Evangeline and Gabriel

...and even the Edgeware Road on Salisbury Plain, in England...

...Thus he made very rapid progress, so that on February 27, 1847, he was able to write the closing lines of the poem...

...The shock of the discovery, in mingled joy and pain, overcame her, and she soon followed him to the grave...

...but did not go to Maryland or Louisiana or Philadelphia...

...The story of the betrothal and expected wedding, and of the separation of the couple by the British decree of exile, is true...

...He had never visited Louisiana or the Mississippi River...

...Thus she spent her life until at last, when she was grown old, she found him, in some New England town, still faithful to her, but on his death-bed...

...But the girl did not wander all over New England, and go to Louisiana, and thence back to Philadelphia, in quest of her lover, and at last find him, faithful to her but dying, in the latter city, accepting her fate with a pious "Father, I thank Thee...

...But Hawthorne was not inclined toward such use of it, being more intent upon the psychology of New England Puritanism than upon the sentiment and romance of the French in Acadia or elsewhere...

...It was first brought to literary notice by the Reverend H. L. Conoly, a Massachusetts clergyman...

...whereupon she lost her mind and died, the victim of his inconstancy...

...He also consulted at the Harvard library Watson's Annals of Philadelphia and the Historical Collections of Pennsylvania, with similarly fortunate results...

...For a time he was in doubt concerning its title...

...Martinville, Louisiana, over the grave of Emmeline Labiche, who is said to have been the original of Longfellow's Evangeline, but whose story is radically different, in its most essential respects, from that related in the Tale of Acadie...

...Conoly had heard, does not appear...

...The Knights of Columbus, we are told, will presently unveil a monument, at St...

...Whether any one of them was the actual name of the heroine, as related in the story which Mr...

...It will be seen that as he heard it some of its technical details were radically different from his presentation of it, though the spirit of it was identical with that of his poem...

...though it has been said that the name thus given was Gabrielle...

...If you really don't want it, though," he said, "let me have it for a poem...

...For happily we know, beyond dispute, whence and how the story came to him, and in what essential form, and the circumstances of his adoption of it as the theme of his poem...

...Instead, she first went to Maryland, and thence to Louisiana, where she found him, alive and well but faithless, being engaged to another girl...

...That was in the fall of 1845...

...The poet, with his essentially cosmopolitan spirit, was immediately fascinated by it, and expressed surprise at Hawthorne's having declined to utilize it...

...He knew of the "Cajans," as the descendants of Acadian exiles were called in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, and therefore extended the itinerary of the "wandering exiles to those regions...

...As for Longfellow himself, he testified that he owed his success to Hawthorne, "for being willing to forego the pleasure of writing a tale which many people would have taken for poetry, that I might write a poem which many people take for prose"—an epigram difficult to improve upon...

...But he decided to extend the scope of its scenes far beyond New England, so as to make it truly national in its appeal...

...As soon as possible, the bride set out to follow him and rejoin him in exile...

...It seems certain, however, that he did not know this later version of the romance...

...It was not until January 8, 1846, that he irrevocably, and most happily, decided upon Evangeline...

...But the appearance of Longfellow's poem called the attention of historians to that important but neglected field, with the result that a number of them devoted themselves to it, notably Parkman in his Montcalm and Wolfe...

...It is the unique distinction of Evangeline that it inspired the writing of history, instead of being inspired by it...

...It was to the effect that a young couple at Grand Pre were about to be married when, on September 5, 1755, the summons came for all the men of the place to assemble at the church and hear a British proclamation...

...But on December 19, 1846, he went to see one of the popular exhibitions of that time...

...He got it from one of his parishioners, a French Canadian, who related it as a piece of truthful folklore among his compatriots in New England, some of whom were descendants of the Acadian exiles...

...Poems and romances are usually inspired by history, when they are not sheer invention...

...Gabrielle, he said, would be a good name for the heroine of a comedy, but for one involved in pathos and tragedy, Evangeline was immeasurably more appropriate...

...It was, in fact, a story exclusively of Acadia and New England...

...He was, however, impressed with the dramatic elements of the tale, and presently arranged to take his friend Conoly to dine with Longfellow, when the story was retold...

...Conoly related it to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, with the suggestion that he might find it a good theme for a romance...

...To have effected that, together with—for a New Englander of Puritan antecedents— his finely appreciative and sympathetic tone toward the Catholic Church and Faith, abundantly justifies Longfellow in whatever poetical license he may have exercised in his elaboration of the Tale of Acadie...

...For years she wandered about New England, vainly seeking traces of him...

...Indeed, had this alleged true version of the story been known to Longfellow, he probably never would have written the poem...

...There is still fresh in memory that of a few years ago concerning the Village Blacksmith and the place in which his shop stood under a spreading chestnut tree, the claimants including: Medford, historic fount of distilled ambrosia...

...for he would have had no mind to commemorate a tale of sordid perfidy and heartbroken despair...

...Down to that time there had been no serious attempt to investigate the history of the Acadians or to write their history in a comprehensive and satisfactory manner...

...From this and from Darby's Geographical Description of Louisiana he got most of his "facts and local coloring," with the result that the portions of his poem relating to those regions have been applauded for their truth to life...

...This was Banvard's panorama, or "moving diorama", as it was called, of the Mississippi River, which he described as "three miles of canvas, and a great deal of merit...

...Uxbridge, in the Chestnut Hill district...

...Among them was the bridegroom...

...But it is obvious that it completely repudiates the intrinsic motive of Longfellow's poem and its crowning and most exquisite incident...

...Other duties interfered with his work on the poem, and for a year he made little progress...

...Also, he had a very vivid memory of a visit which he had made to Philadelphia, where he had strayed into the beautiful secluded grounds of the Pennsylvania Hospital, on Spruce Street, with their lawns and trees and flower-beds...

...and of the triumph of an exquisite and holy faith...

...I do not know, and I have no thought of challenging it...

...It would not have appealed to him, but rather would have repelled him...

...He at first called it Gabrielle...

...Then Evangeline occurred to him, and he spent a day, on December 7, considering and pondering the three...

...With this arrangement Hawthorne was delighted, and almost on the spot Longfellow began to plan Evangeline...

...and who wrote that he regarded it "with more pleasure than it would be decorous to express...

...When they thus assembled, 418 strong, they were placed under arrest, and a few days later they and many more, in all 1,923, were transported into exile in New England and elsewhere...

...and where he had seen a quaint old Catholic cemetery...

...As for Celestine, it savored too much of melodrama...

...If he had used it at all, he would certainly have rejected the latter part of it altogether...

...and he determined to make that the scene of the final act of the drama...

...On November 28 of that year Longfellow began writing the poem...

...It has also been said, on excellent authority, that Longfellow discarded Gabrielle and adopted Evangeline because the latter was more in keeping with the character and temperament of his heroine as he intended to portray her...

...He did not discard Gabrielle altogether, however, but changed its gender and bestowed the name upon the exiled bridegroom...

...But now comes something far more complicated and with a far stronger appeal to human sympathy...

...excepting that the two were not Evangeline Bellefontaine and Gabriel Lajeunesse, but Emmeline Labiche and Louis Arcenaux...

...It has recently been stated, on the authority of "the grandson of the foster mother" of the hapless heroine of Grand Pre, that while the first part of the poem is substantially correct, save for the names of the chief characters, the last part is all wrong...

...It was published on October 30 of that year, and was received by nobody with greater interest and gratification than by Hawthorne, who had suggested his writing it and had brought the story to his attention...

...This he presently changed to Celestine...

...Brattle Street, in Cambridge...

...Upon hearing this story, Mr...

...This may be the true story...