SOURCE: “Evangeline: Introductory Note,” in Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha, The Courtship of Miles Standish, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1886, pp. 7-18.

In the following essay, the author discusses the impetus for Longfellow's poem Evangeline, examines passages from his diary relating to its composition, and briefly recounts the historical inquiry into actual Acadian events that followed the poem's publication.

In Hawthorne's American Note-Books is the following passage:—

“H. L. C. heard from a French Canadian a story of a young couple in Acadie. On their marriage-day all the men of the Province were summoned to assemble in the church to hear a proclamation. When assembled, they were all seized and shipped off to be distributed through New England,—among them the new bridegroom. His bride set off in search of him—wandered about New England all her life-time, and at last when she was old...