"The seventy lectures to which I am doomed next year hang over me
like a dark curtain. Seventy lectures! who will have the patience
to hear them? If my eyes were strong I should delight in it. But it
will eat up a whole year, and I was just beginning so cheerily on
my poem and looking forward to pleasant work on it next year."
Oh, the pity of it! Many men could have lectured to college boys on the
modern languages and literature, if not as well as Longfellow, at least
well enough; but who was there who could write his poems? That he
should drudge on through his best years, giving only the odds and ends
of his time to his real life-work, seems an infinite pity. What might he
not have done in those earlier years could he have gone fresh and
untired to his musings and his dreams?
Emerson was wiser than he, when early in life he resolved to be content
with the most modest means and to have possession of himself. He never
drudged in a profession, but gave his full strength to his literary
work. Longfellow should have done this at least ten years before he did.
But five children had come into the family during the years of his last
marriage, and poetry has not long been a paying investment in this
country, although Longfellow in the later years received large sums for
his work. He probably dropped his college work as soon as he felt that
he could afford to do so; and after that, much of his important work was
done. But it was not done with the buoyancy and freshness which the
earlier years might have furnished, although some of his best poems were
written after the change.
But the last twenty years of Mr. Longfellow's life were saddened
inexpressibly by the loss of his wife, and all his later work is of a
sombre hue, filled through and through, unconsciously, with his own
sadness. Unconsciously we say, for he never intentionally rhymed his own
sorrows. There is no personal mention of his griefs in all his later
poems. The death of his wife occurred on the 9th of July in 1861, and
was caused by burns received from having her clothing ignited by a match
upon which she trod in their library, where she had been sealing up some
packages of the children's curls, which she had just cut. Mr. Longfellow
was badly burned in trying to save her, and when the funeral took place
was confined to his bed. She was buried upon the anniversary of her
marriage-day, and was crowned with a wreath of orange blossoms. She was
long remembered in Cambridge as the most beautiful woman of her
time,--beautiful not alone in body, but in spirit and life. Mr.
Longfellow never recovered from the tragedy, but mourned her in silence
for twenty years. Heart-breaking are the entries in the journal during
all this time,--entries telling at frequent intervals of his ever
increasing desolation. Little was known of all this by the world until
the publication of his journal, for it was one of the peculiarities of
his grief that he could speak of it to no one. Only after months had
passed did he allude to it in his letters even to his brothers, and then
in the briefest fashion: "And now of what we both are thinking I can
write no word. God's will be done." The first entry in the journal after
the break made at the time of her death is this:--
"Sleep sweetly, tender heart, in peace!
Sleep, holy spirit, blessed soul!
While the stars burn, the moons increase,
And the great ages onward roll."
The entries in the journal are all brief, but they are frequent and like
these: "Walk before breakfast with E---- and afterward alone. The
country is beautiful, but oh, how sad! How can I live any longer!" "The
glimmer of golden leaves in the sunshine; the lilac hedge shot with the
crimson creeper; the river writing its silver S in the meadow;
everything without full of loveliness. But within me the hunger, the
famine of the heart!" "Another walk under the pines, in the bright
morning sunshine."
"Known and unknown; human, divine:
Sweet human hand and lip and eye;
Dear heavenly friend, who canst not die:
Mine, mine forever; ever mine."
"How inexpressibly sad are all holydays! But the dear little girls had
their Christmas-tree last night, and an unseen presence blessed the
scene!"
No mention of his loss was ever made in his published verse, though the
whole of his poetry was much sadder after that loss; but after his own
death the following poem was found in his desk, written eighteen years
after his wife's death:--
"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."
It was a long time before he could work again. When he felt that he
could do so, he began his translation of Dante, and frequently produced
a canto in a day, finding in this absorbing occupation the first
alleviation of his sorrow. In a sonnet "On Translating Dante," he
said:--
"I enter here from day to day,
And leave my burden at this minster gate."
But when his work was done he always found that his burden was still
awaiting him on the outside, and he took it up and bore it as patiently
as he could. But he began earnestly to long for
"The Wayside Inn,
Where toil should cease and rest begin,"
and to feel that the approach of old age without the beloved
companionship was hard indeed to contemplate. But his children were
beautiful and promising and affectionate, and he a most loving and
conscientious father; so they gradually came to occupy his thoughts and
much to cheer his solitude. He was a famous man too by this time, indeed
long before; and the world made demands upon him which could not always
be disregarded, and he began to mingle with it somewhat again. But the
little group of friends to whom allusion has been made were his best
comforters, and were more and more prized as the years went on. During
the translation of Dante they assembled at very short intervals to
listen to the reading of the work, and to criticise, and suggest such
changes as were deemed advisable; and these occasions were much enjoyed.
As the years went by, one after another of the early friends fell by the
way, leaving gaps in his life which could never be filled. Felton was
the first to go, and he was very deeply mourned by Longfellow, who felt
"as if the world were reeling and sinking under his feet." His death
made, as his friend expressed it, "a chasm which not only nothing can
fill up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up." Hawthorne and
Agassiz followed soon after Felton; and later Charles Sumner, most
deeply mourned of all. He said, in allusion to these friends, in one of
his most beautiful sonnets:--
"I also wait! but they will come no more,
Those friends of mine, whose presence satisfied
The thirst and hunger of my heart. Ah me!
They have forgotten the pathway to my door!
Something is gone from Nature since they died,
And summer is not summer, nor can be."
Mr. Longfellow made a final visit to Europe in 1868, accompanied by his
children, two sisters, and a brother, and his brother-in-law Thomas
Appleton. This journey was much enjoyed by all, although Mr. Longfellow
was not a very good sight-seer, and impatient of delays. The remainder
of his life passed placidly at his old home, and he died at the age of
seventy-five, in the midst of his family and friends. Upon his coffin
they placed a palm-branch and a spray of passion-flower,--symbols of
victory and the glory of suffering; and he was buried at Mount Auburn,
beside her he had so long mourned. What his work was we may tell in the
eloquent words of his brother poet and most appreciative critic, Mr.
Stedman:--
"His song was a household service, the ritual of our feastings and
mournings; and often it rehearsed for us the tales of many lands,
or, best of all, the legends of our own. I see him, a silver-haired
minstrel, touching melodious keys, playing and singing in the
twilight, within sound of the rote of the sea. There he lingers
late; the curfew-bell has tolled and the darkness closes round,
till at last that tender voice is silent, and he softly moves unto
his rest."
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