Evangeline_ and the pathos--somewhat too drawn
out--of the story made it dear to a multitude of readers who cared
nothing about the technical disputes of Poe and other critics as to
whether or not Longfellow's lines were sufficiently "spondaic" to
represent truthfully the quantitative hexameters of Homer and Vergil.

In 1855 appeared _Hiawatha_, Longfellow's most aboriginal and
"American" book. The tripping trochaic measure he borrowed from the
Finnish epic _Kalevala_. The vague, child-like mythology of the Indian
tribes, with its anthropomorphic sense of the brotherhood between men,
animals, and the forms of inanimate nature, he took from Schoolcraft's
_Algic Researches_, 1839. He fixed forever, in a skillfully chosen
poetic form, the more inward and imaginative part of Indian character,
as Cooper had given permanence to its external and active side. Of
Longfellow's dramatic experiments, the _Golden Legend_, 1851, alone
deserves mention here. This was in his chosen realm, a tale taken from
the ecclesiastical annals of the Middle Ages, precious with martyrs'
blood and bathed in the rich twilight of the cloister. It contains
some of his best work, but its merit is rather poetic than dramatic,
although Ruskin praised it for the closeness with which it entered into
the temper of the monk.

Longfellow has pleased the people more than the critics. He gave
freely what he had, and the gift was beautiful. Those who have looked
in his poetry for something else than poetry, or for poetry of some
other kind, have not been slow to assert that he was a lady's poet--one
who satisfied callow youths and school-girls by uttering commonplaces
in graceful and musical shape, but who offered no strong meat for men.
Miss Fuller called his poetry thin, and the poet himself--or, rather, a
portrait of the poet which frontispieced an illustrated edition of his
works--a "dandy Pindar." This is not true of his poetry, or of the
best of it. But he had a singing and not a talking voice, and in his
prose one becomes sensible of a certain weakness. _Hyperion_, for
example, published in 1839, a loitering fiction, interspersed with
descriptions of European travel, is, upon the whole, a weak book,
overflowery in diction and sentimental in tone.

The crown of Longfellow's achievements as a translator was his great
version of Dante's _Divina Commedia_, published between 1867 and 1870.
It is a severely literal, almost a line for line, rendering