THE LONGFELLOW HOUSE
It has the requisite dignity of its poet and its general, the well-dressed air of its Tory merchant, the scholarly simplicity of its lexicographer, the open-armed hospitality of its rich apothecary-general, and the grace of the lady who is its present chatelaine.
The Longfellow House
“The moonlight poet,” a clever Frenchman called him, “having little passion, but a calmness of attitude which approaches majesty.” In a single deft pass of verbal legerdemain he conjures about the venerable head of Longfellow all the cool alluring mystery that veils a far-away mountain peak at night. He waves the magic word “moonlight” and the sun puffs out. In one stroke he has drawn a caricature which is not a character. The brightness of words tempted him into an error of drawing at which he would have paused if he had visited the poet’s house.
For it is a yellow citadel stormed by sunlight from morning to night—sunlight pouring down upon its southerly wall and dancing off the terrace to ripple over the lawn, splashing in minor torrents through the tall windows of Martha Washington’s room, and of the poet’s red-curtained study opposite, slanting its mellow shafts at acute angles into the rooms on the north side, and breaking up at last into a carnival of color in the garden.
No such crisp epigram as the Frenchman’s will dismiss the house. True, he would have found himself at home in the midst of gay colorings and an orderly clutter of interesting and precious garnitures, furniture, books and objets d’art. But as his critical faculties were trained upon the interior, as he began to retrace the history of this building, obviously so colonially American, and yet become so definitely of another period without losing its colonial flavor, he would have groped in vain for a bright phrase to polish off his impression.
The Longfellow house is “typical” of nothing, and we may thank heaven for that. It borrows here and there from architectural convention, improves vastly upon it here and there, accepts easily the change in fortunes, in family and in comforts of its successive owners. It has the requisite dignity of its poet and its general, the well-dressed air of its Tory merchant, the scholarly simplicity of its lexicographer, the open-armed hospitality of its rich apothecary-general, and the grace of the lady who is its present occupant. The composite of these qualities is a picture which is almost as familiar and as dear to America as Mount Vernon.
Out of that picture troops a story more varied in human incident than that of Washington’s own home. It begins in 1759, when a Colonel Vassall built a splendid new house on Tory Row, the vulgar name for the Via Sacra of Cambridge, now called Brattle Street. Within a radius of a quarter-mile one might take tea with the Lees, dine with the last of the King’s foresters, discuss politics with Richard Lechmere, or theology with the Reverend East Apthorp, without canvassing more than a small group of the sociable colony of royalists whose residences gave the street its nickname. Administrations change, the Tory “keynote” is perennial, and if your visit to Cambridge had been timed in the early seventies of the Eighteenth Century, the chances are that the prevailing topic of conversation in Tory Row would have been politics, and the keynote would have been—as today—“What are we coming to?”
At that particular season they came to an April forenoon of ’75. A line of red-coats marched out from Boston at the double, past the college, and on into the country toward Lexington, where there was trouble. A few hours later they returned, also at the double, because there had been trouble in the country. On the tail of the British column came the men of Acton and Billerica and Carlisle and Concord, and of every village along the line of pursuit. Four civilians were killed at the corner of Dunster and Winthrop Streets—perhaps because they tried to oppose with well-aimed half-bricks the further retreat of a much-irritated British soldiery. The air of Cambridge became suddenly unhealthy for royalists, and darkness in the fine houses on Tory Row told its own story of the hurried departure of their owners.
The Vassalls fled to Halifax. Cambridge was becoming an armed camp, with incoming militia quartered where they saw fit to alight. The men of Marblehead made themselves very comfortable on the Vassall estate. The battle of Bunker Hill on June 17th, with heavy loss and no tangible advantage to either side, threw the camp into utter confusion and swelled the number of volunteers to fourteen thousand. They swarmed down in a great semi-circle to sever the Boston peninsula from the mainland, while the British retired into the city to await reinforcements. Congress met, chose as commander of the army a young soldier-farmer from Virginia who had shown great intelligence in discussing military plans, and on July 3d he rode down Tory Row from Watertown, made one of the shortest public speeches on record, and took command of his army.