SOURCE: “Longfellow,” in Three Americans and Three Englishmen: Lectures Read before the Students of Trinity College, Hartford, Thomas Whittaker, 1886, pp. 213-45.

In the following excerpt, Johnson calls Hiawatha Longfellow's greatest claim to fame, citing the difficulty of the poet's achievement in portraying so well the mythos of a culture with which he was largely unfamiliar.

Longfellow's best claim to literary power rests, I think, on Hiawatha. This poem lent itself easily to parody,—in fact was a direct invitation to ridicule of a cheap kind,—but I think it a poem of a very high order. I have time to call your attention to but one or two points of its excellence.

In the first place, we must notice the great intrinsic difficulty of the task. It was an attempt to realize in verse a mythical theory of the universe, as it arose in the mind of a...