Nathaniel Hawthorne (how pleasant it always is to come upon these two great American men of letters together!) one day dined at Craigie House, and brought with him a clergyman. The clergyman happened to remark that he had been vainly endeavouring to interest Hawthorne in a subject that he himself thought would do admirably for a story. He then related the history of a young Acadian girl who had been turned away with her people in that dire "'55," thereafter became separated from her lover, wandered for many years in search of him, and finally found him in a hospital, dying. And Hawthorne saw nothing in this! That Longfellow at once took to the lovely legend is not so striking a fact as that Hawthorne, true to the strange taste of his "miasmatic conscience," felt the want of a sin to study in the story, and so would have none of it. "Let me have it for a poem, then," said Longfellow, and he had the leave at once. He raked up historical material from Haliburton's "Nova Scotia" and other books, and soon was steadily building up that idyl that is his true Golden Legend. After he had wormed his way through the chronicles of that doomed land, he wrote to Hawthorne and suggested that the romancer should take up as a theme the early history and later wanderings of these Acadians; but with Acadia Hawthorne would have nothing to do on any terms. Beyond consulting records, Longfellow put together the materials of "Evangeline" entirely "out of his head;" that is to say, he did not think it necessary to visit Acadia and pick up local colour. When a boy, he had rambled about the old Wadsworth home at Hiram, climbing often to a balcony on the roof, and thence looking over great stretches of wood and hill-pinewoods, and hills down which log-laden cataracts tumbled resoundingly. From recollections of such a scene, it was comparatively easy for him to imagine "the forest primeval;" and these same recollections of early days must have furnished many portraits of farming folk not unlike the Acadians, save that they were not so sunny and meek of temper, coming of stern Protestant stock, instead of from a light-hearted people whose very superstitions were all tinged with poetry. The selection of hexameter lines for " Evangeline was of course a bold experiment—one that was being tried almost in the same year by Arthur Clough, whose "Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich: a Long-Vacation Pastoral," is scholarly and brilliant in metre and phraseology. Although Clough's lines much more resemble classic models than do Longfellow's, they cannot pretend to their sustained charm; we do not read the "Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich" for its music; and here Bowdoin completely out-distanced Oxford. The great precedent Longfellow had in his mind when he resolved to try hexameters was Goethe's "Hermann and Dorothea ;" and this was enough to justify his attempt to compromise between the exactions of classic scansion and the rhythmical licence of English metres. His success was By employing a as wonderful as the attempt was bold. style of metre that carries the ear back to times in the world's history when grand simplicities were sung, the poet naturally was able to enhance the epic qualities of his work, and remove Acadia and its people to the neces 66 6 sary extent from touch with a part of the world in which human history's developments were raw and unattractive. And once persuaded that it was possible to avoid "sing-song" monotony in English hexameters, Longfellow was right in thinking that the rhythm he chose was well suited for the telling of a long story into which nothing abruptly dramatic was to enter, but which was to derive its chief interest from broadly-worked pictures. Probably no other poem gave Longfellow so much trouble in writing. He has said almost as much: Evangeline' is so easy for you to read, because it was so hard for me to write." The necessity for varying the place of the cæsura, and the dearth of spondees in our language, were the two chief metrical difficulties with which he had to contend. Occasionally the reader unacquainted with conventionalities of classic prosody will find that where he is inclined at first to read a dactyl, the accent must rest on the first syllable, which with the next makes a spondee. This hint will be found specially serviceable regarding the initial feet of lines like the following, which must be read as commencing with the accent not on the third syllable, but on the first "On the morrow to meet in the church, when his Majesty's mandate," &c. 66 Bring these ships to our shores. Perhaps the harvest in "And anon with his wooden shoes beat time to the music," &c. The following line has been pointed out as a very perfect hexameter "Chanting the Hundredth Psalm-that grand old Puritan anthem.” And this is probably the worst line-a hopeless one "Children's children sat on his knee, and' heard' his' great' watch' tick'." In this instance the onomatopoetic sympathy with which Longfellow describes the children listening to the regular ticking of a watch has made him forget the rules of metre absolutely. Much nonsense has been talked about the general principle of English hexameters, by critics whose ears. are attuned to the quantitative music of Greek and Latin verse. It is true that where, as in Charles Kingsley's "Andromeda," the poet clearly raises comparison with classic forerunners by reason of his subject and his method of treating that subject, it must be unpleasant for the ears of some scholars to have the looser English rhythms imposed upon them instead of the ancient spondees and dactyls arranged in a manner almost contrapuntal. On the other hand, when Longfellow chooses a subject wholly removed from classic association, why should he not experiment in any measure he pleases, and select, if it suits him, a system of lines in each of which there will be a sufficient number of words to fall by a more or less natural rhythm into six beats, or pulses? Call such lines English hexameters, or call them anything else: they can be written to read musically, —and what more is required? That there are six English feet in each of these lines is as indisputable as that there are five in each line of Pope's "Rape of the Lock." The term "English hexameters," therefore, seems applicable enough; and in using it, a poet need not be thought to imply that he is seeking to translate the hexameters of the Iliad or the Æneid. Mr. Matthew Arnold has somewhere hinted that it might be possible, in translating Homer into English, to carry literary artifice so far as to put together English hexameters capable of scansion by long and short syllables. This idea has even been carried out, but only in brief experiments: it could not be sustained through any lengthy translation that aimed at either literal accuracy or poetic spirit. Longfellow himself cherished through life the project of translating Homer; but in such an undertaking English hexameters, had he chosen them as his vehicle, would have been as false in taste as they were justifiable in the construction of "Evangeline." Yet even in the case of a hexametrical rendering of Homer, the classical scholar only could be offended. To the unlearned reader, the measure of "Evangeline" would probably be as acceptable as the rhymed pentameter of Pope or the blank verse of Cowper. Of course we do not say that any translation in hexameters would prove acceptable; for Herschel's was a failure. The truth is that this measure, within its proper use, should be regarded, not as a bastard classicism, but as a wholly modern invention. Impassioned speech more often breaks into pentameter and hexameter than into any other measure; this is of course a truism. Longfellow himself has pointed to the splendid hexameters that abound in our Bible—“ Husbands, love your wives, and be not bitter against them;" "God is gone up with a shout, the Lord with the sound of a trumpet;" "He setteth an end to darkness, and searcheth out all perfection." Would Mr. Swinburne, simply because these |