unker Hill Battle, Taylor's
Amram's Wooing, Emerson's Concord Hymn, etc., etc. Then, too, some
critics rank as prose epics Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, Poe's Fall of
the House of Usher, Hale's Man Without a Country, Bret Harte's Luck of
Roaring Camp, Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona, etc., etc.

It is, however, Longfellow, America's most popular poet, who has
written the nearest approach to a real epic, and the poems most likely
to live, in his Wreck of the Hesperus, Skeleton in Armor, Golden
Legend, Hiawatha, Tales of a Wayside Inn, Courtship of Miles Standish,
and Evangeline, besides translating Dante's grand epic The Divine
Comedy.

In Longfellow's Wreck of the Hesperus we have a miniature nautical
epic, in the Skeleton in Armor our only epic relating to the Norse
discovery, in the Golden Legend, and in many of the Tales of a Wayside
Inn, happy adaptations of mediaeval epics or romances.

Hiawatha, often termed "the Indian Edda," is written in the metre of
the old Finnish Kalevala, and contains the essence of many Indian
legends, together with charming descriptions of the woods, the waters,
and their furry, feathered, and finny denizens. Every one has followed
entranced the career of Hiawatha, from birth to childhood and boyhood,
watched with awe his painful initiation to manhood and with tender
sympathy his idyllic wooing of Minnehaha and their characteristic
wedding festivities. Innumerable youthful hearts have swelled at his
anguish during the Famine, and countless tears have silently dropped
at the death of the sweet little Indian squaw. After connecting this
Indian legend with the coming of the White Man from the East, the
poet, knowing the Red man had to withdraw before the new-comer
skilfully made use of a sun-myth, and allowed us to witness Hiawatha's
departure, full of allegorical significance:

Thus departed Hiawatha,
Hiawatha the Beloved,
In the glory of the sunset,
In the purple mists of evening,
To the regions of the home-wind,
Of the Northwest-wind Keewaydin,
To the Islands of the Blessed,
To the kingdom of Ponemah,
To the land of the Hereafter!

The Courtship of Miles Standish brings us to the time of the Pilgrim's
settlement in the New World and has inspired many painters.

The next poem, which some authorities consider Longfellow's
masterpiece, is connected with another historical event, of a later
date, the conquest of Acadia by the English. It is a matter of history
that in