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
The Song of Hiawatha Longfellow, who approved the work before its premiere in 1859, but despite early success it was soon forgotten. An equally ambitious project was the 5-part instrumental symphony by Ellsworth Phelps in 1878. The poem also influenced two composers of European origin who spent a few years in the USA but did not choose to settle there. The first of these was Frederick Delius, who completed his tone poem "Hiawatha" in 1888 and inscribed on the title page the passage beginning “Ye who love the haunts of Nature” from near the start of the poem. The work was not performed at