"Sanborn brought me your good gift of Hiawatha," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) on 25 November 1855 to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He had not been able to finish it before yesterday, he admitted, but then he knew that a book by Longfellow one could dip into whenever one wanted. No need to rush the reading experience: "I have always one foremost satisfaction in reading your books that I am safe—I am in variously skilful hands but first of all they are safe hands." Too safe, perhaps? Emerson claimed he had enjoyed the book his friend Franklin Sanborn had so kindly delivered to him. He found it, as he said redundantly, "very wholesome, sweet & wholesome as maize very proper & pertinent to us to read." However, what bothered him about Longfellow's American Indian poem, was, well, the Indian part of it: "The dangers of the Indians are, that they are really savage, have poor small sterile heads,—no thoughts, & you...