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.