When it is remembered that the Pennsylvania Hospital and the City Almshouse were both on Spruce Street, and that either of these could have been the scene of the meeting of Evangeline and Gabriel, what is more probable, that, as Longfellow walked Spruce Street, in 1824, he could, at the western entrance of Holy Trinity church have glanced at the passageway to the entrance of the church and seen as you can to-day see, the little churchyard attached to it? Then passing eastward, to Sixth Street, and turning northward, he had to pass the church, when again he saw “the little Catholic churchyard”—the only such in the city in 1824, and the smallest even to-day.
Remember, Longfellow, in describing the burial place of the lovers, wrote:
“Side by side, in their nameless graves, the lovers are sleeping,
Under the humble walls of the little Catholic churchyard.
In the heart of the city, they lie, unknown and unnoticed;
Daily the tides of life go ebbing and flowing beside them.”
Mind, he says, “the little Catholic churchyard.” Many, I fear, have thought of Old St. Joseph’s, “the little Catholic church,” and so, have assigned to it the burial place, but it is “the little Catholic churchyard,” which Longfellow speaks of, and the smallest such which Philadelphia had in 1824, or could have had in 1793, the time of the pestilence, was Holy Trinity, which dates from 1789. It best fills the probabilities in the case: the almshouse at Tenth Street; the hospital at Eighth; the little Catholic churchyard at Sixth Street.
The word “yard,” too, is important. He does not say Catholic graveyard—but churchyard. Holy Trinity best fills the idea of a small space attached to a building—a church—and having the commonly called “yard,” a small enclosed place—in this case, at the side of the church, right “under the humble walls.” No other Catholic churchyard in 1793, could have been “under the walls” of any church but this. St. Joseph’s had ceased to be a place of interment; St. Mary’s was, and yet is, a large graveyard. It is not a “little churchyard,” and interments cannot be said, even in imagination of poetry, to have been “under the walls” of the church, as big in 1793 as to-day, save by about twenty feet.
While, of course, there was no real Evangeline or Gabriel in Philadelphia, and no real burial anywhere, the sole discussion is confined to the churchyard Longfellow saw, in 1824, and in 1847, had in mind as the burial place of the two. No place so well fills the possibilities, even the probability, as Holy Trinity’s “little churchyard,” at Sixth and Spruce.
How Longfellow came to write Evangeline has been narrated; how Lowell thought the “tradition” a fit one for a story, but that Longfellow desired he be allowed to use it for a poem.