RESIGNATION OF PROFESSORSHIP--TO DEATH OF MRS. LONGFELLOW
On the last day of 1853, Longfellow wrote in his diary, "How barren of
all poetic production and even prose production this last year has been!
For 1853 I have absolutely nothing to show. Really there has been
nothing but the college work. The family absorbs half the time, and
letters and visits take out a huge cantle." Yet four days later he
wrote, January 4, 1854, "Another day absorbed in the college. But why
complain? These golden days are driven like nails into the fabric. Who
knows but they help it to hold fast and firm?" On February 22, he
writes, "You are not misinformed about my leaving the professorship. I
am 'pawing to get free.'" On his birthday, February 27, he writes, in
the joy of approaching freedom, "I am curious to know what poetic
victories, if any, will be won this year." On April 19 he writes, "At
eleven o'clock in No. 6 University Hall, I delivered my last
lecture--the last I shall ever deliver, here or anywhere."{80} The
following are the letters explaining this, and hitherto unpublished, but
preserved in the Harvard College archives.
CAMBRIDGE, February 16, 1854.
GENTLEMEN,--In pursuance of conversations held with Dr. Walker, the
subject of which he has already communicated to you,--I now beg
leave to tender you my resignation of the "Smith Professorship of
the French and Spanish Languages and Literatures," which I have held
in Harvard College since the year 1835.
Should it be in your power to appoint my successor before the
beginning of the next Term, I should be glad to retire at once. But
if this should be inconvenient, I will discharge the duties of the
office until the end of the present Academic Year.
I venture on this occasion, Gentlemen, to call your attention to the
subject of the salaries paid to the several Instructors in this
Department, and to urge, as far as may be proper, such increase as
may correspond to the increased expenses of living in this part of
the country at the present time.
With sentiments of the highest regard, and sincere acknowledgments
of your constant courtesy and kindness, during the eighteen years of
my connection with the College,
I have the honor to be, Gentlemen,
Your Obt. Servt.
HENRY W. LONGFELLOW.{81}
To the President and Corporation of Harvard University.
[TO PRESIDENT WALKER.]
CAMBRIDGE, Feb. 16, 1854.
MY DEAR SIR,--I inclose you my note to the Corporation. Will you be
kind enough to look at it, before handing it to them; for if it is
not in proper form and phrase, I will write it over again.
I also inclose the letters of Schele de Vere, and remain,
Very faithfully Yours
HENRY W. LONGFELLOW{82}
P. S. I have not assigned any reasons for my resignation, thinking
it better to avoid a repetition of details, which I have already
explained to you.
[TO THE PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE.]
GENTLEMEN,--Having last Winter signified to you my intention of
resigning my Professorship at the close of the present College year,
I now beg leave to tender you my resignation more formally and
officially.
It is eighteen years since I entered upon the duties of this
Professorship. They have been to me pleasant and congenial; and I
hope I have discharged them to your satisfaction, and to the
advantage of the College in whose prosperity I shall always take the
deepest interest.
In dissolving a connection, which has lasted so long, and which has
been to me a source of so much pleasure and advantage, permit me to
express to you my grateful thanks for the confidence you have
reposed in me, and the many marks of kindness and consideration
which I have received at your hands.
With best wishes for the College and for yourselves, I have the
honor to be, Gentlemen,
Your Obedient Servant
HENRY W. LONGFELLOW
_Smith Professor of French and Spanish, and
Professor of Belles Lettres._{83}
CAMBRIDGE, August 23, 1854.
[TO PRESIDENT WALKER.]
NAHANT, Aug. 23, 1854.
MY DEAR SIR,--I inclose you the Letter of resignation we were
speaking of yesterday. I have made it short, as better suited to
College Records; and have said nothing of the regret, which I
naturally feel on leaving you, for it hardly seems to me that I am
leaving you; and little of my grateful acknowledgments; for these I
hope always to show, by remaining the faithful friend and ally of
the College.
I beg you to make my official farewells to the members of the
Faculty at their next meeting, and to assure them all and each of my
regard and friendship, and of my best wishes for them in all things.
With sentiments of highest esteem, I remain
Dear Sir,
Yours faithfully
HENRY W. LONGFELLOW{84}
His retirement was not a matter of ill health, for he was perfectly
well, except that he could not use his eyes by candle-light. But friends
and guests and children and college lectures had more and more filled up
his time, so that he had no strength for poetry, and the last two years
had been very unproductive. There was, moreover, all the excitement of
his friend Sumner's career, and of the fugitive slave cases in Boston,
and it is no wonder that he writes in his diary, with his usual guarded
moderation, "I am not, however, very sure as to the result." Meanwhile
he sat for his portrait by Lawrence, and the subject of the fugitive
slave cases brought to the poet's face, as the artist testified, a look
of animation and indignation which he was glad to catch and retain. On
Commencement Day, July 19, 1854, he wore his academical robes for the
last time, and writes of that event, "The whole crowded church looked
ghostly and unreal as a thing in which I had no part." He had already
been engaged upon his version of Dante, having taken it up on February
1, 1853,{85} after ten years' interval; and moreover another new
literary project had occurred to him "purely in the realm of fancy," as
he describes it, and his freedom became a source of joy.
He had been anxious for some years to carry out his early plan of works
upon American themes. He had, as will be remembered, made himself
spokesman for the Indians on the college platform. His list of proposed
subjects had included as far back as 1829, "Tales of the Quoddy
Indians," with a description of Sacobezon, their chief. After
twenty-five years he wrote in his diary (June 22, 1854), "I have at
length hit upon a plan for a poem on the American Indians which seems to
be the right one and the only. It is to weave together their beautiful
traditions into a whole. I have hit upon a measure, too, which I think
the right one and the only one for the purpose." He had to draw for this
delineation not merely upon the Indians seen in books, but on those he
had himself observed in Maine, the Sacs and Foxes he had watched on
Boston Common, and an Ojibway chief whom he had entertained at his
house. As for the poetic measure, a suitable one had just been suggested
to him by the Finnish epic of "Kalevala," which he had been reading; and
he had been delighted by its appropriateness to the stage character to
be dealt with and the type of legend to be treated. "Hiawatha" was begun
on June 25, 1854, and published on November 10 of that year. He enjoyed
the work thoroughly, but it evidently seemed to him somewhat tame before
he got through, and this tendency to tameness was sometimes a subject of
criticism with readers; but its very simplicity made the style
attractive to children and gave a charm which it is likely always to
retain. With his usual frankness, he stated at the outset that the metre
was not original with him, and it was of course a merit in the legends
that they were not original. The book received every form of attention;
it was admired, laughed at, parodied, set to music, and publicly read,
and his fame unquestionably rests far more securely on this and other
strictly American poems than on the prolonged labor of the "Golden
Legend." He himself writes that some of the newspapers are "fierce and
furious" about "Hiawatha," and again "there is the greatest pother over
'Hiawatha.'" Freiligrath, who translated the poem into German, writes
him from London, "Are you not chuckling over the war which is waging in
the 'Athenæum' about the measure from 'Hiawatha'?" He had letters of
hearty approval from Emerson, Hawthorne, Parsons, and Bayard Taylor; the
latter, perhaps, making the best single encomium on the book in writing
to its author, "The whole poem floats in an atmosphere of the American
'Indian summer.'" The best tribute ever paid to it, however, was the
actual representation of it as a drama by the Ojibway Indians on an
island in Lake Huron, in August, 1901, in honor of a visit to the tribe
by some of the children and grandchildren of the poet. This posthumous
tribute to a work of genius is in itself so picturesque and interesting
and has been so well described by Miss Alice Longfellow, who was
present, that I have obtained her consent to reprint it in the Appendix
to this volume.
Longfellow's next poem reverted to hexameters once more, inasmuch as
"Evangeline" had thoroughly outlived the early criticisms inspired by
this meter. The theme had crossed his mind in 1856, and he had begun to
treat it in dramatic form and verse, under the name it now bears; but
after a year's delay he tried it again under the name of Priscilla,
taking the name, possibly, from an attractive English Quakeress,
Priscilla Green, whose sweet voice had charmed him in a public meeting,
"breaking now and then," as he says, "into a kind of rhythmic charm in
which the voice seemed floating up and down on wings." It has been
thought that he transferred in some degree the personality of this
worthy woman to the heroine of his story, their Christian names being
the same; but he afterwards resumed the original title, "The Courtship
of Miles Standish." He wrote it with great ease between December, 1857,
and March, 1858, and perhaps never composed anything with a lighter
touch or more unmingled pleasure. Twenty-five thousand copies were sold
or ordered of the publishers during the first week, and ten thousand in
London on the first day. In both theme and treatment the story was
thoroughly to his liking, and vindicated yet further that early instinct
which guided him to American subjects. Longfellow was himself descended,
it will be remembered, from the very marriage he described, thus
guaranteeing a sympathetic treatment, while the measure is a shade
crisper and more elastic than that of "Evangeline," owing largely to the
greater use of trochees. It is almost needless to say that no such
effort can ever be held strictly to the classic rules, owing to the
difference in the character of the language. With German hexameters the
analogy is closer.
On July 10, 1861, Mrs. Longfellow died the tragic death which has been
so often described, from injuries received by fire the day before. Never
was there a greater tragedy within a household; never one more simply
and nobly borne. It was true to Lowell's temperament to write frankly
his sorrow in exquisite verse; but it became Longfellow's habit, more
and more, to withhold his profoundest feelings from spoken or written
utterance; and it was only after his death that his portfolio, being
opened, revealed this sonnet, suggested by a picture of the western
mountain whose breast bears the crossed furrows.
THE CROSS OF SNOW
In the long, sleepless watches of the night,
A gentle face--the face of one long dead--
Looks at me from the wall, where round its head
The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.
Here in this room she died; and soul more white
Never through martyrdom of fire was led
To its repose; nor can in books be read
The legend of a life more benedight.
There is a mountain in the distant West
That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
Displays a cross of snow upon its side.
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
And seasons, changeless since the day she died.
July 10, 1879.
{80 _Life_, ii. 262, 263, 265, 266, 268.}
{81 _Harvard College Papers_ [MS.], 2d ser. xx. 345.}
{82 _Ib._ 347.}
{83 _Harvard College Papers_ [MS.], 2d ser. xxi. 249.}
{84 _Harvard College Papers_ [MS.], 2d ser. xxi. 249.}
{85 _Life_, ii. 248.}