The Song of Hiawatha 1950). American landscape painters referred to the poem to add an epic dimension to their patriotic celebration of the wonders of the national landscape. Albert Bierstadt presented his sunset piece, "The Departure of Hiawatha," to Longfellow in 1868 when the poet was in England to receive an honorary degree at the University of Cambridge. Other examples include Thomas Moran's "Fiercely the Red Sun Descending, Burned His Way along the Heavens" (1875), held by the North Carolina Museum of Art, and the panoramic waterfalls of "Hiawatha and Minnehaha on their Honeymoon" (1885) by Jerome Thompson (1814 – 1886). Thomas Eakins made
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is depicted as bedtime for a cranky child. Many of the metaphors that he used in his poetry came from legends, mythology, and literature. He was inspired, for example, by Norse mythology for "The Skeleton in Armor" and by Finnish legends for "The Song of Hiawatha". Longfellow rarely wrote on current subjects and seemed detached from contemporary American concerns. Even so, he called for the development of high quality American literature, as did many others during this period. In "Kavanagh", a character says: We want a national literature commensurate with our mountains and rivers ... We want a national epic