BEVIEWS — HIAWATHA. 49 



century, and all would have admired. But as it is, American critics 

 seem to vie with one another in casting contempt and ridicule on a 

 poem, which in a fine flow of simple, musical verse, artless and yet mo3t 

 artful, embodies the myth of the New World's heroic age. True, it has 

 not anywhere the deep earnest meaning to be found even in Tennyson's 

 quaint " Medley." But from its absence from this poem, it would be 

 unjust to assume that the poet is therefore incapable of such. Suffi- 

 cient is it that much of the profoundly suggestive thought of the " In 

 Memoriam" would be as much out of keeping with this tenderly simple 

 Indian epos, a^ the scholastic theses of mediaeval doctors, if transferred 

 from the school of Salerno of " The Golden Legend," to the Indian 

 council lodge. Nevertheless ' ; Hiawatha" has its inner meanings too, 

 finely suggestive to the sympathetic mind; and appealing, not unsuc- 

 cessfully, in its simple utterances, to those : 



"Whose hearts are fresh and simple, 



Who have faith in God and Nature, 



Who believe that in all ages 



Every human heart is human; 



That in even savage bosoms 



There are longings, yearnings, strivings 



For the good they comprehend not, 



That the feeble hands and helpless, 



Groping blindly in the darkness, 



Touch God's right hand in that darkness, 



And are lifted up and strengthened." 



The monotonous cadence of the verse has been imitated by satiric 

 critics, who have found no difficulty in turning it into burlesque and 

 vulgar parody; while others, seeking a new point of attack, assail its 

 originality, and find that the measureof the Indian ''Hiawatha" breathes 

 not of the forests of the wild West, but is stolen, in every note, from 

 the old songs of Europe's Northmen. An amusing confusion in some of 

 the charges thus advanced, betrays the ignorance of their originators 

 of the essential difference in race and language between the Ugrian 

 Fin and the true Scandinavian Norseman. The evidence, moreover, 

 adduced, and complacently accepted, in proof of the poetic theft, is, 

 oddly enough, in the form of ex post facto English translations. One 

 Philadelphia critic, indeed, presents his extract from the old Finnish 

 epic of " Kalewala," as confessedly "done into English from the 

 German translation" of Anton Schiefner. Fancy a couplet of Pope 

 produced in evidence of a theft from old Homer! Yet here the extra- 

 vagance is even more glaring, for it is the translation of a translation 

 in which we are to recognise the original. 



Longfellow's familiarity with both the ancient and modern languages 



D 



