Such wonderful colors overspread our bay this evening, the wide heavens, and all that lay between, it seemed an unreal and magic glory, and I recall dimly Hawthorne’s disgust when he endeavored to describe a landscape. The Lord, he says, expressed himself in this glory; how shall we therefore interpret into language when he himself has taken this form of speech as the only adequate expression to convey his meaning to us? Who does not feel this in looking at the glories of Nature in this perfect season?
And here is a final glimpse of Longfellow, at Manchester-by-the-Sea, shortly after Don Pedro of Brazil had visited him in Cambridge:—
Thursday, July 6, 1876.—A fine rushing wind—no rain, but a wind that seemed to tear everything up by the roots. I dared not venture out in the morning. To our surprise and delight Mr. Longfellow came to dine. He was pleased to find Anna here, and fell to talking of Heidelberg in German with her and quoting the poets most delightfully. We sat in the front hall and rejoiced over his presence as he talked, for he was in a fine talking mood. He told us of the Emperor’s visit and of his soldierly though most simple bearing; how he came to call upon him after his dinner, and when, as he rose to go, Longfellow said, “Your Majesty, I thank you for the honor you have done me.” He said, “Ah! no, Longfellow, none of your nonsense, let us be friends together. I hope you will write to me. I will write you first and you must promise to answer.” As they walked down the garden path together, Longfellow raised his hat and stepped one side as he was about to get into his carriage. “No, no,” he said laughingly, “there you are at it again.” In short, he has left a pleasant memory behind.
Longfellow told us his maids broke everything he possessed; at last they had broken a very beautiful Japanese vase or bowl which Charley brought home—so he had made a Latin epitaph for the maid. Unhappily I recall only the last line:—
Nihil tetigit quod non fregit.
He described Blumenbach very amusingly, whose lectures on Natural History he attended as a youth in Heidelberg. He descended from his desk one day and came and rested his hand on the rail just before which L. was seated. He had been speaking of Platonic love. “Und die Platonische Liebe ist nach Amerika gegangen,” he said, looking at Longfellow. The whole student audience roared and applauded.
He was in the loveliest spirits and manners. His friendly ways to my three friendless girls were not only such as to excite them profoundly, but there was sincere feeling in his invitation to them to call upon him and in his questions in their behalf.
The wind subsided as we sat together; the two young Bigelows sang “Maid of Athens” and one or two other songs, and then he departed. How sorry we were as we watched his retreating figure, as he and dear J. wound down the hill in the little phaeton.
Mrs. Fields’s gallery of friends would be incomplete without a single sketch of Whittier’s familiar outline. Out of many which the diaries contain, one may best be taken, for it shows him in company with that other friend, Celia Thaxter, whom also Mrs. Fields counted among the few to whose memory she devoted special chapters in her “Authors and Friends”; and it brings the three together at Mrs. Thaxter’s native Isles of Shoals, so long a mecca of the “like-minded.”