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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1906 edition. Excerpt: ...then, was a lyrist of the German romantic school. Like Uhland he felt rather than saw. Hawthorne could not use the material for 'Evangeline, ' it was too vague and dispersive to grip his imagination. To Longfellow it was simply pathos; he could fell it and that was enough. He never visited Acadia, or the Mississippi, or the Fall of Minnehaha, --there was no need of it. Holderlin had never visited Greece before he wrote his 'Hyperion' with chapter after chapter of description. To have made the visit might have spoiled the picture. Realism, truth to actual externals, even to the historical facts in the case amounted to little in Longfellow's scheme. It was the atmosphere and the feeling that counted. He cared only to call up the marchenwelt with the golden mist over it, with its delicious sadness, and its pathetic human figure dimly seen, and the result is a book that has been wept over by two generations of school-girls. The heroine Evangeline, is a mere abstraction impossible to visualize. Heine declared that 'the women in Uhland's poems are only beautiful shadows, embodied moonshine.' 'French romanticism' says Brandes, 'produces clearly defined figures; the ideal of German romanticism is not a figure but a melody, not definite form but indefinite aspiration.' Evangeline is a feminine Heinrich von Ofterdingen, seeking the world over for the blue flower, and losing it in the end just when it seemed in her grasp. And it is so of 'Hiawatha.' It is romantic through and through, unreal even to ghostliness, touching the actual world only here and there. Its atmosphere and its melody are everything, --moonlight, starlight, romantic love, the days that are forgotten, and over all sentiment and pathos. The Indians are in reality monks and mediaeval knights...