Longfellow Evangeline This is the Forest Primeval

By Little Paris Fine Arts

This illustration is Page 1 – the beginning of the Prologue - from the 1850 book of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem “Evangeline”. Myles Birket Foster was a famous British artist, also especially known for his watercolors and other paintings. London’s Henry Vizetelly, was perhaps first known for his work with “The Illustrated London News”, formed his own engraver firm in 1800 and carved this print from Foster’s artwork 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 the father of United States Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes, Jr.