iels (Arvin P.100-101).Evangeline is nothing if not persistent. It apparently never occurred to the Victorian Longfellow that anyone would question the virtue of a maiden who would voyage for years unchaperoned with the rough men of the frontier and even spend a summer and autumn as the only women in a mission full of men (Williams P.154). It is what imparts to Evagneline its particular Longfellow character of delicate and rather teminine pathos, and deprives it of the true heroic strain. But pathos of this sort is a genuine poetic effect, and it is felt and expressed so purely, so appropriately, here as to escape the charge of sentimentality (Arvin P.101-102). The Song of Hiawatha is one of the few great long poems by Longfellow. Longfellow, in the eyes of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (1793 – 1864), ethnologist, explorer, and Indian Agent, who had married a half – Ojibway woman, and who would give credit to Longfellow with having, for the time, portrayed the Indian correctly in the literature. Longfellow combined the mythical with the historical and undercut the heroic stature of his characters by presenting them as “child – like and immature,” not universally human. Sometimes he presented nature as in different to human wants and sometimes as sympathetic (Wagenknecht p. 102 and 96).Hiawatha is a long and many – sided poem, in which readers mat be trusted to fin their own tastes and interests, but one can hardly believe that many would fail to respond to the famous passages from “Hiawath’a childhood” in canto 3 (Wagenknecht p. 99). Hiawatha is not born by immaculate conception nor does he spring full-grown from the brow of a god, but he does have a supernatural origin. The “beautiful Nokomis,” who is “a wife, but not a mother,” through the act of a jealous rival falls from the moon to a beautiful meadow on earth, where she gives birth to a winsome daughter, Wenonah...
