Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in 1807 in Portland, Maine, and he became a professor of modern languages at Harvard. His most famous narrative poems include The Song of Hiawatha, Paul Reveres Ride, "The Village Blacksmith," "The Wreck of the Hesperus." From his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, Longfellow got a brief outline of a story from which he composed one of his most favorite poems, 'Evangeline'. The original story had Evangeline wandering about New England in search of her bridegroom. One of the first poets to take the landscape and stories of North America as his subjects, Longfellow b...