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+Project Gutenberg's The White Mr. Longfellow, by William Dean Howells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+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
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The White Mr. Longfellow, by William Dean Howells
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext The White Mr. Longfellow, by Howells
+#41 in our series by William Dean Howells
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+Title: The White Mr. Longfellow
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+Author: William Dean Howells
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+Release Date: August, 2002  [Etext #3394]
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+
+LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--The White Mr. Longfellow
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+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 tho 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 . . . . . . . .
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext The White Mr. Longfellow, by Howells
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The White Mr. Longfellow, by Howells
+#41 in our series by William Dean Howells
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+Title: The White Mr. Longfellow
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+Author: William Dean Howells
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+
+
+
+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 tho 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
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of The White Mr. Longfellow
+by William Dean Howells
+
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