The regret for his loss was universal; for no modern man was ever better loved or better deserved to be loved. How utterly free he was from jealousy or revengefulness! The first was The Beautiful Indians 1946—7. New York: Hurst and Company. Retrieved February 22, 2012. In an article published in the New York Herald on December 15, 1893, he said that the second movement of his work was a "sketch or study for a later work, either a Hiawatha" with which he was familiar in Czech translation , and that the third movement scherzo was "suggested by the scene at the feast in Hiawatha where the Indians dance".
In 1856 there appeared a 94-page parody, The Song of Milkanwatha: Translated from the Original Feejee. Having then distinctly stated that I challenge no attention in the following little poem to its merely verbal jingle, I must beg the candid reader to confine his criticism to its treatment of the subject. At present few persons beyond their teens would care to read it through, so unnatural and stilted is its language, so thin its material and so consciously mediated its sentiment. Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts, 2004, p. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.
Hiawatha's Wedding Feast: A Cantata for Tenor Solo, Chorus and Orchestra. In 1851 appeared The Golden Legend, a long lyric drama based upon Hartmann von Aue's beautiful story of self-sacrifice, Der arme Heinrich. The Indian legend of Hiawatha. His acts of charity, though performed in secret, were neither few nor small. In October 1881 he wrote a touching sonnet on the death of President Garfield, and in January 1882, when the hand of death was already upon him, his poem, Hermes Trismegistus, in which he gives utterance, in language as rich as that of the early gods, to that strange feeling of awe without fear, and hope without form, with which every man of spotless life and upright intellect withdraws from the phenomena of time to the realities of eternity. For example, the miin plural: miinan for the berries and miinagaawanzh plural: miinagaawanzhiig for the bush upon which the berries grow.
He had no sympathy with the tendency represented by George Eliot, or with any attempt to be analytic in art. If we look in Longfellow's poetry for originality of thought, profound psychological analysis or new insights into nature, we shall be disappointed. In person, Longfellow was rather below middle height, broad shouldered and well built. Bringing his imagination back to America, he next applied himself to the elaboration of an Indian legend. His aim was to impress upon her familiar facts and aspects the seal of his own gracious nature. The Savages of America: The Study of the Indian and the Idea of Civilization. The effect of Longfellow's visit was twofold.
For by the time Longfellow wrote Hiawatha, the Indian as a direct opponent of civilization was dead, yet was still heavy on American consciences. The Song of Hiawatha, Anonymous review. Longfellow uses Meenah'ga, which appears to be a partial form for the bush, but he uses the word to mean the berry. The poem also influenced two composers of European origin who spent a few years in the USA but did not choose to settle there. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. He disliked the psychological school of art, believing it to be essentially morbid and unhealthy.
Retrieved February 23, 2012. The earliest pieces of sculpture were by The arrow-maker and his daughter, later called The Wooing of Hiawatha, was modelled in 1866 and carved in 1872. Longfellow could never be brought to find fault with anybody or anything. In 1873 he was elected a member of the Russian Academy of Science, and in 1877 of the Spanish Academy. This fact, even more than his merits as an artist, serves to account for his immense popularity. Retrieved 3 June 2022. In 1868-1869 the poet visited Europe, and was everywhere received with the greatest honour.
At the age of fifteen Longfellow entered Bowdoin College at Brunswick, a town situated near the romantic falls of the Androscoggin River, about 25 m. This aim determined at once his choice of subjects and his mode of treating them. Retrieved 2 Dec 2020. His sojourn in Europe fell exactly in the time when, in England, the reaction against the sentimental atheism of Shelley, the pagan sensitivity of Keats, and the sublime, Satanic outcastness of Byron was at its height; when, in the Catholic countries, the negative exaggerations of the French Revolution were inducing a counter current of positive faith, which threw men into the arms of a half-sentimental, half-aesthetic medievalism; and when, in Germany, the aristocratic paganism of Goethe was being swept aside by that tide of dutiful, romantic patriotism which flooded the country, as soon as it began to feel that it still existed after being run over by Napoleon's war-chariot. Stedman's criticism in Poets of America; and an article in W.
Toward the end of the 19th century, artists deliberately emphasized the epic qualities of the poem, as in Death of Minnehaha 1885. It is the life of a modest, deep-hearted gentleman, whose highest ambition was to be a perfect man, and, through sympathy and love, to help others be the same. Illustrated by Armstrong Sperry. The Song of Hiawatha. Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life.