Page:Poet Lore, volume 31, 1920.djvu/589

Rh of well-shampooed auburn hair; trousers of skin stained azure and carmine; and stylish shoes covered with red and sulphur-colored beads. Not that Hiawatha is not sometimes impressive in conflict. In proper shadow and perspective, the Peabody warriors are very impressive indeed. I found myself alone with them one still, rainy twilight, and was quite glad to escape through the doorway into the more soothing atmosphere of Aztec tombs and altars and totem poles. And Longfellow knows how to manage shadow and perspective. So it is that the immaculate Hiawatha fighting with his father among the mountains, is both moving and effective. And it is to Longfellow's credit that, as a rule, his hero, in spite of his too-sophisticated quality, never poses and seldom seems a lay-figure. He is simply too little torn by the brambles and briars, too little drenched by cold and heat, too little tarnished in his bronzy lustre by the rains and snows and storms. All heroic suggestion of kinship to the Thunder-god has vanished more entirely from this trim, immaculate figure than from any other of the twin-brethren.

This same combination of shrunken fiber and heightened colorfulness can be found in the Great Sturgeon who, being an aquatic warrior of mythical origin and lustrous appearance, forms a delightful animal-analog to Hiawatha. The protoype of this charming sea-creature is a mighty monster that swam into myth, and ultimately into our poem, out of the serious, weltering fancy of the folk-mind as it brooded on the mighty phenomenon of the vanishing of light into darkness, whether the apparent daily drowning of the sun in the western ocean or its sudden eclipse in full career across the sky. Among peoples scattered over all the earth this obscuring blackness has been imaged as a huge dragon swallowing sun and moon, which fearless heroes have ultimately recovered. Later legend has rationalized these clashing jaws into clashing rocks through which Jason and his heroes sailed into the Otherworld ocean to bring hence the Golden Fleece (obvious solar symbol); or they change, these jaws, into the sides of a cave in a copper mountain into which Wainamoinen and Illmarinen, the Finnish argonauts, pass in search of the brilliant many-colored sampo, fertility-grinder for the valley of Pohyola. Besides having its jaws turned into clashing rocks or cavern-sides or split trees, the swallowing dragon is often metamorphosed completely into a picturesque variety of creatures,—horned serpents, whales, pikes, or sturgeons. These creatures, as a rule have a distinctly monstrous, uncanny quality, like the supernatural nickers that fill the