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.