Lowell and Longfellow continue to make their appearances in Mrs. Fields’s diary.
December 7, 1871.—Last Sunday Charlotte Cushman dined here. Our guests asked to meet her were Mr. and Mrs. Lowell and Mr. Longfellow; Miss Stebbins and Miss Chapman, her guests, also came. We had a lovely social time, Lowell making himself especially interesting, as he always does when he can once work himself up to the pitch of going out at all. He talked a while with me about poetry and his own topics after dinner. He said he was one of the few people who believed in absolute truth; that he always looked for certain qualities in writers, which if he could not discover, they no longer interested him and he did not care to read them. He discovered, for instance, in the writers who had survived the centuries the same kindred points, those points he studied until he discovered what the adamant was and where it was founded; then he would look into the writers of our own age to see if he could find the same stuff; there was little enough of it unfortunately. He does not like Reynolds’s portrait of Johnson, thought it untrue, far too handsome, yet highly characteristic in the management of the hands, which portray the man as he was when talking better probably than anything ever did. Mrs. Lowell appeared to enjoy herself. J. says L. is always more himself if Mrs. L. is happy and talkative. They are thinking of Europe. Mabel is to be married in April, and afterward they probably go at once to Europe.
A small party of friends assembled in the evening. Longfellow was the beloved and observed and worshipped among all.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
From a photograph taken in middle life
April 11, 1872.—Last night Jamie dined with Longfellow. John Field of Pennsylvania and Lowell were the two other guests. J. was there twenty minutes before the rest arrived, and Longfellow gave him an account of the wedding of a school-mate of mine, —— ——, an excellent generous-hearted, generously built woman, with a little limping old clergyman who has already had three wives and whose first name is ——. Longfellow said, in memory of what had gone before, the organist, as if driven by some evil spirit, played “Auld Lang Syne,” as the wedding procession came in, consisting of the bride and her brother, two very well-made large persons and the elderly bridegroom limping on behind all alone. The organist suddenly stopped at this point, breaking off with a queer little quirk and shiver as if he only then discovered what he was doing. Indeed the whole wedding appeared to have points to affect the risibles of the poet. He could hardly speak of it without laughter. He said, moreover, that it was, he thought, disgusting and outrageous for old men to get married.
Tuesday, September 23, 1872.—Longfellow came to town to see Jamie, in one of his loveliest moods. The day was so warm and fine, such a day of dreams, that he proposed to him every kind of excursion. “Come,” he said, “let us go to the tea stores and smell the tea; the warm atmosphere will bring out all the odors and we can get samples!” And again, “Come, let us go to the wharves and see the vessels just in from Italy or Spain. It will be a lovely sight in this soft sky, and we can hear the men speak in their native tongues.” Unhappily all these seductions were in vain, for Jamie was busy and was to lecture in Grantville in the evening. L. said: “At half-past eight I shall think of you doing thus and thus” (sawing the air with his arms). L. continued: “You know I have very strange people come to me—a man came a day or two ago by the name of Hyers, who has just published a book describing his own career. He believes that he is fed by the Lord! ‘How do you mean?’ asked I, with the knowledge that we were all fed in the same way. ‘Why,’ said H., ‘He leaves pies and peanuts on the sidewalks for me.’” Longfellow could hardly contain himself—but “after all,” he said, “that is very like Greene: when Greene comes to me, he always takes his money to come and go, just like my own sons and without so much as a thank you. But I like to have Greene come because he enjoys it so much and it is so strange. He amuses me. Then Appleton too, with his odd fancies, it would be hard to find a stranger man than he. He amused me immensely the other day by fancying an Indian, ‘Great Fire,’ or ‘Hole in the Wall,’ or some such fellow, coming to Boston for the first time. Passing a perruquier’s, he sees the window filled with masses of false hair; taking them to be scalps and the window to be an exhibition of these tokens of prowess, he rushes in, embraces the little perruquier behind the counter, treats him like a brother, and almost frightens the small hairdresser out of his senses!!”
L. likes Joaquin [Miller] much. Of course, he said, there are some things about him not altogether agreeable, such as flinging a quid of tobacco out of his mouth under the table; “but I don’t mind those things; perhaps,” he added, “perhaps I might have done the same as a youth of 20!!!”
Thursday, June 12, 1873.—Dined last night with the Aldriches and Mr. Bugbee at Mr. Lowell’s beautiful old Elmwood.[21] It was a perfect night, cool, fresh, moon-lighted, after a muggy day of heat. After dinner I went into the fine old study with Aldrich, where he showed me two or three little poems he has lately written. He was all ready to talk on literary topics and much in earnest about his own satisfaction over “Miss Mehitable’s Son” (which is indeed a very good story), and was full of disgust over the “Nation’s” cool dismissal of it. It was too bad; but that Dennet of the “Nation” is beneath contempt because of the slights he throws upon good literary work. Aldrich says he found “Asphodel” all worn to pieces, read and reread in the upstairs study. He finds Mr. Lowell’s library in curious disorder with respect to modern books. He is an easy lender and an easy borrower. The result is, everything is at loose ends. Only two volumes of Hawthorne can be found, for instance....