"This is the Forest Primeval" from Evangeline

By Little Paris Fine Arts

This illustration is Page 147 from 1879 book “The Poetical Works of Longfellow”. William Hamilton Gibson (1850– 1896) the American artist who drew the forest image was also known as an author and naturalist, and his woodblock engraver was American Jonathan Scott Hartley (1845 – 1912), who was best known as a sculptor. Ludvig Sandöe Ipsen (1840 – 1920) was the Danish- American artist who scripted the page header “Evangeline” and Russell & Richardson was his engraver. The image was scanned from an original first edition copy of the book. In Oliver Wendall Holmes, Sr.'s tribute to Longfellow compared the familiarity of the first line of the poem Evangeline - “This is the forest primeval” – to the great Greek classic Homer’s “The Iliad” and the Roman Classic Virgil’s “The Aeneid”. Holmes was one of the four so honored and called “The Fireside Poets” – along with Longfellow – and was the father of United States Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes, Jr.