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 OldCambridge. This was not so simple a matter as it might seem; for theancient town had not yet quickened its scholarly pace to the modern step. Indeed, in the spring of 1866 the impulse of expansion was not yetvisibly felt anywhere; the enormous material growth that followed thecivil 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 ourpurse. I wish I might tell how at last we bought a house; we had nomoney, but we were rich in friends, who are still alive to shrink fromthe story of their constant faith in a financial future which wesometimes doubted, and who backed their credulity with their credit. Itis sufficient for the present record, which professes to be strictlyliterary, to notify the fact that on the first day of May, 1866, we wentout to Cambridge and began to live in a house which we owned in fee ifnot in deed, and which was none the less valuable for being covered withmortgages. Physically, it was a carpenter's box, of a sort which isreadily imagined by the Anglo-American genius for ugliness, but which itis not so easy to impart a just conception of. A trim hedge ofarbor-vita; tried to hide it from the world in front, and a tall boardfence behind; the little lot was well planted (perhaps too well planted)with pears, grapes, and currants, and there was a small open space whichI lost no time in digging up for a kitchen-garden. On one side of uswere 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 nevercould persuade Aldrich had painted leaves on them in the fall. We werereally in a poor suburb of a suburb; but such is the fascination ofownership, even the ownership of a fully mortgaged property, that wecalculated the latitude and longitude of the whole earth from the spot wecalled ours. In our walks about Cambridge we saw other places where wemight have been willing to live; only, we said, they were too far off: Weeven prized the architecture of our little box, though we had but solately lived in a Gothic palace on the Grand Canal in Venice, and werenot uncritical of beauty in the possessions of others. Positive beautywe 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 bracketsof turned wood under its eaves. But we were richly content with it; andwith life in Cambridge, as it began to open itself to us, we wereinfinitely more than content. This life, so refined, so intelligent, sogracefully simple, I do not suppose has anywhere else had its parallel. 

I. 

It was the moment before the old American customs had been changed byEuropean influences among people of easier circumstances; and inCambridge society kept what was best of its village traditions, and choseto keep them in the full knowledge of different things. Nearly every onehad been abroad; and nearly every one had acquired the taste for oliveswithout losing a relish for native sauces; through the intellectual lifethere was an entire democracy, and I do not believe that since thecapitalistic era began there was ever a community in which money countedfor less. There was little show of what money could buy; I remember butone private carriage (naturally, a publisher's); and there was not onelivery, 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 hiscarriages, according as he lost or gathered courage for the charge. Wethought him extortionate, and we mostly walked through snow and mud ofamazing depth and thickness. 

The reader will imagine how acceptable this circumstance was to a youngliterary man beginning life with a fully mortgaged house and a salary ofuntried elasticity. If there were distinctions made in Cambridge theywere not against literature, and we found ourselves in the midst of acharming society, indifferent, apparently, to all questions but those ofthe 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 cultivatedin some sort was essential, and after that came civil manners, and thewillingness and ability to be agreeable and interesting; but the questionof riches or poverty did not enter. Even the question of family, whichis of so great concern in New England, was in abeyance. Perhaps it wastaken for granted that every one in Old Cambridge society must be of goodfamily, or he could not be there; perhaps his mere residence tacitlyennobled him; certainly his acceptance was an informal patent ofgentility. To my mind, the structure of society was almost ideal, anduntil we have a perfectly socialized condition of things I do not believewe shall ever have a more perfect society. The instincts which governedit were not such as can arise from the sordid competition of interests;they flowed from a devotion to letters, and from a self-sacrifice inmaterial things which I can give no better notion of than by saying thatthe outlay of the richest college magnate seemed to be graduated to theincome of the poorest. 

In those days, the men whose names have given splendor to Cambridge werestill living there. I shall forget some of them in the alphabeticalenumeration 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, JamesPierce, Dr. Peabody, Professor Parsons, Professor Sophocles. The varietyof talents and of achievements was indeed so great that Mr. Bret Harte, when fresh from his Pacific slope, justly said, after listening to apartial rehearsal of them, "Why, you couldn't fire a revolver from yourfront porch anywhere without bringing down a two-volumer!" Everybody hadwritten a book, or an article, or a poem; or was in the process orexpectation of doing it, and doubtless those whose names escape me willhave greater difficulty in eluding fame. These kindly, these gifted folkeach came to see us and to make us at home among them; and my home isstill among them, on this side and on that side of the line between theliving and the dead which invisibly passes through all the streets of thecities of men. 

II. 

We had the whole summer for the exploration of Cambridge before societyreturned from the mountains and the sea-shore, and it was not tillOctober that I saw Longfellow. I heard again, as I heard when I firstcame to Boston, that he was at Nahant, and though Nahant was no longer sofar away, now, as it was then, I did not think of seeking him out evenwhen we went for a day to explore that coast during the summer. It seemsstrange that I cannot recall just when and where I saw him, but earlyafter his return to Cambridge I had a message from him asking me to cometo 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 andscholars whom he invited to follow him and criticise his work from theoriginal, while he read his version aloud. Those who were mostconstantly present were Lowell and Professor Norton, but from time totime others came in, and we seldom sat down at the nine-o'clock supperthat 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 withLongfellow 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 mysense aches for the rhyme which he rejected, but my admiration for hisfidelity to Dante otherwise is immeasurable. I remember with equaladmiration the subtle and sympathetic scholarship of his critics, whoscrutinized every shade of meaning in a word or phrase that gave thempause, and did not let it pass till all the reasons and facts had beenconsidered. Sometimes, and even often, Longfellow yielded to theircensure, but for the most part, when he was of another mind, he held tohis mind, and the passage had to go as he said. I make a little haste tosay that in all the meetings of the Club, during a whole winter ofWednesday evenings, I myself, though I faithfully followed in an ItalianDante with the rest, ventured upon one suggestion only. This was kindly, even seriously, considered by the poet, and gently rejected. He couldnot do anything otherwise than gently, and I was not suffered to feelthat I had done a presumptuous thing. I can see him now, as he looked upfrom the proof-sheets on the round table before him, and over at me, growing consciously smaller and smaller, like something through areversed opera-glass. He had a shaded drop-light in front of him, and inits glow his beautiful and benignly noble head had a dignity peculiar tohim. 

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 ofthe man. His head, after he allowed his beard to grow and wore his hairlong in the manner of elderly men, was leonine, but mildly leonine, asthe old painters conceived the lion of St. Mark. Once Sophocles, theex-monk of Mount Athos, so long a Greek professor at Harvard, came in forsupper, after the reading was over, and he was leonine too, but of afierceness that contrasted finely with Longfellow's mildness. I rememberthe poet's asking him something about the punishment of impaling, inTurkey, 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 resonantmurmur, like the note of some deep-throated horn. His voice was verylulling in quality, and at the Dante Club it used to have early effectwith an old scholar who sat in a cavernous armchair at the corner of thefire, and who drowsed audibly in the soft tone and the gentle heat. Thepoet had a fat terrier who wished always to be present at the meetings ofthe Club, and he commonly fell asleep at the same moment with that dearold 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 textof the Paradiso. When the duet opened, Longfellow would look up with anarch recognition of the fact, and then go gravely on to the end of thecanto. At the close he would speak to his friend and lead him out tosupper as if he had not seen or heard anything amiss. 

III. 

In that elect company I was silent, partly because I was conscious of myyouthful inadequacy, and partly because I preferred to listen. ButLongfellow always behaved as if I were saying a succession of edifyingand 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 Irecall nothing that he said. But he always spoke both wisely and simply, without the least touch of pose, and with no intention of effect, butwith something that I must call quality for want of a better word; sothat at a table where Holmes sparkled, and Lowell glowed, and Agassizbeamed, he cast the light of a gentle gaiety, which seemed to dim allthese vivider luminaries. While he spoke you did not miss Fields's storyor Tom Appleton's wit, or even the gracious amity of Mr. Norton, with hisunequalled intuitions. 

The supper was very plain: a cold turkey, which the host carved, or ahaunch of venison, or some braces of grouse, or a platter of quails, witha deep bowl of salad, and the sympathetic companionship of those electvintages which Longfellow loved, and which he chose with the inspirationof affection. We usually began with oysters, and when some one who wasexpected did not come promptly, Longfellow invited us to raid his plate, as a just punishment of his delay. One evening Lowell remarked, with thecayenne poised above his bluepoints, "It's astonishing how fond thesefellows are of pepper. "

The old friend of the cavernous arm-chair was perhaps not wide enoughawake to repress an "Ah?" of deep interest in this fact of naturalhistory, and Lowell was provoked to go on. "Yes, I've dropped a redpepper pod into a barrel of them, before now, and then taken them out ina solid mass, clinging to it like a swarm of bees to their queen. "

"Is it possible?" cried the old friend; and then Longfellow intervened tosave him from worse, and turned the talk. 

I reproach myself that I made no record of the talk, for I find that onlya few fragments of it have caught in my memory, and that the sieve whichshould have kept the gold has let it wash away with the gravel. Iremember 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 sciencethe shroud gathering to the throat of many a doomed man apparently inperfect health, and happy in the promise of unnumbered days. The thoughtmay have been suggested by some of the toys of superstition whichintellectual 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 moststrenuously with the unbelieving Autocrat. But he really was in earnestabout it, though he relished a joke at the expense of his doctrine, likesome clerics when they are in the safe company of other clerics. He toldme once of having recounted to Agassiz the facts of a very remarkableseance, where the souls of the departed outdid themselves in theathletics and acrobatics they seem so fond of over there, throwing largestones across the room, moving pianos, and lifting dinner-tables andsetting them a-twirl under the chandelier. "And now, " he demanded, "whatdo you say to that?" "Well, Mr. Appleton, " Agassiz answered, toAppleton's infinite delight, "I say that it did not happen. "

One night they began to speak at the Dante supper of the unhappy manwhose crime is a red stain in the Cambridge annals, and one and anotherrecalled their impressions of Professor Webster. It was possibly with aretroactive sense that they had all felt something uncanny in him, but, apropos of the deep salad-bowl in the centre of the table, Longfellowremembered a supper Webster was at, where he lighted some chemical insuch a dish and held his head over it, with a handkerchief noosed abouthis throat and lifted above it with one hand, while his face, in the palelight, 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 (nowwith God) paid America at the height of a popularity long since toppledto the ground, with many another. He was in very good humor with ourwhole continent, and at Longfellow's table he found the champagne evensurprisingly 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 withhim at Longfellow's, where he was anxious to constitute himself a guestduring his sojourn in our neighborhood. Longfellow was equally anxiousthat he should not do so, and he took a harmless pleasure inout-manoeuvring him. He seized a chance to speak with me alone, andplotted to deliver him over to me without apparent unkindness, when thelatest horse-car should be going in to Boston, and begged me to walk himto Harvard Square and put him aboard. "Put him aboard, and don't leavehim till the car starts, and then watch that he doesn't get off. "

These instructions he accompanied with a lifting of the eyebrows, and apursing of the mouth, in an anxiety not altogether burlesque. He knewhimself the prey of any one who chose to batten on him, and hishospitality was subject to frightful abuse. Perhaps Mr. Norton hassomewhere told how, when he asked if a certain person who had beenoutstaying his time was not a dreadful bore, Longfellow answered, withangelic patience, "Yes; but then you know I have been bored so often!"

There was one fatal Englishman whom I shared with him during the greatpart of a season: a poor soul, not without gifts, but always ready formore, especially if they took the form of meat and drink. He had broughtletters from one of the best English men alive, who withdrew them toolate to save his American friends from the sad consequences of welcominghim. So he established himself impregnably in a Boston club, and cameout every day to dine with Longfellow in Cambridge, beginning with hisreturn from Nahant in October and continuing far into December. That wasthe year of the great horse-distemper, when the plague disabled thetransportation in Boston, and cut off all intercourse between the suburband the city on the street railways. "I did think, " Longfellowpathetically lamented, "that when the horse-cars stopped running, Ishould have a little respite from L. , but he walks out. "

In the midst of his own suffering he was willing to advise with meconcerning some poems L. Had offered to the Atlantic Monthly, and afterwe had desperately read them together he said, with inspiration, "I thinkthese things are more adapted to music than the magazine, " and thisseemed so good a notion that when L. Came to know their fate from me, Ianswered, confidently, "I think they are rather more adapted to music. "He calmly asked, "Why?" and as this was an exigency which Longfellow hadnot forecast for me, I was caught in it without hope of escape. I reallydo not know what I said, but I know that I did not take the poems, suchwas my literary conscience in those days; I am afraid I should be weakernow. 

IV. 

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

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

 "Dust is in her beautiful eyes, "

and whether it was they that smiled or wept in their time over thoselove-letters, I will leave the reader to say. The fortunes of her Toryfamily fell with those of their party, and the last Vassal ended his daysa prisoner from his creditors in his own house, with a weekly enlargementon Sundays, when the law could not reach him. It is known how the placetook 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 beforehe became its owner. The house is square, with Longfellow's study wherehe read and wrote on the right of the door, and a statelier librarybehind it; on the left is the drawing-room, with the dining-room in itsrear; from its square hall climbs a beautiful stairway with twistedbanisters, 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 withbooks, papers, and proofs; in the farthest corner by the window was ahigh desk which he sometimes stood at to write. In this room Washingtonheld his councils and transacted his business with all comers; in thechamber overhead he slept. I do not think Longfellow associated theplace much with him, and I never heard him speak of Washington inrelation to it except once, when he told me with peculiar relish what hecalled the true version of a pious story concerning the aide-de-camp whoblundered in upon him while he knelt in prayer. The father of hiscountry rose and rebuked the young man severely, and then resumed hisdevotions. "He rebuked him, " said Longfellow, lifting his brows andmaking rings round the pupils of his eyes, "by throwing his scabbard athis head. "

All the front windows of Craigie House look, out over the open fieldsacross the Charles, which is now the Longfellow Memorial Garden. Thepoet used to be amused with the popular superstition that he was holdingthis vacant ground with a view to a rise in the price of lots, while allhe wanted was to keep a feature of his beloved landscape unchanged. Loftyelms drooped at the corners of the house; on the lawn billowed clumps ofthe lilac, which formed a thick hedge along the fence. There was aterrace part way down this lawn, and when a white-painted balustrade wasset some fifteen years ago upon its brink, it seemed always to have beenthere. Long verandas stretched on either side of the mansion; and behindwas an old-fashioned garden with beds primly edged with box after adesign of the poet's own. Longfellow had a ghost story of this quaintplaisance, which he used to tell with an artful reserve of thecatastrophe. He was coming home one winter night, and as he crossed thegarden he was startled by a white figure swaying before him. But he knewthat the only way was to advance upon it. He pushed boldly forward, andwas suddenly caught under the throat-by the clothes-line with a longnight-gown on it. 

Perhaps it was at the end of a long night of the Dante Club that I heardhim tell this story. The evenings were sometimes mornings before thereluctant break-up came, but they were never half long enough for me. Ihave given no idea of the high reasoning of vital things which I mustoften have heard at that table, and that I have forgotten it is no proofthat I did not hear it. The memory will not be ruled as to what it shallbind and what it shall loose, and I should entreat mine in vain forrecord of those meetings other than what I have given. Perhaps it wouldbe well, in the interest of some popular conceptions of what the socialintercourse of great wits must be, for me to invent some ennobling andelevating passages of conversation at Longfellow's; perhaps I ought to doit for the sake of my own repute as a serious and adequate witness. ButI am rather helpless in the matter; I must set down what I remember, andsurely if I can remember no phrase from Holmes that a reader could liveor die by, it is something to recall how, when a certain potent cheesewas passing, he leaned over to gaze at it, and asked: "Does it kick? Doesit kick?" No strain of high poetic thinking remains to me from Lowell, but he made me laugh unforgettably with his passive adventure one nightgoing home late, when a man suddenly leaped from the top of a high fenceupon the sidewalk at his feet, and after giving him the worst fright ofhis life, disappeared peaceably into the darkness. To be sure, there wasone most memorable supper, when he read the "Bigelow Paper" he hadfinished that day, and enriched the meaning of his verse with the beautyof his voice. There lingers yet in my sense his very tone in giving thelast line of the passage lamenting the waste of the heroic lives which inthose 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 whichspoken praise always lacks; and I suppose that I could not give a justnotion of these Dante Club evenings without imparting the effect of suchsilences. This I could not hopefully undertake to do; but I am temptedto some effort of the kind by my remembrance of Longfellow's old friendGeorge Washington Greene, who often came up from his home in RhodeIsland, to be at those sessions, and who was a most interesting andamiable fact of those delicate silences. A full half of his earlier lifehad been passed in Italy, where he and Longfellow met and loved eachother in their youth with an affection which the poet was constant to inhis age, after many vicissitudes, with the beautiful fidelity of hisnature. Greene was like an old Italian house-priest in manner, gentle, suave, very suave, smooth as creamy curds, cultivated in the eleganciesof literary taste, and with a certain meek abeyance. I think I neverheard him speak, in all those evenings, except when Longfellow addressedhim, though he must have had the Dante scholarship for an occasionalcriticism. It was at more recent dinners, where I met him with theLongfellow family alone, that he broke now and then into a quotation fromsome of the modern Italian poets he knew by heart (preferably Giusti), and syllabled their verse with an exquisite Roman accent and a bewitchingFlorentine rhythm. Now and then at these times he brought out a fadedItalian anecdote, faintly smelling of civet, and threadbare in itsancient texture. He liked to speak of Goldoni and of Nota, of Niccoliniand Manzoni, of Monti and Leopardi; and if you came to America, of theRevolution and his grandfather, the Quaker General Nathaniel Greene, whose life he wrote (and I read) in three volumes: He worshippedLongfellow, and their friendship continued while they lived, but towardsthe last of his visits at Craigie House it had a pathos for the witnesswhich 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 werose from table, Longfellow lifted him out of his chair, and took himupon his arm again for their return to the study. 

He was of lighter metal than most other members of the Dante Club, and hewas not of their immediate intimacy, living away from Cambridge, as hedid, and I shared his silence in their presence with full sympathy. I wasby far the youngest of their number, and I cannot yet quite make out whyI was of it at all. But at every moment I was as sensible of my goodfortune as of my ill desert. They were the men whom of all men living Imost honored, and it seemed to be impossible that I at my age should beso perfectly fulfilling the dream of my life in their company. Often, thenights were very cold, and as I returned home from Craigie House to thecarpenter's box on Sacramento Street, a mile or two away, I was as ifsoul-borne through the air by my pride and joy, while the frozen blocksof snow clinked and tinkled before my feet stumbling along the middle ofthe road. I still think that was the richest moment of my life, and Ilook back at it as the moment, in a life not unblessed by chance, which Iwould most like to live over again--if I must live any. The next winterthe sessions of the Dante Club were transferred to the house of Mr. Norton, who was then completing his version of the 'Vita Nuova'. Thishas always seemed to me a work of not less graceful art than Longfellow'stranslation of the 'Commedia'. In fact, it joins the effect of asympathy almost mounting to divination with a patient scholarship and adelicate skill unknown to me elsewhere in such work. I do not knowwhether Mr. Norton has satisfied himself better in his prose version ofthe 'Commedia' than in this of the 'Vita Nuova', but I do not believe hecould have satisfied Dante better, unless he had rhymed his sonnets andcanzonets. I am sure he might have done this if he had chosen. He hasalways pretended that it was impossible, but miracles are neverimpossible in the right hands. 

V. 

After three or four years we sold the carpenter's box on SacramentoStreet, and removed to a larger house near Harvard Square, and in theimmediate neighborhood of Longfellow. He gave me an easement across thatold garden behind his house, through an opening in the high board fencewhich enclosed it, and I saw him oftener than ever, though the meetingsof the Dante Club had come to an end. At the last of them, Lowell hadasked him, with fond regret in his jest, "Longfellow, why don't you dothat Indian poem in forty thousand verses?" The demand but feeblyexpressed the reluctance in us all, though I suspect the Indian poemexisted only by the challenger's invention. Before I leave my faint andunworthy record of these great times I am tempted to mention an incidentpoignant with tragical associations. The first night after Christmas theholly and the pine wreathed about the chandelier above the supper-tabletook fire from the gas, just as we came out from the reading, andLongfellow ran forward and caught the burning garlands down and bore themout. No one could speak for thinking what he must be thinking of whenthe ineffable calamity of his home befell it. Curtis once told me that alittle while before Mrs. Longfellow's death he was driving by CraigieHouse with Holmes, who said be trembled to look at it, for those wholived there had their happiness so perfect that no change, of all thechanges which must come to them, could fail to be for the worse. I didnot know Longfellow before that fatal time, and I shall not say that hispresence bore record of it except in my fancy. He may always have hadthat 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 comersat home; some people complained of a certain 'gene' in him; and he had areserve with strangers, which never quite lost itself in the abandon offriendship, as Lowell's did. He was the most perfectly modest man I eversaw, ever imagined, but he had a gentle dignity which I do not believeany one, the coarsest, the obtusest, could trespass upon. In the yearswhen I began to know him, his long hair and the beautiful beard whichmixed with it were of one iron-gray, which I saw blanch to a perfectsilver, while that pearly tone of his complexion, which Appleton soadmired, lost itself in the wanness of age and pain. When he walked, hehad a kind of spring in his gait, as if now and again a buoyant thoughtlifted him from the ground. It was fine to meet him coming down aCambridge street; you felt that the encounter made you a part of literaryhistory, and set you apart with him for the moment from the poor andmean. When he appeared in Harvard Square, he beatified if not beautifiedthe 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 sameprovision-man as he; and Longfellow remained as constant to histradespeople as to any other friends. He rather liked to bring hisproofs back to the printer's himself, and we often found ourselvestogether at the University Press, where the Atlantic Monthly used to beprinted. But outside of his own house Longfellow seemed to want a fitatmosphere, and I love best to think of him in his study, where hewrought 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 timeI 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 inshape, 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 theywere the first drafts or not I cannot say; very likely not. Towards thelast he no longer sent his poems to the magazines in his own hand; butthey 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 werenot for the interruptions, he might overwork. He was not a friend tostated exercise, I believe, nor fond of walking, as Lowell was; he hadnot, indeed, the childish associations of the younger poet with theCambridge neighborhoods; and I never saw him walking for pleasure excepton the east veranda of his house, though I was told he loved walking inhis youth. In this and in some other things Longfellow was more Europeanthan American, more Latin than Saxon. He once said quaintly that one gota great deal of exercise in putting on and off one's overcoat andovershoes. 

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 volunteervisitors; but I never heard him complain of them. He was very charitablein the immediate sort which Christ seems to have meant; but he had hispreferences; humorously owned, among beggars. He liked the Germanbeggars least, and the Italian beggars most, as having most savair-faire;in fact, we all loved the Italians in Cambridge. He was pleased with theaccounts I could give him of the love and honor I had known for him inItaly, and one day there came a letter from an Italian admirer, addressedto "Mr. Greatest Poet Longfellow, " which he said was the very mostamusing superscription he had ever seen. 

It is known that the King of Italy offered Longfellow the cross of SanLazzaro, which is the Italian literary decoration. It came through thegood offices of my old acquaintance Professor Messadaglia, then a deputyin the Italian Parliament, whom, for some reason I cannot remember, I hadput in correspondence with Longfellow. The honor was wholly unexpected, and it brought Longfellow a distress which was chiefly for the gentlemanwho had procured him the impossible distinction. He showed me the prettycollar and cross, not, I think, without a natural pleasure in it. No manwas 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 adecoration from a Catholic prince. " His decision was from hisconscience, and I think that all Americans who think duly about it willapprove his decision. 

VI. 

Such honors as he could fitly permit himself he did not refuse, and Irecall what zest he had in his election to the Arcadian Academy, whichhad 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 vastrenown came from his popular recognition everywhere. Few were the lands, few the languages he was unknown to: he showed me a version of the "Psalmof Life" in Chinese. Apparently even the poor lost autograph-seeker wasnot denied by his universal kindness; I know that he kept a store ofautographs ready written on small squares of paper for all who applied byletter or in person; he said it was no trouble; but perhaps he was to beexcused for refusing the request of a lady for fifty autographs, whichshe 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, verykindly, out of their excuses and reasons; and the Englishman who came tosee him because there were no ruins to visit in America was no fable, asI can testify from the poet himself. But he had no prejudice againstEnglishmen, and even at a certain time when the coarse-handed Britishcriticism began to blame his delicate art for the universal acceptance ofhis verse, and to try to sneer him into the rank of inferior poets, hewas without rancor for the clumsy misliking that he felt. He could notunderstand rudeness; he was too finely framed for that; he could know itonly as Swedenborg's most celestial angels perceived evil, as somethingdistressful, angular. The ill-will that seemed nearly always to go withadverse criticism made him distrust criticism, and the discomfort whichmistaken or blundering praise gives probably made him shy of allcriticism. He said that in his early life as an author he used to seekout and save all the notices of his poems, but in his latter days he readonly those that happened to fall in his way; these he cut out and amusedhis leisure by putting together in scrapbooks. He was reluctant to makeany criticism of other poets; I do not remember ever to have heard himmake one; and his writings show no trace of the literary dislikes orcontempts which we so often mistake in ourselves for righteous judgments. No doubt he had his resentments, but he hushed them in his heart, whichhe did not suffer them to embitter. While Poe was writing of "Longfellowand other Plagiarists, " Longfellow was helping to keep Poe alive by theloans which always made themselves gifts in Poe's case. He very, veryrarely spoke of himself at all, and almost never of the grievances whichhe did not fail to share with all who live. 

He was patient, as I said, of all things, and gentle beyond all meregentlemanliness. But it would have been a great mistake to mistake hismildness for softness. It was most manly and firm; and of course it wasbraced with the New England conscience he was born to. If he did notfind 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 ofSumner at a dinner in Boston during the old pro-slavery times: he said tothe gentlemen present that Sumner was his friend, and he must leave theircompany if they continued to assail him. 

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

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

The hospitality which was constant at either house was not merely of theworldly sort. Longfellow loved good cheer; he tasted history and poetryin a precious wine; and he liked people who were acquainted with mannersand men, and brought the air of capitals with them. But often the manwho dined with Longfellow was the man who needed a dinner; and from whatI have seen of the sweet courtesy that governed at that board, I am surethat 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 Iremember 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 thefancy 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 ofthose things. " He had thought of them in the days of the slave, when hehad taken his place with the friends of the hopeless and hapless, and aslong as he lived he continued of the party which had freed the slave. Hedid not often speak of politics, but when the movement of some of thebest Republicans away from their party began, he said that he could notsee the wisdom of their course. But this was said without censure orcriticism of them, and so far as I know he never permitted himselfanything like denunciation of those who in any wise differed from him. Ona matter of yet deeper interest, I do not feel authorized to speak forhim, but I think that as he grew older, his hold upon anything like acreed weakened, though he remained of the Unitarian philosophy concerningChrist. He did not latterly go to church, I believe; but then, very fewof his circle were church-goers. Once he said something very vague anduncertain concerning the doctrine of another life when I affirmed my hopeof it, to the effect that he wished he could be sure, with the sigh thatso often clothed the expression of a misgiving with him. 

VII. 

When my acquaintance with Longfellow began he had written the things thatmade his fame, and that it will probably rest upon: "Evangeline, ""Hiawatha, " and the "Courtship of Miles Standish" were by that time oldstories. But during the eighteen years that I knew him he produced thebest of his minor poems, the greatest of his sonnets, the sweetest of hislyrics. His art ripened to the last, it grew richer and finer, and itnever knew decay. He rarely read anything of his own aloud, but in threeor four cases he read to me poems he had just finished, as if to givehimself the pleasure of hearing them with the sympathetic sense ofanother. The hexameter piece, "Elizabeth, " in the third part of "Talesof a Wayside Inn, " was one of these, and he liked my liking itsrhythmical form, which I believed one of the measures best adapted to theEnglish speech, and which he had used himself with so much pleasure andsuccess. 

About this time he was greatly interested in the slight experiments I wasbeginning to make in dramatic form, and he said that if he were himself ayoung man he should write altogether for the stage; he thought the dramahad a greater future with us. He was pleased when a popular singerwished to produce his "Masque of Pandora, " with music, and he was patientwhen it failed of the effect hoped for it as an opera. When the lateLawrence Barrett, in the enthusiasm which was one of the fine traits ofhis generous character, had taken my play of "A Counterfeit Presentment, "and came to the Boston Museum with it, Longfellow could not apparentlyhave been more zealous for its popular acceptance if it had been his ownwork. He invited himself to one of the rehearsals with me, and he satwith me on the stage through the four acts with a fortitude which I stillwonder at, and with the keenest zest for all the details of theperformance. No finer testimony to the love and honor which all kinds ofpeople had for him could have been given than that shown by the actorsand 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 werefaces peering round at the poet, who sat unconscious of their adoration, intent upon the play. He was intercepted at every step in going out, andmade to put his name to the photographs of himself which his worshippersproduced from their persons. 

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

Where once he had given his kindness he could not again withhold it, andhe was anxious no fact should be interpreted as withdrawal. When theEmperor Dom Pedro of Brazil, who was so great a lover of Longfellow, cameto Boston, he asked himself out to dine with the poet, who had expectedto offer him some such hospitality. Soon after, Longfellow met me, andas if eager to forestall a possible feeling in me, said, "I wanted to askyou 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 probablynever come so near dining with an emperor again, I prized his wish to askme much more than the chance I had missed; and with this my great andgood friend seemed a little consoled. I believe that I do not speak tooconfidently of our relation. He was truly the friend of all men, but Ihad certainly the advantage of my propinquity. We were near neighbors, asthe pleonasm has it, both when I lived on Berkeley Street and after I hadbuilt my own house on Concord Avenue; and I suppose he found my youthfulinformality convenient. He always asked me to dinner when his old friendGreene came to visit him, and then we had an Italian time together, withmore or less repetition in our talk, of what we had said before ofItalian poetry and Italian character. One day there came a note from himsaying, 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 andmyself, and we will have an Italian dinner. "

Unhappily I had accepted a dinner in Boston for that night, and thisinvitation put me in great misery. I must keep my engagement, but howcould I bear to miss meeting Salvini at Longfellow's table on terms likethese? We consulted at home together and questioned whether I might notrush into Boston, seek out my host there, possess him of the facts, andfrankly throw myself on his mercy. Then a sudden thought struck us: Goto Longfellow, and submit the case to him! I went, and he entered withdelicate sympathy into the affair. But he decided that, taking the largeview of it, I must keep my engagement, lest I should run even a remoterisk of wounding my friend's susceptibilities. I obeyed, and I had avery 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 himfew of those experiences of the distinguished man in contact with theundistinguished, which he must have had so abundantly. But he told, while it was fresh in his mind, an incident that happened to him one dayin Boston at a tobacconist's, where a certain brand of cigars wasrecommended to him as the kind Longfellow smoked. "Ah, then I must havesome of them; and I will ask you to send me a box, " said Longfellow, andhe wrote down his name and address. The cigar-dealer read it with thesmile of a worsted champion, and said, "Well, I guess you had me, thattime. " At a funeral a mourner wished to open conversation, and by way ofsuggesting a theme of common interest, began, "You've buried, I believe?"

Sometimes people were shown by the poet through Craigie House who had noknowledge of it except that it had been Washington's headquarters. Ofcourse Longfellow was known by sight to every one in Cambridge. He wasdaily in the streets, while his health endured, and as he kept nocarriage, he was often to be met in the horse-cars, which were suchcommon ground in Cambridge that they were often like small invitedparties of friends when they left Harvard Square, so that you expectedthe gentlemen to jump up and ask the ladies whether they would havechicken salad. In civic and political matters he mingled so far as tovote regularly, and he voted with his party, trusting it for a generalregard to the public welfare. 

I fancy he was somewhat shy of his fellow-men, as the scholar seemsalways to be, from the sequestered habit of his life; but I thinkLongfellow was incapable of marking any difference between himself andthem. I never heard from him anything that was 'de haut en bas', when hespoke of people, and in Cambridge, where there was a good deal ofcontempt for the less lettered, and we liked to smile though we did notlike to sneer, and to analyze if we did not censure, Longfellow andLongfellow's house were free of all that. Whatever his feeling may havebeen towards other sorts and conditions of men, his effect was of anentire democracy. He was always the most unassuming person in anycompany, and at some large public dinners where I saw him I found himpatient of the greater attention that more public men paid themselves andone another. He was not a speaker, and I never saw him on his feet atdinner, except once, when he read a poem for Whittier, who was absent. Hedisliked after-dinner speaking, and made conditions for his own exemptionfrom it. 

VIII. 

Once your friend, Longfellow was always your friend; he would not thinkevil of you, and if he knew evil of you, he would be the last of all thatknew it to judge you for it. This may have been from the impersonalhabit of his mind, but I believe it was also the effect of principle, forhe would do what he could to arrest the delivery of judgment from others, and would soften the sentences passed in his presence. Naturally thisbrought him under some condemnation with those of a severer cast; and Ihave heard him criticised for his benevolence towards all, and hisconstancy to some who were not quite so true to themselves, perhaps. Butthis leniency of Longfellow's was what constituted him great as well asgood, for it is not our wisdom that censures others. As for hisgoodness, I never saw a fault in him. I do not mean to say that he hadno faults, or that there were no better men, but only to give the witnessof my knowledge concerning him. I claim in no wise to have been hisintimate; such a thing was not possible in my case for quite apparentreasons; and I doubt if Longfellow was capable of intimacy in the sensewe mostly attach to the word. Something more of egotism than I everfound in him must go to the making of any intimacy which did not comefrom the tenderest affections of his heart. But as a man shows himselfto those often with him, and in his noted relations with other men, heshowed himself without blame. All men that I have known, besides, havehad some foible (it often endeared them the more), or some meanness, orpettiness, or bitterness; but Longfellow had none, nor the suggestion ofany. No breath of evil ever touched his name; he went in and out amonghis fellow-men without the reproach that follows wrong; the worst thing Iever heard said of him was that he had 'gene', and this was said by oneof those difficult Cambridge men who would have found 'gene' in acelestial angel. Something that Bjornstjerne Bjornson wrote to me whenhe was leaving America after a winter in Cambridge, comes nearersuggesting Longfellow than all my talk. The Norsemen, in the days oftheir stormy and reluctant conversion, used always to speak of Christ asthe White Christ, and Bjornson said in his letter, "Give my love to theWhite 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 weregoing about with his heart in a kind of mist. The whole night through hewould not be aware of having slept. "But, " he would add, with hisheavenly patience, "I always get a good deal of rest from lying down solong. " I cannot say whether these conditions persisted, or how much hisinsomnia had to do with his breaking health; three or four years beforethe end came, we left Cambridge for a house farther in the country, and Isaw him less frequently than before. He did not allow our meetings tocease; 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 ofcoming to see us in our cottage on the hill west of Cambridge, but it waswith an effort not visible in the days when he could end one of his briefwalks at our house on Concord Avenue; he never came but he left our housemore luminous for his having been there. Once he came to supper there tomeet Garfield (an old family friend of mine in Ohio), and though he wassuffering from a heavy cold, he would not scant us in his stay. I hadsome very bad sherry which he drank with the serenity of a martyr, and Ishudder to this day to think what his kindness must have cost him. Hetold his story of the clothes-line ghost, and Garfield matched it withthe story of an umbrella ghost who sheltered a friend of his through amidnight storm, but was not cheerful company to his beneficiary, whopassed 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 longsickness, which had nearly been my last, and when I could get about Ireturned the visit Longfellow had not failed to pay me. But I did notfind him, and I never saw him again in life. I went into Boston tofinish the winter of 1881-2, and from time to time I heard that the poetwas failing in health. As soon as I felt able to bear the horse-carjourney I went out to Cambridge to see him. I had knocked once at hisdoor, the friendly door that had so often opened to his welcome, andstood 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?" Ipalpitated, and with a burst of grief she answered, "Oh, the poorgentleman has just departed!" I turned away as if from a helplessintrusion at a death-bed. 

At the services held in the house before the obsequies at the cemetery, Isaw 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 toall, and I will not pretend that there was a peculiar peacefulness inLongfellow's noble mask, as I saw it then. It was calm and benign as ithad been in life; he could not have worn a gentler aspect in going out ofthe world than he had always worn in it; he had not to wait for death todignify it with "the peace of God. " All who were left of his oldCambridge 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 hiselbows held in either hand, stood with his head pathetically fallenforward, looking down at the dead face. Those who knew how his memorywas a mere blank, with faint gleams of recognition capriciously comingand going in it, must have felt that he was struggling to remember who itwas lay there before him; and for me the electly simple words confessinghis failure will always be pathetic with his remembered aspect: "Thegentleman we have just been burying, " he said, to the friend who had comewith him, "was a sweet and beautiful soul; but I forget his name. "

I had the privilege and honor of looking over the unprinted poemsLongfellow left behind him, and of helping to decide which of them shouldbe published. 

There were not many of them, and some of these few were quitefragmentary. I gave my voice for the publication of all that had anysort of completeness, for in every one there was a touch of his exquisiteart, the grace of his most lovely spirit. We have so far had two menonly who felt the claim of their gift to the very best that the mostpatient skill could give its utterance: one was Hawthorne and the otherwas Longfellow. I shall not undertake to say which was the greaterartist of these two; but I am sure that every one who has studied it mustfeel with me that the art of Longfellow held out to the end with no touchof decay in it, and that it equalled the art of any other poet of histime. It knew when to give itself, and more and more it knew when towithhold 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 andBrowning he fully shared in the expression of an age which morecompletely 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