MARRIAGE AND LIFE AT BRUNSWICK
It has been a source of regret to many that the memoirs of Longfellow,
even when prepared by his brother, have given, perhaps necessarily, so
little space to his early love and first marriage, facts which are apt
to be, for a poet, the turning-points in his career. We know that this
period in Lowell's life, for instance, brought what seemed almost a
transformation of his nature, making an earnest reformer and patriot of
a youth who had hitherto been little more than a brilliant and somewhat
reckless boy. In Longfellow's serener nature there was no room for a
change so marked, yet it is important to recognize that it brought with
it a revival of that poetic tendency which had singularly subsided for a
time after its early manifestation. He had written to his friend, George
W. Greene, on June 27, 1830, that he had long ceased to attach any value
to his early poems or even to think of them at all. Yet after about a
year of married life, he began (December 1, 1832) the introduction to
his Phi Beta Kappa poem, and during the following year published a
volume of poetical translations from the Spanish; thus imitating Bryant,
then in some ways his model, who had derived so much of his inspiration
from the Spanish muse. It is not unreasonable to recognize something of
his young wife's influence in this rekindling of poetic impulse, and it
is pleasant, in examining the manuscript lectures delivered by him at
Bowdoin College and still preserved there, to find them accompanied by
pages of extracts, here and there, in her handwriting. It will therefore
be interesting to make her acquaintance a little farther.
Mary Storer Potter was the second daughter of the Hon. Barrett Potter
and Anne (Storer) Potter of Portland, neighbors and friends of the
Longfellow family. She had been for a time a schoolmate of Henry
Longfellow at the private school of Bezaleel Cushman in Portland; and it
is the family tradition that on the young professor's returning to his
native city after his three years' absence in Europe he saw her at
church and was so struck with her appearance as to follow her home
afterwards without venturing to accost her. On reaching his own house,
however, he begged his sister to call with him at once at the Potter
residence, and all the rest followed as in a novel. They were married
September 14, 1831, she being then nineteen years of age, having been
born on May 12, 1812, and he being twenty-four.
It was a period when Portland was somewhat celebrated for the beauty of
its women; and indeed feminine beauty, at least in regard to coloring,
seems somewhat developed, like the tints of garden flowers, by the
neighborhood of the sea. An oil painting of Mrs. Longfellow is in my
possession, taken in a costume said to have been selected by the young
poet from one of the highly illustrated annuals so much in vogue at that
day. She had dark hair and deep blue eyes, the latter still represented
in some of her nieces, although she left no children. Something of her
love of study and of her qualities of mind and heart are also thus
represented in this younger generation. She had never learned Latin or
Greek, her father disapproving of those studies for girls, but he had
encouraged her in the love of mathematics, and there is among her papers
a calculation of an eclipse.
She had been mainly educated at the school, then celebrated, of Miss
Gushing in Hingham. "My first impression of her," wrote in later years
the venerable professor, Alpheus Packard,--who was professor of Latin
and Greek at Bowdoin at the time of her marriage,--"is of an attractive
person, blooming in health and beauty, the graceful bride of a very
attractive and elegant young man." Some books from her girlish library
now lie before me, dingy and time-worn, with her name in varying
handwriting from the early "Mary S. Potter" to the later "Mary S. P.
Longfellow." They show many marked passages and here and there a
quotation. The collection begins with Miss Edgeworth's "Harry and Lucy;"
then follow somewhat abruptly "Sabbath Recreations," by Miss Emily
Taylor, and "The Wreath, a selection of elegant poems from the best
authors,"--these poems including the classics of that day, Beattie's
"Minstrel," Blair's "Grave," Gray's "Elegy," Goldsmith's "Traveller,"
and some lighter measures from Campbell, Moore, and Burns. The sombre
muse undoubtedly predominated, but on the whole the book was not so bad
an elementary preparation for the training of a poet's wife. It is a
touching accidental coincidence that one of the poems most emphatically
marked is one of the few American poems in these volumes, Bryant's
"Death of the Flowers," especially the last verse, which describes a
woman who died in her youthful beauty. To these are added books of
maturer counsel, as Miss Bowdler's "Poems and Essays," then reprinted
from the sixteenth English edition, but now forgotten, and Mrs.
Barbauld's "Legacy for Young Ladies," discussing beauty, fashion,
botany, the uses of history, and especially including a somewhat
elaborate essay on "female studies," on which, perhaps, Judge Potter
founded his prohibition of the classics. Mrs. Barbauld lays down the
rule that "the learned languages, the Greek especially, require a great
deal more time than a young woman can conveniently spare. To the Latin,"
she adds, "there is not an equal objection ... and it will not," she
thinks, "in the present state of things, excite either a smile or a
stare in fashionable company." But she afterwards says, "French you are
not only permitted to learn, but you are laid under the same necessity
of acquiring it as your brother is of acquiring the Latin." Mrs.
Barbauld's demands, however, are not extravagant, as she thinks that "a
young person who reads French with ease, who is so well grounded as to
write it grammatically, and has what I should call a good English
pronunciation will by a short residence in France gain fluency and the
accent." This "good English pronunciation" of French is still not
unfamiliar to those acquainted with Anglicized or Americanized regions
of Paris.
Among the maturer books of Mary Potter was Worcester's "Elements of
History," then and now a clear and useful manual of its kind, and a
little book called "The Literary Gem" (1827), which was an excellent
companion or antidote for Worcester's History, as it included
translations from the German imaginative writers just beginning to be
known, Goethe, Richter, and Körner, together with examples of that
American literary school which grew up partly in imitation of the
German, and of which the "Legend of Peter Rugg," by William Austin, is
the only specimen now remembered. With this as a concluding volume, it
will be seen that Mary Potter's mind had some fitting preparation for
her husband's companionship, and that the influence of Bryant in poetry,
and of Austin, the precursor of Hawthorne, in prose, may well have
lodged in her mind the ambition, which was always making itself visible
in her husband, towards the new work of creating an American literature.
It is in this point of view that the young wife's mental training
assumed a real importance in studying the atmosphere of Longfellow's
early days. For the rest, she was described by her next-door neighbor in
Brunswick, Miss Emeline Weld, as "a lovely woman in character and
appearance, gentle, refined, and graceful, with an attractive manner
that won all hearts."{15}
Longfellow's salary at Bowdoin College was eight hundred dollars, as
professor of modern languages, with an additional hundred as librarian.
From the beginning he took the lead among American teachers in this
department, the difficulty among these being that they consisted of two
classes,--Americans imperfectly acquainted with Europe and foreigners as
imperfectly known in America. Even in the selection of mere tutors the
same trouble always existed, though partially diminished, as time went
on, by those refugees from revolutionary excitements in Europe,
especially from Germany and Italy, who were a real addition to our
university circles. Even these were from their very conditions of
arrival a somewhat impetuous and unmanageable class, and in American
colleges--as later during the Civil War in the American army--the very
circumstances of their training made them sometimes hard to control as
subordinates. It was very fortunate, when they found, as in Longfellow,
a well-trained American who could be placed over their heads.
There were also text-books and readers to be prepared and edited by the
young professor, one of which, as I well remember, was of immense value
to students, the "Proverbes Dramatiques," already mentioned, a
collection of simple and readable plays, written in colloquial French,
and a most valuable substitute for the previous Racine and Corneille,
the use of which was like teaching classes to read out of Shakespeare.
Thus full of simple and congenial work, Longfellow went to housekeeping
with his young wife in a house still attractive under its rural elms,
and thus described by him:--
"June 23 [1831]. I can almost fancy myself in Spain, the morning is so
soft and beautiful. The tessellated shadow of the honeysuckle lies
motionless upon my study floor, as if it were a figure in the carpet;
and through the open window comes the fragrance of the wild brier and
the mock orange. The birds are carolling in the trees, and their shadows
flit across the window as they dart to and fro in the sunshine; while
the murmur of the bee, the cooing of doves from the eaves, and the
whirring of a little humming-bird that has its nest in the honeysuckle,
send up a sound of joy to meet the rising sun."
{15 _Every Other Saturday_, i. 20.}