SOURCE: “F. L. von Stolberg's ‘Der Harz' as a Source in the Prologue of Evangeline,” in ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Vol. 7, No. 3, July, 1994, pp. 146-49.

In the following essay, Bohm points out the implications of Longfellow's use of von Stolberg's poem ‘Der Harz’ in Evangeline.

Shifts in the canon relegate to obscurity writers who were once prominent. Friedrich Leopold von Stolberg (1750-1819) is known today only to specialists of eighteenth-century German literary history, primarily for his participation in the “Storm and Stress” movement (Sturm und Drang), as an acquaintance of Goethe's, and for his intense, mystical religiosity in later life (Behrens, Schumann). Enough of his fame endured briefly for him to be memorialized, together with his brother Christian, also a writer, in an expansive edition of collected works in twenty volumes that appeared in 1827.

The date is of significance, for in 1826 Longfellow had gone to...