EEYIEWS — HIAWATHA. 51 



Some contended with their arrows, 

 Some contended with their lances, 

 Some contended in the races, 

 Some contended in the leaping, 

 Some contended in the wrestling, 

 And in games of emulation, &c. 



Alliteration is the earliest form of rhyme, and is characteristic of 

 all the old poetry of northern Europe. We find it in full use, alongside 

 of Latin in rhyming leonines, in the "Piers Ploughman," temp. 

 Edward III., the immediate precursor of the regular rhyming heroics 

 of Chaucer. Its revival in the, so called, rhymeless octosyllabics of 

 "Hiawatha" was too delicate a chord for the dull ears of critics, open 

 only, like those of their American Mocking-bird, to stolen sounds; 

 yet in the following, the alliteration, though irregular and intermittent, 

 is as musical as any rhyme: — 



"Thus continued Hiawatha: 

 That this peace may last forever, 

 And our hands be clasped more closely, 

 And our hearts be more united, 

 Give me as my wife this maiden, 

 Minnehaha, Laughing Water, 

 Loveliest of Dacotah women. 

 * * * * 



And the lovely Laughing Water 

 Seemed more lovely, as she stood there, 

 Neither willing nor reluctant, 

 As she went to Hiawatha, 

 Softly took the seat beside him, 

 While she said and blushed to say it : 

 I will follow you my husband! 



This was Hiawatha's wooing ; 

 Thus it was he won the daughter 

 Of the ancient Arrow-maker, 

 In the land of the Dacotahs ! " 



The verse to our ear is charming. The models assumed to have 

 suggested its form and measure, were free to all poets, just as nature 

 is free to them, and here is the one poet who has turned them to 

 account in a song of the forest echoes. Its alliterative monotone is 

 unmistakeably suggestive of the child-like simplicity with which the 

 unsophisticated Indian iinprovisatore mav be conceived to well forth 

 his rythmic tale to willing ears. Yet this monotone is most skilfully 

 used. It is like the music of a Paganinni, bringing melody from one 

 string, such as meaner artists expend in vain all the appliances of 

 their art and instruments to equal. A singularly pleasing combina- 



