come into the world with a mission for his people; his birth is
equally mysterious and invests him at once with almost supernatural
qualities. Like Arthur, he seeks to redeem his kingdom from savagery
and to teach the blessing of peace.

From first to last Hiawatha moves among the people, a real leader,
showing them how to clear their forests, to plant grain, to make for
themselves clothing of embroidered and painted skins, to improve their
fishing-grounds, and to live at peace with their neighbors. Hiawatha's
own life was one that was lived for others. From the time when he was
a little child and his grandmother told him all the fairy-tales of
nature, up to the day when, like Arthur, he passed mysteriously away
through the gates of the sunset, all his hope and joy and work were
for his people. He is a creature that could only have been born from a
mind as pure and poetic as that of Longfellow.

All the scenes and images of the poem are so true to nature that they
seem like very breaths from the forest. We move with Hiawatha through
the dewy birchen aisles, learn with him the language of the nimble
squirrel and of the wise beaver and mighty bear, watch him build his
famous canoe, and spend hours with him fishing in the waters of the
great inland sea, bordered by the pictured rocks, painted by nature
herself. Longfellow's first idea of the poem was suggested, it is
said, by his hearing a Harvard student recite some Indian tales.
Searching among the various books that treated of the American Indian,
he found many legends and incidents that preserved fairly well the
traditional history of the Indian race, and grouping these around one
central figure and filling in the gaps with poetic descriptions of the
forests, mountains, lakes, rivers, and plains, which made up the abode
of these picturesque people, he thus built up the entire poem. The
metre used is that in which the Kalevala, the national epic of the
Finns is written, and the Finnish hero, Wainamoinen, in his gift of
song and his brave adventures, is not unlike the great Hiawatha. Among
Longfellow's other long poems are: _The Spanish Student_, a dramatic
poem founded upon a Spanish romance; _The Divine Tragedy_, and _The
Golden Legend_, founded upon the life of Christ; _The Courtship of
Miles Standish_, a tale of Puritan love-making in the time of the
early settlers, and _Tales of a Wayside Inn_, which were a series of
poems of adventure supposed to be related in tu