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I am not, however, very sure as to the result. Meanwhile he sat for his portrait by Lawrence, and the subject of the fugitive slave cases brought to the poet's face, as the artist testified, a look of animation and indignation which he was glad to catch and retain. On Commencement Day, July 19, 1854, he wore his academical robes for the last time, and writes of that event,
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The whole crowded church looked ghostly and unreal as a thing in which I had no part. He had already been engaged upon his version of Dante, having taken it up on February 1, 1853,{85} after ten years' interval; and moreover another new literary project had occurred to him
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Tales of the Quoddy Indians, with a description of Sacobezon, their chief. After twenty-five years he wrote in his diary (June 22, 1854),
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I have at length hit upon a plan for a poem on the American Indians which seems to be the right one and the only. It is to weave together their beautiful traditions into a whole. I have hit upon a measure, too, which I think the right one and the only one for the purpose. He had to draw for this delineation not merely upon the Indians seen in books, but on those he had himself observed in Maine, the Sacs and Foxes he had watched on Boston Common, and an Ojibway chief whom he had entertained at his house. As for the poetic measure, a suitable one had just been suggested to him by the Finnish epic of
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Kalevala, which he had been reading; and he had been delighted by its appropriateness to the stage character to be dealt with and the type of legend to be treated.
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Hiawatha was begun on June 25, 1854, and published on November 10 of that year. He enjoyed the work thoroughly, but it evidently seemed to him somewhat tame before he got through, and this tendency to tameness was sometimes a subject of criticism with readers; but its very simplicity made the style attractive to children and gave a charm which it is likely always to retain. With his usual frankness, he stated at the outset that the metre was not original with him, and it was of course a merit in the legends that they were not original. The book received every form of attention; it was admired, laughed at, parodied, set to music, and publicly read, and his fame unquestionably rests far more securely on this and other strictly American poems than on the prolonged labor of the
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Golden Legend. He himself writes that some of the newspapers are
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about
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Hiawatha, and again
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Freiligrath, who translated the poem into German, writes him from London,
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Are you not chuckling over the war which is waging in the 'Athenæum' about the measure from 'Hiawatha'? He had letters of hearty approval from Emerson, Hawthorne, Parsons, and Bayard Taylor; the latter, perhaps, making the best single encomium on the book in writing to its author,
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The whole poem floats in an atmosphere of the American 'Indian summer.'