A few days after, he wrote from Gottingen to his father, ‘I shall never again be in Europe.’ We thus see his mind at work on American themes in Germany, as later on German themes in America, unconsciously predicting that mingling of the two influences which gave him his fame. His earlier books gave to studious Americans, as I can well recall, their first imaginative glimpses of Europe, while the poet's homeward-looking thoughts from Europe had shown the instinct which was to identify his later fame with purely American themes. It is to be noticed that whatever was artificial and foreign in Longfellow's work appeared before he went to Europe; and was the same sort of thing which appeared in all boyish American work at that period. It was then that in describing the Indian hunter he made the dance go round by the greenwood tree. He did not lay this aside at once after his return from Europe, and Margaret Fuller said of him, ‘He borrows incessantly and mixes what he borrows.’ Criticising the very prelude to ‘Voices of the Night,’ she pointed out the phrases ‘pentecost’ and ‘bishop's-caps’ as indications that he was not merely ‘musing ’[52]
10. Reception of Lafayette in a country village. 13. Down East: the missionary of Acadie.Life, i. 165.
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