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.