EVANGELINE. a Tale of Acadie' is based upon a true story which traveled from Canada to New England by word of mouth, reached Hawthorne, who did not care to use it for a romance, and was by him turned over to Longfellow, who published his poem in 1847. It instantly won the widest public, and has ever since remained among the most popular narrative poems in the English language. Hawthorne's disinclination to use the incident was probably due to the fact that he did not find it deeply tragic: the fate of the innocent lovers who are separated by a purely external force but who remain faithful till death is hardly more than pathetic. The tenderness, however, with which Longfellow handled the pathos of the theme quite con ceivably appealed to a larger variety of read ers than a stern tragic handling, such as Haw thorne's might have been. In form the poem follows the example set by J. H. Voss's 'Luise (1795) and the greater and Doro thea' (1798) of Goethe, both of which had attempted to treat modern sentiments and man ners with Homeric simplicity. But
line' owes nothing essential to its predecessors. The hexameters in which the story is told, while not so close to classical hexameters as those of A. H. Clough's