his guidance by the stars and sky, his fording the icy river, and his arrival in Plymouth just as Miles Standish was embarking for Wessagusset. Nothing then can be more picturesque, more epic in outline, than Standish’s voyage, with his little company of grim, silent men in that open boat. Sternly bent on action, they skirted, under a gloomy eastern sky, along the surf-beaten shore, the mist driving in their faces as the swelling