house years later, should have known General Craigie. For all his
garden parties at Commencement time, with their distinguished guests,
like Talleyrand, and Admiral d’Estaing, and Prince Edward (the father
of Queen Victoria), for all the refinishing and painting he did in
the house, for all the splendor of the organ which he installed in
the northeast room between two fine Corinthian columns, and the rare
girandole in the study, and the Adam mantels--for all his creature
magnificence, he had a scenario or two concealed about his person.
Hark!
“I am the ghost of Madame Craigie. I loved an impetuous youth from the
south, then a student. We parted, for my family forbade me. But we
swore to write each other. He did not write; I pined; then, desperate,
obeyed my parents’ mandates, and married General Craigie. And as we
sat at table in his great house, a letter came to me, in my maiden
name--the name, ah me! now forfeit--saying ‘I have no word of you, no
word since I went away. Why do you not write?’ And _then_ I knew that
they had kept his letters from me, and mine from him! And from that day
I never spoke to my husband save on matters of essential business.”
Hawthorne could have made something out of that.
Or this: the poet was surprised one morning as he came downstairs
to see lying on one of the lower treads a letter. It was a fervent
letter, with no clue to the addressee nor to its source. Inquiry
disclosed nothing from any member of the household. The next morning
another letter--also fervent. When it happened again and still again,
he set himself to solve the mystery. And it was no mystery, for in the
Craigie dynasty there had been an affair, which Andrew was only too
anxious not to pile on his wife’s already considerable grievance. So
he walled the letters up under the stairs, and thought them safe. But
as the sea gives up her dead, the gradual settling of the staircase
and the tapping of feet upon it slowly and inexorably provoked a crack
through which revenge fed the letters, one by one, confiding the story
piecemeal, to a poet.
Capricious investments sent Craigie to his grave in 1818 a poor man. If
Madam Craigie was in the slightest degree relieved at his departure,
her obligation to him was diluted by the fact that she must now support
herself. By “taking in boarders” she could manage to live on in the
old house, and make ends meet. For those who could pass her rather
rigid inspection it offered accommodation far better than the average.
Naturally such folk as Edward Everett and his bride, and President
Jared Sparks of Harvard and Josiah Worcester, who wrote a dictionary,
needed no references. With strangers it was different. A gentle young
fellow with light hair and deep-set eyes, and a clean, aquiline
profile, appeared one afternoon in 1837 and asked for lodgings. She
said she had none vacant. In the temporizing dialogue which followed it
developed that his name was Longfellow and that he was the author of
a book she had quite recently been reading, and her manner thawed so
readily that he got the room.
He was not much trouble, really--only a polite young man from Maine
who had lost his wife a year or two before, and who had just been
made professor of modern languages in the College. He was usually up
in his room writing at night, while Mrs. Craigie read Voltaire or
Madame de Sevigné down in the library, or played an old song on an
old pianoforte. Another paying guest was a Miss Sally Lowell, whose
talented nephew, James Russell Lowell, was beginning to be heard from;
a third was the lexicographer Worcester, who was so taken with the
house that he later bought it. For Longfellow’s part, they were amiable
neighbors, but not so exacting as to interrupt the absorbing routine of
a man of thirty embarking upon a full professorship.
For nearly twenty years he served the College in this capacity. The
College was thrifty, and anxious to get the most out of his teaching;
Longfellow’s health was not good, and the duties of his position
asked more of him than he could sometimes give. He had resolved as a
youth to become an eminent man of letters, just as determinedly as
any man in business ever set his face toward the height of power. He
kept a diary of progress, as scrupulous a record in its own line as
the balance sheets of an industry, and he never allowed himself to be
diverted by praise or ill-health from the pursuit of his ambition.
Steadily and smoothly there came from his pen an output toward which
the public looked with growing anticipation. Now it was experimental,
now political, now religious. The best of it came from the warmest
corner of a warm patriotic heart, where he kept a great treasure of the
legends of his own country.
When _Hiawatha_, _Evangeline_, and _The Courtship of Miles Standish_
had appeared, his fame had crossed boundaries and oceans. Word-mongers
say they are not his finest work, but they went straight, from his
heart to the heart of plain people everywhere. His enthusiasm for the
Indian tradition that is our only native folklore found utterance in
_Hiawatha_; the story of Evangeline he got from Hawthorne; the romance
of John Alden and Priscilla Mullins he picked from his own family tree.
As a poet he gave the lie to the precious though fashionable complaint
that nothing real in art need be expected from America until she had
had a century or two of sandpapering. His enthusiasm of race drew
occasional outbursts of a greater quality--the thing that made him a
great citizen as well as a great national artist--the immortal spirit
which went into such majestic songs as _The Building of the Ship_.
“In neither case,” observes Higginson, “was this Americanism trivial,
wasteful, or ignoble in its tone.” Will the professional hucksters of
100-per-centism please copy?
Contrary to persistent tradition, a poet is not a sulky hermit plucking
ideas from empty air and full bottles. Longfellow had about him a
laboratory full of elixirs of association, to which his sensitive
spirit was a quick reagent. His second marriage gave him a beloved
wife, his wife’s father gave Mrs. Longfellow the Craigie house to live
in always, and Mrs. Longfellow gave her husband the children who were
the Alpha and Omega of his affection for children in general. The
familiar portrait of the children hangs in the dining-room; a pretty
picture, painted by Reed, the same who wrote “Sheridan’s Ride.”
Harvard activities supplied him with a circle of friends which spread
like ripples in a pond with every new literary production he cast
forth. Come into his study and meet the best of them. A fine white
room on the front of the house, high ceiling, tall windows, bright
turkey-red curtains falling from borders scalloped like a flounce
from Godey’s _Ladies’ Book_. An orange-tree flourishing in a tub at a
sunny window--as it was when he stood at his high desk and wrote of
Spain. Most of his writing was done at a round Duncan Phyfe table,
whose graces are hidden under a faded green felt cover. On its dusty
self-pattern of ivy leaves are the articles he left there as he died:
_item_, a miscellany of books; _item_, an ornate ink-well of Coleridge
which Longfellow treasured; _item_, a historic ink-well which had
been the successive property of Moore and Crabbe, which Longfellow
venerated; and, _item_, a little tupenny glass ink-bottle which
Longfellow himself used! Even the quill pens are there with which he
formed that calm, round graceful handwriting.
You came to see his friends. You shall. Here is a spare young man with
a sensitive, kindly smile about the eyes--from Concord he is, and his
name is Emerson. Over in that extraordinarily long armchair by the
hearth sits (on his shoulder-blades) a handsome chap, the only man
who fits the chair--six feet and more of Charles Summer. On the walls
are the crayon portraits customary as gifts before the days of the
camera: here is Felton, whom Dickens called “the heartiest of Greek
professors”; here that fascinating Agassiz, always shuttling between
Cambridge and some tropic or other; here Hawthorne’s grave dark eyes.
Picture him later in life chatting before the fire with Lowell, Holmes,
John Lothrop Motley, or Whittier. Shift the scene to a Boston tavern
with the same company, and three or four more of their stature, engaged
in starting _The Atlantic Monthly_, and ask yourself where a poet could
seek more inspiration. Gossips who knew this group only from outside
called it the “Mutual Admiration Society,” and you may find in the
Boston Athenaeum a review of _Evangeline_ written by Felton on which
some scoffing contemporary has pencilled “_Insured at the Mutual_.”
There is good authority for picturing Longfellow and a pair of younger
cronies returning under the moon from a good dinner at Porter’s,
singing in harmony--“I am a Rajah!! Putterum!” And in the years when
the Saturday Club was flourishing, the poet was a regular attendant,
and a modest, dry-spoken commentator on discussions in which the
Olympians matched wits.
Every eminent visitor to Boston paid him court and even Oscar Wilde
paid him a patronizing call. Many came who were not eminent, and the
poet often invited aimless tourists in to see the house. To one such
couple he exhibited the Coleridge ink-well, explaining helpfully
that Coleridge had written _The Ancient Mariner_. “Oh,” said the
bridegroom, and nodded. Then, puzzled, he said: “Say! who done the
_Old Oaken Bucket_?” There were memorable evenings spent in the Howe
tavern at Sudbury with Ole Bull, the fiddler, and an ingenious group of
story-tellers whose yarns took shape in “The Tales of a Wayside Inn.”
Longfellow in his later years was the chief figure of Cambridge.
Great men and women came to pay him tribute and to find his modesty
unimpeached. When the undergraduates started a mutiny over in the
College and riotous language was echoing from the red brick of old
“Mass.” hall, it was quieted when one youth cried: “Let’s hear what Mr.
Longfellow has to say about it--he’s fair, at any rate.” And when the
spreading chestnut tree over Dexter Pratt’s smithy fell, the children
of Cambridge gave their pennies to fashion him an armchair of its wood,
and used to traipse fearlessly into the Longfellow house from time to
time to call on the poet and see that the chair gave him good service.
Without question it is one of the homeliest chairs in the world--and
one of the finest.
One cannot leave the house without a glance at his other friends, his
closer intimates, nor enter the house without remarking them. Books,
books, books--heavy Italian walnut cases of them, white shelves of
them, heaps of them, in the study, the halls, the dining-room, the
drawing room, a vault full of the rarest of them in the east entry.
I have not visited the pantry, but I will make a small wager that
there are books on the cake-box. It is a judicious collection by a man
who was a hungry reader and a lover of beautiful volumes. There are
ranks of Italian folios, Tasso and Ariosto in white vellum--and of
apparently everything else in equally rich costume, for the years of
the poet’s great public appreciation built for him a formidable library
of handsomely bound presentation copies and he was no mean purchaser
himself.
They are where the poet left them, and so they will stay. When the
actual tenancy of the house by the Longfellow heirs comes to a period,
it will be held securely in trust just as it is, just as he left it one
March day in 1882. Those generous and tactful heirs have already given
the city of Cambridge the park which affords the house a clear vista to
the Charles, and have given Longfellow land across the Charles to make
up most of Soldiers Field, the great playground of Harvard. Now they
have wisely provided that the house shall not become a museum, but that
it shall remain the home of whose atmosphere and influence they cherish
so acute an appreciation.
Longfellow’s bust stands in Westminster Abbey, the first American so to
be honored. It is made of marble, and is a good likeness. Longfellow’s
soul lives in Cambridge, in his home. The house is a better likeness
than the bust, and of warmer stuff. His children’s trust will
perpetuate their generosity for our children’s children.
* * * * *
A dignified old clock stands on the stairs, and ticks:
“_Forever--never
Never--forever._”
CLIVEDEN
[Illustration:
© D.McK
CLIVEDEN
One of Maxwell’s six-pounders spoke, and a ball passed in the front
window of the Chew house, through four partitions and heaven knows
how many British, and out a rear window. The battery hammered at the
steps, the windows and the door, while snipers fired at the flash of a
rifle from the upper stories. Infantry charged across the lawn and was
beaten back, artillery punctured but did not dislodge. Reed was all
for chasing the rest of the retreating British toward the city, but
Knox said it was against the rules to leave an enemy fort in the rear.
“What!” Reed exclaimed, “Call this a fort and lose the happy moment?”]
CLIVEDEN
A daughter of the Quincy house saw the beginning of the Revolution.
Mount Vernon was the home of its chief figure. From the Jumel Mansion
he retreated to Westchester when the Continental army suffered its
first major reverse. In the Kendall house at Dobbs Ferry he conceived
the campaign which was to end the war, and there finally he saw the
British evacuate the United States. Five houses in America punctuate
the Revolutionary career of Washington, and the fifth is the house
where the cause of freedom entered the dark hours, the period of
terrible ordeal.
Cliveden was built in 1761 on “the worst road in America,” the main
street of Germantown. The village, whose houses dotted some three
miles of the street, was already becoming a fashionable summer
retreat for prominent Philadelphians, and William Chew, the attorney
general of the province, made Cliveden large enough for a family that
totalled fourteen children, with the appropriate retinue of servants
and household pets. The house is three stories high, as severely
rectangular as a mill, with a plain extension built to the rear, and a
further detached addition connected only by an underground passage. It
might easily have been commonplace, but the dapple-gray native stone
of which it is built is interesting, the doorway, to which you ascend
by a flight of six stone steps, is dignified and inviting, and dormer
windows, fat chimneys, and stone urns strike notes of real character
on an otherwise plain roof. It makes no great bid for beauty, but its
aspect of substance is as honest as a Philadelphia lawyer--and that is
what William Chew was.
Although he became chief justice of Pennsylvania under the crown,
he was no more of a loyalist than his position required. As a model
of astute straddling, where can you cite a statement which quite
compares with his decision, rendered in answer to the question: What
is to become of those who meet the mandates of the crown with armed
resistance?
“I have stated,” he answered, “that an opposition by force of arms to
the lawful authority of the King or his Ministry is high treason, but
in the moment when the King or his Ministers shall exceed the authority
vested in them by the Constitution submission to their mandate becomes
treason.” The same tolerance he showed toward the uprising of the
colonies he showed to their leaders in Philadelphia, and you may take
it from John Adams’ diary that he was a rare and upright judge of food
as well as of treason.
“Thursday. Dined with Mr. Chew, Chief Justice of the Province, with all
the gentlemen from Virginia ... and many others. About four o’clock
we were called down to dinner. The furniture was all rich. Turtle
and every other thing, flummery, jellies, sweet-meats, of 20 sorts,
trifles, whipped sillabubs, floating islands, fools, etc., and then
a dessert of fruits, raisens, almonds, pears, peaches, wines most
excellent & admirable. I drank Madeira at a great rate & found no
inconvenience in it.”
However much the members of the Continental Congress enjoyed his
hospitality in 1775, they could no longer endure his presence as
chief justice in Philadelphia in 1777, and in August of that year he
and Governor John Penn were arrested and escorted to Burlington, New
Jersey. Within a month Washington had met the British in force at the
Brandywine in a doubtful effort to check their march on Philadelphia,
and had been defeated. For a fortnight he played hide-and-seek with
Howe on the banks of the Schuylkill, and if the countryside had been
as communicative to him as it was to the enemy, the enemy would not
have marched, as he presently did, unmolested into Philadelphia. Howe
placed his major force at Germantown, and Washington came in as near as
he dared and sat down to watch and wait. Strategically, the Revolution
was a distinctly suburban war. With Philadelphia, the national capital,
in the hands of the British, and winter coming on, American morale was
quoted at .001, with no sales.
On the night of October 2–3, the American forces marched quietly
down the main road toward Germantown, with flanks thrown out, on the
right to the Wissahickon ravine, on the left to the old York pike.
Dawn brought Sullivan of Maine into contact with the enemy. The
enemy retreated, gaining speed as he scampered down Mount Airy into
Germantown, with Sullivan, Conway and Reed at his heels. Colonel
Musgrave, of the Fortieth Regiment of the British, saw the retreat
coming, and with one hundred and twenty men swarmed into Cliveden,
closed the shutters on the lower floor, barred the doors, and prepared
to stand. Washington himself was in the pursuit, and he ordered
Maxwell and four cannon to the ground across the street from Cliveden,
where Upsala now stands. A thick fog had gathered, making it nearly
impossible to determine where the enemy was, or in what strength. The
utmost confusion prevailed. One of Maxwell’s six-pounders spoke, and
a ball passed in the front window of the Chew house, through four
partitions and heaven knows how many British, and out a rear window.
The battery hammered at the steps, the windows and the door, while
snipers fired at the flash of rifles from the upper stories. Infantry
charged across the lawn and were beaten back, artillery punctured, but
did not dislodge. Reed was all for chasing the rest of the retreating
British toward the city, but Knox said it was against the rules to
leave an enemy fort in the rear. “What!” Reed exclaimed, “call this a
fort and lose the happy moment?”
It was in effect a fort, but it was as truly the happy moment to leave
the fort to be cleaned out later and press the British retreat. For the
American wings had not driven the British back (the American left wing
failed because General Stephen was drunk), and the British, unopposed,
marched obliquely toward the center of the fighting at Cliveden. Thus
the battle became, instead of the conflict of bow-shaped forces, the
meeting of two great arrowheads, and the point where the arrows met and
the sparks were flying thickest was the lawn of the Chew house. Smith
of Virginia, a colonel, set out for the house with a flag of truce to
demand Musgrave’s surrender, and was shot from a window. Major White,
one of Sullivan’s aides, tried to set fire to the house, and a shot
from a cellar window killed him. Musgrave hung on. Every minute that
passed brought British troops nearer, and increased the odds against
the Americans.
Our army left five hundred dead and wounded in Germantown and then
retreated to Whitemarsh. The King’s forces, reduced by five hundred
dead and wounded, remained in the bloody fog of the village. The
townsfolk began to come out of their cellars and examine the damage.
A field hospital was set up at Wyck, a fine old house down Germantown
Road. At Johnson House you can see today the hole in a window-frame
through which a frantic pet squirrel, forgotten in the flight to the
cellar, gnawed his way to freedom. Stray bullets pierced every house
within a quarter-mile, and of all the houses within that radius,
Cliveden, its center, took the worst punishment.
Five carpenters worked all that fall and winter repairing the damage.
Holes gaped through the inner walls, hardly a pane of glass was
intact, statues were chipped, mirrors splintered, furniture reduced
to expensive kindling. What was not stained with blood was streaked
with smoke, and the second floor ceilings were sprayed with bullets
by Continentals who dashed into the shelter of the building and fired
through the upper windows.
Across the span of the years we can still hear the echo of an outraged
protest--the hymn of hate of the daughters of William Chew, sung
with all the cordial detestation that could be uttered by a group of
sisters who came out to Germantown under British escort and found
their lovely home in ruins at the hands of the army that had already
made their father a prisoner. None can blame them for the gayety with
which they entered into the social life of that winter in the occupied
city, with never a thought for Washington’s men shivering in the snow
at Valley Forge. Knyphausen, Cornwallis, and the two Howes picked out
comfortable quarters in the deserted houses of the patriots who had
fled, and Major André settled down with a “rapacious crew” in the home
of Benjamin Franklin. When Franklin’s daughter returned after the
British evacuation the next June she reported to him in Paris: “They
stole and carried off with them some of your musical instruments, viz.,
a Welsh harp, ball harp, the set of tuned bells which were in a box,
viol-de-gamba, all the spare harmonica glasses and one or two spare
cases.” Tuneful was the life of the army of occupation.
André was paying diligent court to Peggy Chew. He was her champion in
the fête of Mischianza, and her gallant protector when a marauding
force of ragged Continentals marched down from Valley Forge and
broke up the party. He wore her ribbon, with the legend “No Rival,”
presented her with an aquarelle of himself in costume, wrote an account
of the affair in verse, and filled in his spare hours by inditing to
her rhapsodies inspired in the orchard at Cliveden, in apple-blossom
time. Then came the parting; within a few short years
“The youth who bids with stifled pain
His sad farewell tonight”
was dead with a rope around his neck, and although Peggy married a
soldier of the Republic, she remembered the enemy gallant. She was
never so impishly amused as when she could say a kind word for André,
for it guaranteed an explosive protest from her husband. “Major André,”
said Peggy, demurely, with a certain dangerous sadness in her eyes,
“was a most witty and cultivated gentleman,” and Colonel Howard,
seizing a visitor’s arm, exclaimed “He was a damned spy, sir! Nothing
but a damned spy!”
The house had been restored only two years when William Chew sold it
to Blair McClenahan, but in 1787 he bought it back. In August of 1787
Washington, then president of the Constitutional Convention, rode out
to see the encampment at Whitemarsh to which he had retreated ten
years before, and dined with McClenahan in the Chew house. Despite his
Royalist relations, the close of the Revolution restored Benjamin Chew
to good standing in his community and the judicial profession, and he
served as justice of the High Court of Errours and Appeals until its
abolishment in 1808. During the period when the Federal Congress sat
in Philadelphia it was no infrequent thing to see the Father of His
Country in company with the father of Peggy and of Harriet, who was
soon to marry a Carroll of Doughoregan.
It was at Germantown that Stephen’s drunkenness left his division
without a commander, and opened a vacancy for Lafayette’s assumption
of an active command as major-general. Naturally, therefore, when
Lafayette returned to America in 1825, he could not ignore Germantown.
He was received with a military escort and drawn “in an open barouche”
to Cliveden. Let Miss Ann Johnson, of Upsala, across the way, carry on
the story as she did in a letter to her mother: