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Project Gutenberg’s The White Mr. Longfellow, by William Dean Howells

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Title:  The White Mr. Longfellow
From “Literary Friends And Acquaintances”

Author:  William Dean Howells

Release Date:  October 22, 2004 [EBook #3394]

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WHITE MR. LONGFELLOW ***

Produced by David Widger

LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES—The White Mr. Longfellow

by William Dean Howells

THE WHITE MR. LONGFELLOW

We had expected to stay in Boston only until we could find a house in Old Cambridge.  This was not so simple a matter as it might seem; for the ancient town had not yet quickened its scholarly pace to the modern step.  Indeed, in the spring of 1866 the impulse of expansion was not yet visibly felt anywhere; the enormous material growth that followed the civil war had not yet begun.  In Cambridge the houses to be let were few, and such as there were fell either below our pride or rose above our purse.  I wish I might tell how at last we bought a house; we had no money, but we were rich in friends, who are still alive to shrink from the story of their constant faith in a financial future which we sometimes doubted, and who backed their credulity with their credit.  It is sufficient for the present record, which professes to be strictly literary, to notify the fact that on the first day of May, 1866, we went out to Cambridge and began to live in a house which we owned in fee if not in deed, and which was none the less valuable for being covered with mortgages.  Physically, it was a carpenter’s box, of a sort which is readily imagined by the Anglo-American genius for ugliness, but which it is not so easy to impart a just conception of.  A trim hedge of arbor-vita; tried to hide it from the world in front, and a tall board fence behind; the little lot was well planted (perhaps too well planted) with pears, grapes, and currants, and there was a small open space which I lost no time in digging up for a kitchen-garden.  On one side of us were the open fields; on the other a brief line of neighbor-houses; across the street before us was a grove of stately oaks, which I never could persuade Aldrich had painted leaves on them in the fall.  We were really in a poor suburb of a suburb; but such is the fascination of ownership, even the ownership of a fully mortgaged property, that we calculated the latitude and longitude of the whole earth from the spot we called ours.  In our walks about Cambridge we saw other places where we might have been willing to live; only, we said, they were too far off:  We even prized the architecture of our little box, though we had but so lately lived in a Gothic palace on the Grand Canal in Venice, and were not uncritical of beauty in the possessions of others.  Positive beauty we could not have honestly said we thought our cottage had as a whole, though we might have held out for something of the kind in the brackets of turned wood under its eaves.  But we were richly content with it; and with life in Cambridge, as it began to open itself to us, we were infinitely more than content.  This life, so refined, so intelligent, so gracefully simple, I do not suppose has anywhere else had its parallel.

I.

It was the moment before the old American customs had been changed by European influences among people of easier circumstances; and in Cambridge society kept what was best of its village traditions, and chose to keep them in the full knowledge of different things.  Nearly every one had been abroad; and nearly every one had acquired the taste for olives without losing a relish for native sauces; through the intellectual life there was an entire democracy, and I do not believe that since the capitalistic era began there was ever a community in which money counted for less.  There was little show of what money could buy; I remember but one private carriage (naturally, a publisher’s); and there was not one livery, except a livery in the larger sense kept by the stableman Pike, who made us pay now a quarter and now a half dollar for a seat in his carriages, according as he lost or gathered courage for the charge.  We thought him extortionate, and we mostly walked through snow and mud of amazing depth and thickness.

The reader will imagine how acceptable this circumstance was to a young literary man beginning life with a fully mortgaged house and a salary of untried elasticity.  If there were distinctions made in Cambridge they were not against literature, and we found ourselves in the midst of a charming society, indifferent, apparently, to all questions but those of the higher education which comes so largely by nature.  That is to say, in the Cambridge of that day (and, I dare say, of this) a mind cultivated in some sort was essential, and after that came civil manners, and the willingness and ability to be agreeable and interesting; but the question of riches or poverty did not enter.  Even the question of family, which is of so great concern in New England, was in abeyance.  Perhaps it was taken for granted that every one in Old Cambridge society must be of good family, or he could not be there; perhaps his mere residence tacitly ennobled him; certainly his acceptance was an informal patent of gentility.  To my mind, the structure of society was almost ideal, and until we have a perfectly socialized condition of things I do not believe we shall ever have a more perfect society.  The instincts which governed it were not such as can arise from the sordid competition of interests; they flowed from a devotion to letters, and from a self-sacrifice in material things which I can give no better notion of than by saying that the outlay of the richest college magnate seemed to be graduated to the income of the poorest.

In those days, the men whose names have given splendor to Cambridge were still living there.  I shall forget some of them in the alphabetical enumeration of Louis Agassiz, Francis J. Child, Richard Henry Dana, Jun., John Fiske, Dr. Asa Gray, the family of the Jameses, father and sons, Lowell, Longfellow, Charles Eliot Norton, Dr. John G. Palfrey, James Pierce, Dr. Peabody, Professor Parsons, Professor Sophocles.  The variety of talents and of achievements was indeed so great that Mr. Bret Harte, when fresh from his Pacific slope, justly said, after listening to a partial rehearsal of them, “Why, you couldn’t fire a revolver from your front porch anywhere without bringing down a two-volumer!” Everybody had written a book, or an article, or a poem; or was in the process or expectation of doing it, and doubtless those whose names escape me will have greater difficulty in eluding fame.  These kindly, these gifted folk each came to see us and to make us at home among them; and my home is still among them, on this side and on that side of the line between the living and the dead which invisibly passes through all the streets of the cities of men.

II.

We had the whole summer for the exploration of Cambridge before society returned from the mountains and the sea-shore, and it was not till October that I saw Longfellow.  I heard again, as I heard when I first came to Boston, that he was at Nahant, and though Nahant was no longer so far away, now, as it was then, I did not think of seeking him out even when we went for a day to explore that coast during the summer.  It seems strange that I cannot recall just when and where I saw him, but early after his return to Cambridge I had a message from him asking me to come to a meeting of the Dante Club at Craigie House.

Longfellow was that winter (1866-7) revising his translation of the ‘Paradiso’, and the Dante Club was the circle of Italianate friends and scholars whom he invited to follow him and criticise his work from the original, while he read his version aloud.  Those who were most constantly present were Lowell and Professor Norton, but from time to time others came in, and we seldom sat down at the nine-o’clock supper that followed the reading of the canto in less number than ten or twelve.

The criticism, especially from the accomplished Danteists I have named, was frank and frequent.  I believe they neither of them quite agreed with Longfellow as to the form of version he had chosen, but, waiving that, the question was how perfectly he had done his work upon the given lines:  I myself, with whatever right, great or little, I may have to an opinion, believe thoroughly in Longfellow’s plan.  When I read his version my sense aches for the rhyme which he rejected, but my admiration for his fidelity to Dante otherwise is immeasurable.  I remember with equal admiration the subtle and sympathetic scholarship of his critics, who scrutinized every shade of meaning in a word or phrase that gave them pause, and did not let it pass till all the reasons and facts had been considered.  Sometimes, and even often, Longfellow yielded to their censure, but for the most part, when he was of another mind, he held to his mind, and the passage had to go as he said.  I make a little haste to say that in all the meetings of the Club, during a whole winter of Wednesday evenings, I myself, though I faithfully followed in an Italian Dante with the rest, ventured upon one suggestion only.  This was kindly, even seriously, considered by the poet, and gently rejected.  He could not do anything otherwise than gently, and I was not suffered to feel that I had done a presumptuous thing.  I can see him now, as he looked up from the proof-sheets on the round table before him, and over at me, growing consciously smaller and smaller, like something through a reversed opera-glass.  He had a shaded drop-light in front of him, and in its glow his beautiful and benignly noble head had a dignity peculiar to him.

All the portraits of Longfellow are likenesses more or less bad and good, for there was something as simple in the physiognomy as in the nature of the man.  His head, after he allowed his beard to grow and wore his hair long in the manner of elderly men, was leonine, but mildly leonine, as the old painters conceived the lion of St. Mark.  Once Sophocles, the ex-monk of Mount Athos, so long a Greek professor at Harvard, came in for supper, after the reading was over, and he was leonine too, but of a fierceness that contrasted finely with Longfellow’s mildness.  I remember the poet’s asking him something about the punishment of impaling, in Turkey, and his answering, with an ironical gleam of his fiery eyes, “Unhappily, it is obsolete.”  I dare say he was not so leonine, either, as he looked.

When Longfellow read verse, it was with a hollow, with a mellow resonant murmur, like the note of some deep-throated horn.  His voice was very lulling in quality, and at the Dante Club it used to have early effect with an old scholar who sat in a cavernous armchair at the corner of the fire, and who drowsed audibly in the soft tone and the gentle heat.  The poet had a fat terrier who wished always to be present at the meetings of the Club, and he commonly fell asleep at the same moment with that dear old scholar, so that when they began to make themselves heard in concert, one could not tell which it was that most took our thoughts from the text of the Paradiso.  When the duet opened, Longfellow would look up with an arch recognition of the fact, and then go gravely on to the end of the canto.  At the close he would speak to his friend and lead him out to supper as if he had not seen or heard anything amiss.

III.

In that elect company I was silent, partly because I was conscious of my youthful inadequacy, and partly because I preferred to listen.  But Longfellow always behaved as if I were saying a succession of edifying and delightful things, and from time to time he addressed himself to me, so that I should not feel left out.  He did not talk much himself, and I recall nothing that he said.  But he always spoke both wisely and simply, without the least touch of pose, and with no intention of effect, but with something that I must call quality for want of a better word; so that at a table where Holmes sparkled, and Lowell glowed, and Agassiz beamed, he cast the light of a gentle gaiety, which seemed to dim all these vivider luminaries.  While he spoke you did not miss Fields’s story or Tom Appleton’s wit, or even the gracious amity of Mr. Norton, with his unequalled intuitions.

The supper was very plain:  a cold turkey, which the host carved, or a haunch of venison, or some braces of grouse, or a platter of quails, with a deep bowl of salad, and the sympathetic companionship of those elect vintages which Longfellow loved, and which he chose with the inspiration of affection.  We usually began with oysters, and when some one who was expected did not come promptly, Longfellow invited us to raid his plate, as a just punishment of his delay.  One evening Lowell remarked, with the cayenne poised above his bluepoints, “It’s astonishing how fond these fellows are of pepper.”

The old friend of the cavernous arm-chair was perhaps not wide enough awake to repress an “Ah?” of deep interest in this fact of natural history, and Lowell was provoked to go on.  “Yes, I’ve dropped a red pepper pod into a barrel of them, before now, and then taken them out in a solid mass, clinging to it like a swarm of bees to their queen.”

“Is it possible?” cried the old friend; and then Longfellow intervened to save him from worse, and turned the talk.

I reproach myself that I made no record of the talk, for I find that only a few fragments of it have caught in my memory, and that the sieve which should have kept the gold has let it wash away with the gravel.  I remember once Doctor Holmes’s talking of the physician as the true seer, whose awful gift it was to behold with the fatal second sight of science the shroud gathering to the throat of many a doomed man apparently in perfect health, and happy in the promise of unnumbered days.  The thought may have been suggested by some of the toys of superstition which intellectual people like to play with.

I never could be quite sure at first that Longfellow’s brother-in-law, Appleton, was seriously a spiritualist, even when he disputed the most strenuously with the unbelieving Autocrat.  But he really was in earnest about it, though he relished a joke at the expense of his doctrine, like some clerics when they are in the safe company of other clerics.  He told me once of having recounted to Agassiz the facts of a very remarkable seance, where the souls of the departed outdid themselves in the athletics and acrobatics they seem so fond of over there, throwing large stones across the room, moving pianos, and lifting dinner-tables and setting them a-twirl under the chandelier.  “And now,” he demanded, “what do you say to that?” “Well, Mr. Appleton,” Agassiz answered, to Appleton’s infinite delight, “I say that it did not happen.”

One night they began to speak at the Dante supper of the unhappy man whose crime is a red stain in the Cambridge annals, and one and another recalled their impressions of Professor Webster.  It was possibly with a retroactive sense that they had all felt something uncanny in him, but, apropos of the deep salad-bowl in the centre of the table, Longfellow remembered a supper Webster was at, where he lighted some chemical in such a dish and held his head over it, with a handkerchief noosed about his throat and lifted above it with one hand, while his face, in the pale light, took on the livid ghastliness of that of a man hanged by the neck.

Another night the talk wandered to the visit which an English author (now with God) paid America at the height of a popularity long since toppled to the ground, with many another.  He was in very good humor with our whole continent, and at Longfellow’s table he found the champagne even surprisingly fine.  “But,” he said to his host, who now told the story, “it cawn’t be genuine, you know!”

Many years afterwards this author revisited our shores, and I dined with him at Longfellow’s, where he was anxious to constitute himself a guest during his sojourn in our neighborhood.  Longfellow was equally anxious that he should not do so, and he took a harmless pleasure in out-manoeuvring him.  He seized a chance to speak with me alone, and plotted to deliver him over to me without apparent unkindness, when the latest horse-car should be going in to Boston, and begged me to walk him to Harvard Square and put him aboard.  “Put him aboard, and don’t leave him till the car starts, and then watch that he doesn’t get off.”

These instructions he accompanied with a lifting of the eyebrows, and a pursing of the mouth, in an anxiety not altogether burlesque.  He knew himself the prey of any one who chose to batten on him, and his hospitality was subject to frightful abuse.  Perhaps Mr. Norton has somewhere told how, when he asked if a certain person who had been outstaying his time was not a dreadful bore, Longfellow answered, with angelic patience, “Yes; but then you know I have been bored so often!”

There was one fatal Englishman whom I shared with him during the great part of a season:  a poor soul, not without gifts, but always ready for more, especially if they took the form of meat and drink.  He had brought letters from one of the best English men alive, who withdrew them too late to save his American friends from the sad consequences of welcoming him.  So he established himself impregnably in a Boston club, and came out every day to dine with Longfellow in Cambridge, beginning with his return from Nahant in October and continuing far into December.  That was the year of the great horse-distemper, when the plague disabled the transportation in Boston, and cut off all intercourse between the suburb and the city on the street railways.  “I did think,” Longfellow pathetically lamented, “that when the horse-cars stopped running, I should have a little respite from L., but he walks out.”

In the midst of his own suffering he was willing to advise with me concerning some poems L. had offered to the Atlantic Monthly, and after we had desperately read them together he said, with inspiration, “I think these things are more adapted to music than the magazine,” and this seemed so good a notion that when L. came to know their fate from me, I answered, confidently, “I think they are rather more adapted to music.”  He calmly asked, “Why?” and as this was an exigency which Longfellow had not forecast for me, I was caught in it without hope of escape.  I really do not know what I said, but I know that I did not take the poems, such was my literary conscience in those days; I am afraid I should be weaker now.

IV.

The suppers of the Dante Club were a relaxation from the severity of their toils on criticism, and I will not pretend that their table-talk was of that seriousness which duller wits might have given themselves up to.  The passing stranger, especially if a light or jovial person, was always welcome, and I never knew of the enforcement of the rule I heard of, that if you came in without question on the Club nights, you were a guest; but if you rang or knocked, you could not get in.

Any sort of diversion was hailed, and once Appleton proposed that Longfellow should show us his wine-cellar.  He took up the candle burning on the table for the cigars, and led the way into the basement of the beautiful old Colonial mansion, doubly memorable as Washington’s headquarters while he was in Cambridge, and as the home of Longfellow for so many years.  The taper cast just the right gleams on the darkness, bringing into relief the massive piers of brick, and the solid walls of stone, which gave the cellar the effect of a casemate in some fortress, and leaving the corners and distances to a romantic gloom.  This basement was a work of the days when men built more heavily if not more substantially than now, but I forget, if I ever knew, what date the wine-cellar was of.  It was well stored with precious vintages, aptly cobwebbed and dusty; but I could not find that it had any more charm than the shelves of a library:  it is the inside of bottles and of books that makes its appeal.  The whole place witnessed a bygone state and luxury, which otherwise lingered in a dim legend or two.  Longfellow once spoke of certain old love-letters which dropped down on the basement stairs from some place overhead; and there was the fable or the fact of a subterranean passage under the street from Craigie House to the old Batchelder House, which I relate to these letters with no authority I can allege.  But in Craigie House dwelt the proud fair lady who was buried in the Cambridge church-yard with a slave at her head and a slave at her feet.

“Dust is in her beautiful eyes,”

and whether it was they that smiled or wept in their time over those love-letters, I will leave the reader to say.  The fortunes of her Tory family fell with those of their party, and the last Vassal ended his days a prisoner from his creditors in his own house, with a weekly enlargement on Sundays, when the law could not reach him.  It is known how the place took Longfellow’s fancy when he first came to be professor in Harvard, and how he was a lodger of the last Mistress Craigie there, long before he became its owner.  The house is square, with Longfellow’s study where he read and wrote on the right of the door, and a statelier library behind it; on the left is the drawing-room, with the dining-room in its rear; from its square hall climbs a beautiful stairway with twisted banisters, and a tall clock in their angle.

The study where the Dante Club met, and where I mostly saw Longfellow, was a plain, pleasant room, with broad panelling in white painted pine; in the centre before the fireplace stood his round table, laden with books, papers, and proofs; in the farthest corner by the window was a high desk which he sometimes stood at to write.  In this room Washington held his councils and transacted his business with all comers; in the chamber overhead he slept.  I do not think Longfellow associated the place much with him, and I never heard him speak of Washington in relation to it except once, when he told me with peculiar relish what he called the true version of a pious story concerning the aide-de-camp who blundered in upon him while he knelt in prayer.  The father of his country rose and rebuked the young man severely, and then resumed his devotions.  “He rebuked him,” said Longfellow, lifting his brows and making rings round the pupils of his eyes, “by throwing his scabbard at his head.”

All the front windows of Craigie House look, out over the open fields across the Charles, which is now the Longfellow Memorial Garden.  The poet used to be amused with the popular superstition that he was holding this vacant ground with a view to a rise in the price of lots, while all he wanted was to keep a feature of his beloved landscape unchanged.  Lofty elms drooped at the corners of the house; on the lawn billowed clumps of the lilac, which formed a thick hedge along the fence.  There was a terrace part way down this lawn, and when a white-painted balustrade was set some fifteen years ago upon its brink, it seemed always to have been there.  Long verandas stretched on either side of the mansion; and behind was an old-fashioned garden with beds primly edged with box after a design of the poet’s own.  Longfellow had a ghost story of this quaint plaisance, which he used to tell with an artful reserve of the catastrophe.  He was coming home one winter night, and as he crossed the garden he was startled by a white figure swaying before him.  But he knew that the only way was to advance upon it.  He pushed boldly forward, and was suddenly caught under the throat-by the clothes-line with a long night-gown on it.

Perhaps it was at the end of a long night of the Dante Club that I heard him tell this story.  The evenings were sometimes mornings before the reluctant break-up came, but they were never half long enough for me.  I have given no idea of the high reasoning of vital things which I must often have heard at that table, and that I have forgotten it is no proof that I did not hear it.  The memory will not be ruled as to what it shall bind and what it shall loose, and I should entreat mine in vain for record of those meetings other than what I have given.  Perhaps it would be well, in the interest of some popular conceptions of what the social intercourse of great wits must be, for me to invent some ennobling and elevating passages of conversation at Longfellow’s; perhaps I ought to do it for the sake of my own repute as a serious and adequate witness.  But I am rather helpless in the matter; I must set down what I remember, and surely if I can remember no phrase from Holmes that a reader could live or die by, it is something to recall how, when a certain potent cheese was passing, he leaned over to gaze at it, and asked:  “Does it kick?  Does it kick?” No strain of high poetic thinking remains to me from Lowell, but he made me laugh unforgettably with his passive adventure one night going home late, when a man suddenly leaped from the top of a high fence upon the sidewalk at his feet, and after giving him the worst fright of his life, disappeared peaceably into the darkness.  To be sure, there was one most memorable supper, when he read the “Bigelow Paper” he had finished that day, and enriched the meaning of his verse with the beauty of his voice.  There lingers yet in my sense his very tone in giving the last line of the passage lamenting the waste of the heroic lives which in those dark hours of Johnson’s time seemed to have been

“Butchered to make a blind man’s holiday.”

The hush that followed upon his ceasing was of that finest quality which spoken praise always lacks; and I suppose that I could not give a just notion of these Dante Club evenings without imparting the effect of such silences.  This I could not hopefully undertake to do; but I am tempted to some effort of the kind by my remembrance of Longfellow’s old friend George Washington Greene, who often came up from his home in Rhode Island, to be at those sessions, and who was a most interesting and amiable fact of those delicate silences.  A full half of his earlier life had been passed in Italy, where he and Longfellow met and loved each other in their youth with an affection which the poet was constant to in his age, after many vicissitudes, with the beautiful fidelity of his nature.  Greene was like an old Italian house-priest in manner, gentle, suave, very suave, smooth as creamy curds, cultivated in the elegancies of literary taste, and with a certain meek abeyance.  I think I never heard him speak, in all those evenings, except when Longfellow addressed him, though he must have had the Dante scholarship for an occasional criticism.  It was at more recent dinners, where I met him with the Longfellow family alone, that he broke now and then into a quotation from some of the modern Italian poets he knew by heart (preferably Giusti), and syllabled their verse with an exquisite Roman accent and a bewitching Florentine rhythm.  Now and then at these times he brought out a faded Italian anecdote, faintly smelling of civet, and threadbare in its ancient texture.  He liked to speak of Goldoni and of Nota, of Niccolini and Manzoni, of Monti and Leopardi; and if you came to America, of the Revolution and his grandfather, the Quaker General Nathaniel Greene, whose life he wrote (and I read) in three volumes:  He worshipped Longfellow, and their friendship continued while they lived, but towards the last of his visits at Craigie House it had a pathos for the witness which I should grieve to wrong.  Greene was then a quivering paralytic, and he clung tremulously to Longfellow’s arm in going out to dinner, where even the modern Italian poets were silent upon his lips.  When we rose from table, Longfellow lifted him out of his chair, and took him upon his arm again for their return to the study.

He was of lighter metal than most other members of the Dante Club, and he was not of their immediate intimacy, living away from Cambridge, as he did, and I shared his silence in their presence with full sympathy.  I was by far the youngest of their number, and I cannot yet quite make out why I was of it at all.  But at every moment I was as sensible of my good fortune as of my ill desert.  They were the men whom of all men living I most honored, and it seemed to be impossible that I at my age should be so perfectly fulfilling the dream of my life in their company.  Often, the nights were very cold, and as I returned home from Craigie House to the carpenter’s box on Sacramento Street, a mile or two away, I was as if soul-borne through the air by my pride and joy, while the frozen blocks of snow clinked and tinkled before my feet stumbling along the middle of the road.  I still think that was the richest moment of my life, and I look back at it as the moment, in a life not unblessed by chance, which I would most like to live over again—if I must live any.  The next winter the sessions of the Dante Club were transferred to the house of Mr. Norton, who was then completing his version of the ‘Vita Nuova’.  This has always seemed to me a work of not less graceful art than Longfellow’s translation of the ‘Commedia’.  In fact, it joins the effect of a sympathy almost mounting to divination with a patient scholarship and a delicate skill unknown to me elsewhere in such work.  I do not know whether Mr. Norton has satisfied himself better in his prose version of the ‘Commedia’ than in this of the ‘Vita Nuova’, but I do not believe he could have satisfied Dante better, unless he had rhymed his sonnets and canzonets.  I am sure he might have done this if he had chosen.  He has always pretended that it was impossible, but miracles are never impossible in the right hands.

V.

After three or four years we sold the carpenter’s box on Sacramento Street, and removed to a larger house near Harvard Square, and in the immediate neighborhood of Longfellow.  He gave me an easement across that old garden behind his house, through an opening in the high board fence which enclosed it, and I saw him oftener than ever, though the meetings of the Dante Club had come to an end.  At the last of them, Lowell had asked him, with fond regret in his jest, “Longfellow, why don’t you do that Indian poem in forty thousand verses?” The demand but feebly expressed the reluctance in us all, though I suspect the Indian poem existed only by the challenger’s invention.  Before I leave my faint and unworthy record of these great times I am tempted to mention an incident poignant with tragical associations.  The first night after Christmas the holly and the pine wreathed about the chandelier above the supper-table took fire from the gas, just as we came out from the reading, and Longfellow ran forward and caught the burning garlands down and bore them out.  No one could speak for thinking what he must be thinking of when the ineffable calamity of his home befell it.  Curtis once told me that a little while before Mrs. Longfellow’s death he was driving by Craigie House with Holmes, who said be trembled to look at it, for those who lived there had their happiness so perfect that no change, of all the changes which must come to them, could fail to be for the worse.  I did not know Longfellow before that fatal time, and I shall not say that his presence bore record of it except in my fancy.  He may always have had that look of one who had experienced the utmost harm that fate can do, and henceforth could possess himself of what was left of life in peace.  He could never have been a man of the flowing ease that makes all comers at home; some people complained of a certain ‘gene’ in him; and he had a reserve with strangers, which never quite lost itself in the abandon of friendship, as Lowell’s did.  He was the most perfectly modest man I ever saw, ever imagined, but he had a gentle dignity which I do not believe any one, the coarsest, the obtusest, could trespass upon.  In the years when I began to know him, his long hair and the beautiful beard which mixed with it were of one iron-gray, which I saw blanch to a perfect silver, while that pearly tone of his complexion, which Appleton so admired, lost itself in the wanness of age and pain.  When he walked, he had a kind of spring in his gait, as if now and again a buoyant thought lifted him from the ground.  It was fine to meet him coming down a Cambridge street; you felt that the encounter made you a part of literary history, and set you apart with him for the moment from the poor and mean.  When he appeared in Harvard Square, he beatified if not beautified the ugliest and vulgarest looking spot on the planet outside of New York.  You could meet him sometimes at the market, if you were of the same provision-man as he; and Longfellow remained as constant to his tradespeople as to any other friends.  He rather liked to bring his proofs back to the printer’s himself, and we often found ourselves together at the University Press, where the Atlantic Monthly used to be printed.  But outside of his own house Longfellow seemed to want a fit atmosphere, and I love best to think of him in his study, where he wrought at his lovely art with a serenity expressed in his smooth, regular, and scrupulously perfect handwriting.  It was quite vertical, and rounded, with a slope neither to the right nor left, and at the time I knew him first, he was fond of using a soft pencil on printing paper, though commonly he wrote with a quill.  Each letter was distinct in shape, and between the verses was always the exact space of half an inch.  I have a good many of his poems written in this fashion, but whether they were the first drafts or not I cannot say; very likely not.  Towards the last he no longer sent his poems to the magazines in his own hand; but they were always signed in autograph.

I once asked him if he were not a great deal interrupted, and he said, with a faint sigh, Not more than was good for him, he fancied; if it were not for the interruptions, he might overwork.  He was not a friend to stated exercise, I believe, nor fond of walking, as Lowell was; he had not, indeed, the childish associations of the younger poet with the Cambridge neighborhoods; and I never saw him walking for pleasure except on the east veranda of his house, though I was told he loved walking in his youth.  In this and in some other things Longfellow was more European than American, more Latin than Saxon.  He once said quaintly that one got a great deal of exercise in putting on and off one’s overcoat and overshoes.

I suppose no one who asked decently at his door was denied access to him, and there must have been times when he was overrun with volunteer visitors; but I never heard him complain of them.  He was very charitable in the immediate sort which Christ seems to have meant; but he had his preferences; humorously owned, among beggars.  He liked the German beggars least, and the Italian beggars most, as having most savair-faire; in fact, we all loved the Italians in Cambridge.  He was pleased with the accounts I could give him of the love and honor I had known for him in Italy, and one day there came a letter from an Italian admirer, addressed to “Mr. Greatest Poet Longfellow,” which he said was the very most amusing superscription he had ever seen.

It is known that the King of Italy offered Longfellow the cross of San Lazzaro, which is the Italian literary decoration.  It came through the good offices of my old acquaintance Professor Messadaglia, then a deputy in the Italian Parliament, whom, for some reason I cannot remember, I had put in correspondence with Longfellow.  The honor was wholly unexpected, and it brought Longfellow a distress which was chiefly for the gentleman who had procured him the impossible distinction.  He showed me the pretty collar and cross, not, I think, without a natural pleasure in it.  No man was ever less a bigot in things civil or religious than he, but he said, firmly, “Of course, as a republican and a Protestant, I can’t accept a decoration from a Catholic prince.”  His decision was from his conscience, and I think that all Americans who think duly about it will approve his decision.

VI.

Such honors as he could fitly permit himself he did not refuse, and I recall what zest he had in his election to the Arcadian Academy, which had made him a shepherd of its Roman Fold, with the title, as he said, of “Olimipico something.”  But I fancy his sweetest pleasure in his vast renown came from his popular recognition everywhere.  Few were the lands, few the languages he was unknown to:  he showed me a version of the “Psalm of Life” in Chinese.  Apparently even the poor lost autograph-seeker was not denied by his universal kindness; I know that he kept a store of autographs ready written on small squares of paper for all who applied by letter or in person; he said it was no trouble; but perhaps he was to be excused for refusing the request of a lady for fifty autographs, which she wished to offer as a novel attraction to her guests at a lunch party.

Foreigners of all kinds thronged upon him at their pleasure, apparently, and with perfect impunity.  Sometimes he got a little fun, very, very kindly, out of their excuses and reasons; and the Englishman who came to see him because there were no ruins to visit in America was no fable, as I can testify from the poet himself.  But he had no prejudice against Englishmen, and even at a certain time when the coarse-handed British criticism began to blame his delicate art for the universal acceptance of his verse, and to try to sneer him into the rank of inferior poets, he was without rancor for the clumsy misliking that he felt.  He could not understand rudeness; he was too finely framed for that; he could know it only as Swedenborg’s most celestial angels perceived evil, as something distressful, angular.  The ill-will that seemed nearly always to go with adverse criticism made him distrust criticism, and the discomfort which mistaken or blundering praise gives probably made him shy of all criticism.  He said that in his early life as an author he used to seek out and save all the notices of his poems, but in his latter days he read only those that happened to fall in his way; these he cut out and amused his leisure by putting together in scrapbooks.  He was reluctant to make any criticism of other poets; I do not remember ever to have heard him make one; and his writings show no trace of the literary dislikes or contempts which we so often mistake in ourselves for righteous judgments.  No doubt he had his resentments, but he hushed them in his heart, which he did not suffer them to embitter.  While Poe was writing of “Longfellow and other Plagiarists,” Longfellow was helping to keep Poe alive by the loans which always made themselves gifts in Poe’s case.  He very, very rarely spoke of himself at all, and almost never of the grievances which he did not fail to share with all who live.

He was patient, as I said, of all things, and gentle beyond all mere gentlemanliness.  But it would have been a great mistake to mistake his mildness for softness.  It was most manly and firm; and of course it was braced with the New England conscience he was born to.  If he did not find it well to assert himself, he was prompt in behalf of his friends, and one of the fine things told of him was his resenting some censures of Sumner at a dinner in Boston during the old pro-slavery times:  he said to the gentlemen present that Sumner was his friend, and he must leave their company if they continued to assail him.

But he spoke almost as rarely of his friends as of himself.  He liked the large, impersonal topics which could be dealt with on their human side, and involved characters rather than individuals.  This was rather strange in Cambridge, where we were apt to take our instances from the environment.  It was not the only thing he was strange in there; he was not to that manner born; he lacked the final intimacies which can come only of birth and lifelong association, and which make the men of the Boston breed seem exclusive when they least feel so; he was Longfellow to the friends who were James, and Charles, and Wendell to one another.  He and Hawthorne were classmates at college, but I never heard him mention Hawthorne; I never heard him mention Whittier or Emerson.  I think his reticence about his contemporaries was largely due to his reluctance from criticism:  he was the finest artist of them all, and if he praised he must have praised with the reservations of an honest man.  Of younger writers he was willing enough to speak.  No new contributor made his mark in the magazine unnoted by him, and sometimes I showed him verse in manuscript which gave me peculiar pleasure.  I remember his liking for the first piece that Mr. Maurice Thompson sent me, and how he tasted the fresh flavor of it, and inhaled its wild new fragrance.  He admired the skill of some of the young story-tellers; he praised the subtlety of one in working out an intricate character, and said modestly that he could never have done that sort of thing himself.  It was entirely safe to invite his judgment when in doubt, for he never suffered it to become aggressive, or used it to urge upon me the manuscripts that must often have been urged upon him.

Longfellow had a house at Nahant where he went every summer for more than a quarter of a century.  He found the slight transition change enough from Cambridge, and liked it perhaps because it did not take him beyond the range of the friends and strangers whose company he liked.  Agassiz was there, and Appleton; Sumner came to sojourn with him; and the tourists of all nations found him there in half an hour after they reached Boston.  His cottage was very plain and simple, but was rich in the sight of the illimitable, sea, and it had a luxury of rocks at the foot of its garden, draped with sea-weed, and washed with the indefatigable tides.  As he grew older and feebler he ceased to go to Nahant; he remained the whole year round at Cambridge; he professed to like the summer which he said warmed him through there, better than the cold spectacle of summer which had no such effect at Nahant.

The hospitality which was constant at either house was not merely of the worldly sort.  Longfellow loved good cheer; he tasted history and poetry in a precious wine; and he liked people who were acquainted with manners and men, and brought the air of capitals with them.  But often the man who dined with Longfellow was the man who needed a dinner; and from what I have seen of the sweet courtesy that governed at that board, I am sure that such a man could never have felt himself the least honored guest.  The poet’s heart was open to all the homelessness of the world; and I remember how once when we sat at his table and I spoke of his poem of “The Challenge,” then a new poem, and said how I had been touched by the fancy of

“The poverty-stricken millions
Who challenge our wine and bread,
And impeach us all as traitors,
Both the living and the dead,”

his voice sank in grave humility as he answered, “Yes, I often think of those things.”  He had thought of them in the days of the slave, when he had taken his place with the friends of the hopeless and hapless, and as long as he lived he continued of the party which had freed the slave.  He did not often speak of politics, but when the movement of some of the best Republicans away from their party began, he said that he could not see the wisdom of their course.  But this was said without censure or criticism of them, and so far as I know he never permitted himself anything like denunciation of those who in any wise differed from him.  On a matter of yet deeper interest, I do not feel authorized to speak for him, but I think that as he grew older, his hold upon anything like a creed weakened, though he remained of the Unitarian philosophy concerning Christ.  He did not latterly go to church, I believe; but then, very few of his circle were church-goers.  Once he said something very vague and uncertain concerning the doctrine of another life when I affirmed my hope of it, to the effect that he wished he could be sure, with the sigh that so often clothed the expression of a misgiving with him.

VII.

When my acquaintance with Longfellow began he had written the things that made his fame, and that it will probably rest upon:  “Evangeline,” “Hiawatha,” and the “Courtship of Miles Standish” were by that time old stories.  But during the eighteen years that I knew him he produced the best of his minor poems, the greatest of his sonnets, the sweetest of his lyrics.  His art ripened to the last, it grew richer and finer, and it never knew decay.  He rarely read anything of his own aloud, but in three or four cases he read to me poems he had just finished, as if to give himself the pleasure of hearing them with the sympathetic sense of another.  The hexameter piece, “Elizabeth,” in the third part of “Tales of a Wayside Inn,” was one of these, and he liked my liking its rhythmical form, which I believed one of the measures best adapted to the English speech, and which he had used himself with so much pleasure and success.

About this time he was greatly interested in the slight experiments I was beginning to make in dramatic form, and he said that if he were himself a young man he should write altogether for the stage; he thought the drama had a greater future with us.  He was pleased when a popular singer wished to produce his “Masque of Pandora,” with music, and he was patient when it failed of the effect hoped for it as an opera.  When the late Lawrence Barrett, in the enthusiasm which was one of the fine traits of his generous character, had taken my play of “A Counterfeit Presentment,” and came to the Boston Museum with it, Longfellow could not apparently have been more zealous for its popular acceptance if it had been his own work.  He invited himself to one of the rehearsals with me, and he sat with me on the stage through the four acts with a fortitude which I still wonder at, and with the keenest zest for all the details of the performance.  No finer testimony to the love and honor which all kinds of people had for him could have been given than that shown by the actors and employees of the theatre, high and low.  They thronged the scenery, those who were not upon the stage, and at the edge of every wing were faces peering round at the poet, who sat unconscious of their adoration, intent upon the play.  He was intercepted at every step in going out, and made to put his name to the photographs of himself which his worshippers produced from their persons.

He came to the first night of the piece, and when it seemed to be finding favor with the public, he leaned forward out of his line to nod and smile at the author; when they, had the author up, it was the sweetest flattery of the applause which abused his fondness that Longfellow clapped first and loudest.

Where once he had given his kindness he could not again withhold it, and he was anxious no fact should be interpreted as withdrawal.  When the Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil, who was so great a lover of Longfellow, came to Boston, he asked himself out to dine with the poet, who had expected to offer him some such hospitality.  Soon after, Longfellow met me, and as if eager to forestall a possible feeling in me, said, “I wanted to ask you to dinner with the Emperor, but he not only sent word he was coming, he named his fellow-guests!” I answered that though I should probably never come so near dining with an emperor again, I prized his wish to ask me much more than the chance I had missed; and with this my great and good friend seemed a little consoled.  I believe that I do not speak too confidently of our relation.  He was truly the friend of all men, but I had certainly the advantage of my propinquity.  We were near neighbors, as the pleonasm has it, both when I lived on Berkeley Street and after I had built my own house on Concord Avenue; and I suppose he found my youthful informality convenient.  He always asked me to dinner when his old friend Greene came to visit him, and then we had an Italian time together, with more or less repetition in our talk, of what we had said before of Italian poetry and Italian character.  One day there came a note from him saying, in effect, “Salvini is coming out to dine with me tomorrow night, and I want you to come too.  There will be no one else but Greene and myself, and we will have an Italian dinner.”

Unhappily I had accepted a dinner in Boston for that night, and this invitation put me in great misery.  I must keep my engagement, but how could I bear to miss meeting Salvini at Longfellow’s table on terms like these?  We consulted at home together and questioned whether I might not rush into Boston, seek out my host there, possess him of the facts, and frankly throw myself on his mercy.  Then a sudden thought struck us:  Go to Longfellow, and submit the case to him!  I went, and he entered with delicate sympathy into the affair.  But he decided that, taking the large view of it, I must keep my engagement, lest I should run even a remote risk of wounding my friend’s susceptibilities.  I obeyed, and I had a very good time, but I still feel that I missed the best time of my life, and that I ought to be rewarded for my sacrifice, somewhere.

Longfellow so rarely spoke of himself in any way that one heard from him few of those experiences of the distinguished man in contact with the undistinguished, which he must have had so abundantly.  But he told, while it was fresh in his mind, an incident that happened to him one day in Boston at a tobacconist’s, where a certain brand of cigars was recommended to him as the kind Longfellow smoked.  “Ah, then I must have some of them; and I will ask you to send me a box,” said Longfellow, and he wrote down his name and address.  The cigar-dealer read it with the smile of a worsted champion, and said, “Well, I guess you had me, that time.”  At a funeral a mourner wished to open conversation, and by way of suggesting a theme of common interest, began, “You’ve buried, I believe?”

Sometimes people were shown by the poet through Craigie House who had no knowledge of it except that it had been Washington’s headquarters.  Of course Longfellow was known by sight to every one in Cambridge.  He was daily in the streets, while his health endured, and as he kept no carriage, he was often to be met in the horse-cars, which were such common ground in Cambridge that they were often like small invited parties of friends when they left Harvard Square, so that you expected the gentlemen to jump up and ask the ladies whether they would have chicken salad.  In civic and political matters he mingled so far as to vote regularly, and he voted with his party, trusting it for a general regard to the public welfare.

I fancy he was somewhat shy of his fellow-men, as the scholar seems always to be, from the sequestered habit of his life; but I think Longfellow was incapable of marking any difference between himself and them.  I never heard from him anything that was ‘de haut en bas’, when he spoke of people, and in Cambridge, where there was a good deal of contempt for the less lettered, and we liked to smile though we did not like to sneer, and to analyze if we did not censure, Longfellow and Longfellow’s house were free of all that.  Whatever his feeling may have been towards other sorts and conditions of men, his effect was of an entire democracy.  He was always the most unassuming person in any company, and at some large public dinners where I saw him I found him patient of the greater attention that more public men paid themselves and one another.  He was not a speaker, and I never saw him on his feet at dinner, except once, when he read a poem for Whittier, who was absent.  He disliked after-dinner speaking, and made conditions for his own exemption from it.

VIII.

Once your friend, Longfellow was always your friend; he would not think evil of you, and if he knew evil of you, he would be the last of all that knew it to judge you for it.  This may have been from the impersonal habit of his mind, but I believe it was also the effect of principle, for he would do what he could to arrest the delivery of judgment from others, and would soften the sentences passed in his presence.  Naturally this brought him under some condemnation with those of a severer cast; and I have heard him criticised for his benevolence towards all, and his constancy to some who were not quite so true to themselves, perhaps.  But this leniency of Longfellow’s was what constituted him great as well as good, for it is not our wisdom that censures others.  As for his goodness, I never saw a fault in him.  I do not mean to say that he had no faults, or that there were no better men, but only to give the witness of my knowledge concerning him.  I claim in no wise to have been his intimate; such a thing was not possible in my case for quite apparent reasons; and I doubt if Longfellow was capable of intimacy in the sense we mostly attach to the word.  Something more of egotism than I ever found in him must go to the making of any intimacy which did not come from the tenderest affections of his heart.  But as a man shows himself to those often with him, and in his noted relations with other men, he showed himself without blame.  All men that I have known, besides, have had some foible (it often endeared them the more), or some meanness, or pettiness, or bitterness; but Longfellow had none, nor the suggestion of any.  No breath of evil ever touched his name; he went in and out among his fellow-men without the reproach that follows wrong; the worst thing I ever heard said of him was that he had ‘gene’, and this was said by one of those difficult Cambridge men who would have found ‘gene’ in a celestial angel.  Something that Bjornstjerne Bjornson wrote to me when he was leaving America after a winter in Cambridge, comes nearer suggesting Longfellow than all my talk.  The Norsemen, in the days of their stormy and reluctant conversion, used always to speak of Christ as the White Christ, and Bjornson said in his letter, “Give my love to the White Mr. Longfellow.”

A good many, years before Longfellow’s death he began to be sleepless, and he suffered greatly.  He said to me once that he felt as if he were going about with his heart in a kind of mist.  The whole night through he would not be aware of having slept.  “But,” he would add, with his heavenly patience, “I always get a good deal of rest from lying down so long.”  I cannot say whether these conditions persisted, or how much his insomnia had to do with his breaking health; three or four years before the end came, we left Cambridge for a house farther in the country, and I saw him less frequently than before.  He did not allow our meetings to cease; he asked me to dinner from time to time, as if to keep them up, but it could not be with the old frequency.  Once he made a point of coming to see us in our cottage on the hill west of Cambridge, but it was with an effort not visible in the days when he could end one of his brief walks at our house on Concord Avenue; he never came but he left our house more luminous for his having been there.  Once he came to supper there to meet Garfield (an old family friend of mine in Ohio), and though he was suffering from a heavy cold, he would not scant us in his stay.  I had some very bad sherry which he drank with the serenity of a martyr, and I shudder to this day to think what his kindness must have cost him.  He told his story of the clothes-line ghost, and Garfield matched it with the story of an umbrella ghost who sheltered a friend of his through a midnight storm, but was not cheerful company to his beneficiary, who passed his hand through him at one point in the effort to take his arm.

After the end of four years I came to Cambridge to be treated for a long sickness, which had nearly been my last, and when I could get about I returned the visit Longfellow had not failed to pay me.  But I did not find him, and I never saw him again in life.  I went into Boston to finish the winter of 1881-2, and from time to time I heard that the poet was failing in health.  As soon as I felt able to bear the horse-car journey I went out to Cambridge to see him.  I had knocked once at his door, the friendly door that had so often opened to his welcome, and stood with the knocker in my hand when the door was suddenly set ajar, and a maid showed her face wet with tears.  “How is Mr. Longfellow?” I palpitated, and with a burst of grief she answered, “Oh, the poor gentleman has just departed!” I turned away as if from a helpless intrusion at a death-bed.

At the services held in the house before the obsequies at the cemetery, I saw the poet for the last time, where

“Dead he lay among his books,”

in the library behind his study.  Death seldom fails to bring serenity to all, and I will not pretend that there was a peculiar peacefulness in Longfellow’s noble mask, as I saw it then.  It was calm and benign as it had been in life; he could not have worn a gentler aspect in going out of the world than he had always worn in it; he had not to wait for death to dignify it with “the peace of God.”  All who were left of his old Cambridge were present, and among those who had come farther was Emerson.  He went up to the bier, and with his arms crossed on his breast, and his elbows held in either hand, stood with his head pathetically fallen forward, looking down at the dead face.  Those who knew how his memory was a mere blank, with faint gleams of recognition capriciously coming and going in it, must have felt that he was struggling to remember who it was lay there before him; and for me the electly simple words confessing his failure will always be pathetic with his remembered aspect:  “The gentleman we have just been burying,” he said, to the friend who had come with him, “was a sweet and beautiful soul; but I forget his name.”

I had the privilege and honor of looking over the unprinted poems Longfellow left behind him, and of helping to decide which of them should be published.

There were not many of them, and some of these few were quite fragmentary.  I gave my voice for the publication of all that had any sort of completeness, for in every one there was a touch of his exquisite art, the grace of his most lovely spirit.  We have so far had two men only who felt the claim of their gift to the very best that the most patient skill could give its utterance:  one was Hawthorne and the other was Longfellow.  I shall not undertake to say which was the greater artist of these two; but I am sure that every one who has studied it must feel with me that the art of Longfellow held out to the end with no touch of decay in it, and that it equalled the art of any other poet of his time.  It knew when to give itself, and more and more it knew when to withhold itself.

What Longfellow’s place in literature will be, I shall not offer to say; that is Time’s affair, not mine; but I am sure that with Tennyson and Browning he fully shared in the expression of an age which more completely than any former age got itself said by its poets.

ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:

Anglo-American genius for ugliness
Backed their credulity with their credit
Candle burning on the table for the cigars
Discomfort which mistaken or blundering praise
Fell either below our pride or rose above our purse
Literary dislikes or contempts
Memory will not be ruled
Shy of his fellow-men, as the scholar seems always to be

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