are the dark providences of God; luminous, though not to us; and even
to ourselves in another position." "Walk on the bridge, both ends of
which are lost in the fog, like human life midway between two
eternities; beginning and ending in mist." In Hawthorne an allegoric
moaning is usually something deeper and subtler than this, and seldom
so openly expressed. Many of Longfellow's poems--the _Beleaguered
City_, for example--may be definitely divided into two parts; in the
first, a story is told or a natural phenomenon described; in the
second, the spiritual application of the parable is formally set forth.
This method became with him almost a trick of style, and his readers
learn to look for the _hoec fabula docet_ at the end as a matter of
course. As for the prevailing optimism in Longfellow's view of
life--of which the above passage is an instance--it seems to be in him
an affair of temperament, and not, as in Emerson, the result of
philosophic insight. Perhaps, however, in the last analysis optimism
and pessimism are subjective--the expression of temperament or
individual experience, since the facts of life are the same, whether
seen through Schopenhauer's eyes or through Emerson's. If there is any
particular in which Longfellow's inspiration came to him at first hand
and not through books, it is in respect to the aspects of the sea. On
this theme no American poet has written more beautifully and with a
keener sympathy than the author of _The Wreck of the Hesperus_ and of
_Seaweed_.

In 1847 was published the long poem of _Evangeline_. The story of the
Acadian peasant girl, who was separated from her lover in the
dispersion of her people by the English troops, and after weary
wanderings and a life-long search, found him at last, an old man dying
in a Philadelphia hospital, was told to Longfellow by the Rev. H. L.
Conolly, who had previously suggested it to Hawthorne as a subject for