He was not much trouble, really—only a polite young man from Maine who had lost his wife a year or two before, and who had just been made professor of modern languages in the College. He was usually up in his room writing at night, while Mrs. Craigie read Voltaire or Madame de Sevigné down in the library, or played an old song on an old pianoforte. Another paying guest was a Miss Sally Lowell, whose talented nephew, James Russell Lowell, was beginning to be heard from; a third was the lexicographer Worcester, who was so taken with the house that he later bought it. For Longfellow’s part, they were amiable neighbors, but not so exacting as to interrupt the absorbing routine of a man of thirty embarking upon a full professorship.
For nearly twenty years he served the College in this capacity. The College was thrifty, and anxious to get the most out of his teaching; Longfellow’s health was not good, and the duties of his position asked more of him than he could sometimes give. He had resolved as a youth to become an eminent man of letters, just as determinedly as any man in business ever set his face toward the height of power. He kept a diary of progress, as scrupulous a record in its own line as the balance sheets of an industry, and he never allowed himself to be diverted by praise or ill-health from the pursuit of his ambition. Steadily and smoothly there came from his pen an output toward which the public looked with growing anticipation. Now it was experimental, now political, now religious. The best of it came from the warmest corner of a warm patriotic heart, where he kept a great treasure of the legends of his own country.
When Hiawatha, Evangeline, and The Courtship of Miles Standish had appeared, his fame had crossed boundaries and oceans. Word-mongers say they are not his finest work, but they went straight, from his heart to the heart of plain people everywhere. His enthusiasm for the Indian tradition that is our only native folklore found utterance in Hiawatha; the story of Evangeline he got from Hawthorne; the romance of John Alden and Priscilla Mullins he picked from his own family tree. As a poet he gave the lie to the precious though fashionable complaint that nothing real in art need be expected from America until she had had a century or two of sandpapering. His enthusiasm of race drew occasional outbursts of a greater quality—the thing that made him a great citizen as well as a great national artist—the immortal spirit which went into such majestic songs as The Building of the Ship. “In neither case,” observes Higginson, “was this Americanism trivial, wasteful, or ignoble in its tone.” Will the professional hucksters of 100-per-centism please copy?
Contrary to persistent tradition, a poet is not a sulky hermit plucking ideas from empty air and full bottles. Longfellow had about him a laboratory full of elixirs of association, to which his sensitive spirit was a quick reagent. His second marriage gave him a beloved wife, his wife’s father gave Mrs. Longfellow the Craigie house to live in always, and Mrs. Longfellow gave her husband the children who were the Alpha and Omega of his affection for children in general. The familiar portrait of the children hangs in the dining-room; a pretty picture, painted by Reed, the same who wrote “Sheridan’s Ride.”
Harvard activities supplied him with a circle of friends which spread like ripples in a pond with every new literary production he cast forth. Come into his study and meet the best of them. A fine white room on the front of the house, high ceiling, tall windows, bright turkey-red curtains falling from borders scalloped like a flounce from Godey’s Ladies’ Book. An orange-tree flourishing in a tub at a sunny window—as it was when he stood at his high desk and wrote of Spain. Most of his writing was done at a round Duncan Phyfe table, whose graces are hidden under a faded green felt cover. On its dusty self-pattern of ivy leaves are the articles he left there as he died: item, a miscellany of books; item, an ornate ink-well of Coleridge which Longfellow treasured; item, a historic ink-well which had been the successive property of Moore and Crabbe, which Longfellow venerated; and, item, a little tupenny glass ink-bottle which Longfellow himself used! Even the quill pens are there with which he formed that calm, round graceful handwriting.
You came to see his friends. You shall. Here is a spare young man with a sensitive, kindly smile about the eyes—from Concord he is, and his name is Emerson. Over in that extraordinarily long armchair by the hearth sits (on his shoulder-blades) a handsome chap, the only man who fits the chair—six feet and more of Charles Summer. On the walls are the crayon portraits customary as gifts before the days of the camera: here is Felton, whom Dickens called “the heartiest of Greek professors”; here that fascinating Agassiz, always shuttling between Cambridge and some tropic or other; here Hawthorne’s grave dark eyes.
Picture him later in life chatting before the fire with Lowell, Holmes, John Lothrop Motley, or Whittier. Shift the scene to a Boston tavern with the same company, and three or four more of their stature, engaged in starting The Atlantic Monthly, and ask yourself where a poet could seek more inspiration. Gossips who knew this group only from outside called it the “Mutual Admiration Society,” and you may find in the Boston Athenaeum a review of Evangeline written by Felton on which some scoffing contemporary has pencilled “Insured at the Mutual.” There is good authority for picturing Longfellow and a pair of younger cronies returning under the moon from a good dinner at Porter’s, singing in harmony—“I am a Rajah!! Putterum!” And in the years when the Saturday Club was flourishing, the poet was a regular attendant, and a modest, dry-spoken commentator on discussions in which the Olympians matched wits.
Every eminent visitor to Boston paid him court and even Oscar Wilde paid him a patronizing call. Many came who were not eminent, and the poet often invited aimless tourists in to see the house. To one such couple he exhibited the Coleridge ink-well, explaining helpfully that Coleridge had written The Ancient Mariner. “Oh,” said the bridegroom, and nodded. Then, puzzled, he said: “Say! who done the Old Oaken Bucket?” There were memorable evenings spent in the Howe tavern at Sudbury with Ole Bull, the fiddler, and an ingenious group of story-tellers whose yarns took shape in “The Tales of a Wayside Inn.”
Longfellow in his later years was the chief figure of Cambridge. Great men and women came to pay him tribute and to find his modesty unimpeached. When the undergraduates started a mutiny over in the College and riotous language was echoing from the red brick of old “Mass.” hall, it was quieted when one youth cried: “Let’s hear what Mr. Longfellow has to say about it—he’s fair, at any rate.” And when the spreading chestnut tree over Dexter Pratt’s smithy fell, the children of Cambridge gave their pennies to fashion him an armchair of its wood, and used to traipse fearlessly into the Longfellow house from time to time to call on the poet and see that the chair gave him good service. Without question it is one of the homeliest chairs in the world—and one of the finest.
One cannot leave the house without a glance at his other friends, his closer intimates, nor enter the house without remarking them. Books, books, books—heavy Italian walnut cases of them, white shelves of them, heaps of them, in the study, the halls, the dining-room, the drawing room, a vault full of the rarest of them in the east entry. I have not visited the pantry, but I will make a small wager that there are books on the cake-box. It is a judicious collection by a man who was a hungry reader and a lover of beautiful volumes. There are ranks of Italian folios, Tasso and Ariosto in white vellum—and of apparently everything else in equally rich costume, for the years of the poet’s great public appreciation built for him a formidable library of handsomely bound presentation copies and he was no mean purchaser himself.