Following in the general lead of Emerson, he was a Unitarian, which, in Longfellow’s case, resulted in a Christian “broad church” toleration of all faiths on earth with special leanings in “Evangeline” toward nature worship in the beauty of its descriptive passages, and toward the Roman Catholic Church in the sympathetic portrayal of the priest who guides the poem’s heroine. The breadth of Longfellow’s feelings is important because he had taken a step that led him in the direction of anthropology and the composition of “The Song of Hiawatha.”

No amount of European travel had weakened Longfellow’s early interest in the fate of the North American Indian. His early poem “Burial of the Minnisink” showed how strong that interest was; its inspiration had produced one of the best of his youthful poems, in which the last lines were:

. . . One piercing neigh
Arose, and, on the dead man’s plain,
The rider grasps his steed again.

This is fine and it is in the tradition of an earlier American poem—Philip Freneau’s “The Indian Burying Ground” with the well-remembered lines:

The hunter still the deer pursues,
The hunter and the deer a shade!

It would seem that his travels in Europe had actually intensified Longfellow’s delight in the exotic aspects of the vanishing American Indian. It is even probable that the impressionable young professor Longfellow had learned to look at the Indian with the curiosity-and-wonder-inspired eye of the European. In any case, Longfellow’s image of “The Noble Savage” was not likely to lose its dignity, for preceding it on the trail marked out ahead were the footprints of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. On the evidence of his “The Skeleton in Armor,” Longfellow brilliantly anticipated twentieth-century interests in archeology and anthropology, particularly in their application to folklore and myths. He was less concerned with their realistic historical significance than with their importance in the imaginative-mythological scheme of being. Though in his day, except in France, the word “symbolism” was rarely used, and certainly the conservative Longfellow was not the man to use it, the tendency in his poetry was in the direction of symbolic meaning. His great patriotic poem, “The Building of the Ship,” was a step in that direction; in “The Song of Hiawatha” the actions of its hero, the beau ideal of “The Noble Savage,” are symbolic actions, sustained by the mythology of his people.

Longfellow’s preparation for the writing of “Hiawa tha,” a process that was both subconscious and instinctively deliberate, dated from boyhood to 1854. His published sources were in the works of two pioneer anthropologists, Heckewelder and Schoolcraft. He also cultivated the friendship of an Ojibway chieftain so as to catch the flavor of oral tradition in Indian mythology. The results of Longfellow’s research here, as in the best of his adaptations from European literature, created an effect that held few traces of scholarly procedure—it was that of a thorough-going re-creation. As re-created, “The Song of Hiawatha,” in twenty-two panoramic episodes, is the transfiguration of an Indian brave into a demigod. His progress from birth through the rites of marriage and through various magical trials to deification, his departure into the sunset, symbolizes the rise and decline of his people and his gods. It is just as well that Longfellow made no attempt to give his “Noble Savage” tragic depth and significance. His dramatic experiments in a tragic vein, his New England Tragedies, are failures, their significance lost in a welter of misplaced sentiment, melodramatic incident, and mediocre blank verse. “Hiawatha” is much happier in its resolution. Hiawatha’s goodness is of harmony with nature; he is a child of the Sun and of Indian Summer, and indeed in his good looks and magical powers he has a minor deity resemblance to Apollo. He is what his mythmaking poet and author intended him to be—“my Hiawatha”—the hero of Longfellow’s nature worship, raised to the nth degree, and placed, as if within a shrine, within a poem. Hiawatha’s departure is the apotheosis:

And the evening sun descending
Set the clouds on fire with redness,
Burned the broad sky, like a prairie,
Left upon the level water
One long track and trail of splendor,
Down whose stream, as down a river,
Westward, westward Hiawatha
Sailed into the fiery sunset,
Sailed into the purple vapors,

To the Islands of the Blessed,
To the Kingdom of Ponemah,
To the Land of the Hereafter!

The flaws in the long work are obvious enough. Caught up in the rhythm he adapted for the poem, Longfellow fell victim to echoing redundancies and banal repetitions. It was the price he had to pay for his facility in playing by ear. Parts of “The Song of Hiawatha” are better than the whole: marvelous passages are to be found in the episodes of “The Four Winds,” “Picture-Writing,” “The Ghosts,” and “Hiawatha’s Departure”—certainly, American literature would be far less rich without them. Yet the overall design of the poem should not be as far underrated as it has been; it was more daring in its breaking away from the usual forms of narrative verse than many of its critics have suspected. It was not until T. S. Eliot wrote “The Waste Land” nearly seventy years later that readings in anthropology played so decisive a part in the making of a major poem.