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outline of it will be found in ‘The American Note-Books’ of Hawthorne, who disappointed Father Conolly by not using it himself.
It was finished on Longfellow's fortieth birthday.
It was a striking illustration of the wide popularity of ‘Evangeline,’ that even the proper names introduced under guidance of his rhythmical ear spread to other countries and were taken up and preserved as treasures in themselves.
Sumner writes from England to Longfellow that the Hon. Mrs. Norton, herself well known in literature, had read ‘Evangeline,’ not once only, but twenty times, and the scene on Lake Atchafalaya, where the two lovers pass each other unknowingly, so impressed her that she had a seal cut with the name upon it. Not long after this, Leopold, King of the Belgiums, repeated the same word to her and said that it was so suggestive of scenes in human life that he was about to have it cut on a seal, when she astonished him by showing him hers.
The best review of ‘Evangeline’ ever written was probably the analysis made of it by that accomplished French traveller of half a century ago, Professor Philarete Chasles of the College Le France, in his ‘Etudes sur la Litterature et les Moeurs des Anglo-Americains du XIX. Siecle,’ published in 1851.
It is interesting to read it, and to recognize anew what has often
Boston and New York, Hougton, Mifflin and company, 1902.
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