my long lost cousin

It was an amusing day in many respects (some of the amusement was of the slapstick failure variety). But the funniest thing was renewing correspondence with my distant cousin in North Carolina (never met him, he just found me via this blog) and then clicking a few links and discovering my other, unsuspected distant cousin:

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

Unforunately, I’m already on record as enjoying Poe’s attacks on Longfellow, and it’s hard to retract it now.

This may actually be a good time to re-cite one of my favorite parodies. Here is the opening to Longfellow’s “Hiawatha”…

“Should you ask me,
whence these stories?
Whence these legends and traditions,
With the odors of the forest
With the dew and damp of meadows,
With the curling smoke of wigwams,
With the rushing of great rivers,
With their frequent repetitions,
And their wild reverberations
As of thunder in the mountains?”

And here is the opening to Lewis Carroll’s brilliant “Hiawatha’s Photographing”:

“From his shoulder Hiawatha
Took the camera of rosewood,
Made of sliding, folding rosewood;
Neatly put it all together.
In its case it lay compactly,
Folded into nearly nothing;
But he opened out the hinges,
Pushed and pulled the joints and hinges,
Till it looked all squares and oblongs,
Like a complicated figure
In the Second Book of Euclid.”