“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.
After a fortnight in the residence on Harvard Square, now known as Wadsworth House, he ordered the men of Marblehead out of the Vassall house to make room for his staff and headquarters. For ten months it was his base of operations, the longest period during which he occupied any headquarters during the Revolution. He came there the authorized commander of an undisciplined, inexperienced mob. He left only after he had transformed that mob into an army, fed it, clothed it, armed it, guarded it from small-pox, and finally, with its valor and enthusiasm and skill, ejected the British from Boston for a more hospitable battleground to the southward.
The southeast room was his office. One day in the early winter of ’75–6 an out-rider came in with good news, and presently Martha Washington “arrived in great ceremony, with a coach and four black horses, with postilions and servants in scarlet livery.” She was installed in the sunny room across the hallway, the room from whose walls look down today the interesting faces of Sir William Pepperrell’s children, and the same room in which you may find an exquisite onyx and metal goblet from the studio of that delightful international scamp, Benvenuto Cellini.
As chatelaine of headquarters she presided over a modest celebration of their wedding anniversary, although, Miss Alice Longfellow says, “the General had to be much persuaded by his aides.” And there was a “Twelfth Night party” which is a tradition in the Longfellow family. On rare occasions since it has been repeated, once by a group of youngsters of all ages who impersonated in costume the guests of Washington, and some of those latter-day guests were direct descendants of the earlier dignitaries. On another winter night the Longfellow children dressed in the characters of the successive occupants of the house, and the sword of General Craigie clanked about the boots of a certain Boston lawyer until, as he says “I was no longer Dana; I felt like a regular profiteer!”
For the end of the Revolution was the beginning of a large period of hospitality in the life of General Andrew Craigie. He had been apothecary-general to the Continental army, and in the light of the recent war, it must be evident that purveying to any victorious army is profitable. The Vassall House, during the seventeen years after Washington’s departure, had been occupied by two good patriots: Nathaniel Tracy, who gave a hundred ships to the government during the war, and Thomas Russel, the same who set Timothy Dexter an example for making a fortune. Then Andrew Craigie (General, if you like) bought the house, and it bears his name as commonly today as that of the poet.
Hawthorne, the quiet, handsome young writer who used to visit the house years later, should have known General Craigie. For all his garden parties at Commencement time, with their distinguished guests, like Talleyrand, and Admiral d’Estaing, and Prince Edward (the father of Queen Victoria), for all the refinishing and painting he did in the house, for all the splendor of the organ which he installed in the northeast room between two fine Corinthian columns, and the rare girandole in the study, and the Adam mantels—for all his creature magnificence, he had a scenario or two concealed about his person.
Hark!
“I am the ghost of Madame Craigie. I loved an impetuous youth from the south, then a student. We parted, for my family forbade me. But we swore to write each other. He did not write; I pined; then, desperate, obeyed my parents’ mandates, and married General Craigie. And as we sat at table in his great house, a letter came to me, in my maiden name—the name, ah me! now forfeit—saying ‘I have no word of you, no word since I went away. Why do you not write?’ And then I knew that they had kept his letters from me, and mine from him! And from that day I never spoke to my husband save on matters of essential business.”
Hawthorne could have made something out of that.
Or this: the poet was surprised one morning as he came downstairs to see lying on one of the lower treads a letter. It was a fervent letter, with no clue to the addressee nor to its source. Inquiry disclosed nothing from any member of the household. The next morning another letter—also fervent. When it happened again and still again, he set himself to solve the mystery. And it was no mystery, for in the Craigie dynasty there had been an affair, which Andrew was only too anxious not to pile on his wife’s already considerable grievance. So he walled the letters up under the stairs, and thought them safe. But as the sea gives up her dead, the gradual settling of the staircase and the tapping of feet upon it slowly and inexorably provoked a crack through which revenge fed the letters, one by one, confiding the story piecemeal, to a poet.
Capricious investments sent Craigie to his grave in 1818 a poor man. If Madam Craigie was in the slightest degree relieved at his departure, her obligation to him was diluted by the fact that she must now support herself. By “taking in boarders” she could manage to live on in the old house, and make ends meet. For those who could pass her rather rigid inspection it offered accommodation far better than the average. Naturally such folk as Edward Everett and his bride, and President Jared Sparks of Harvard and Josiah Worcester, who wrote a dictionary, needed no references. With strangers it was different. A gentle young fellow with light hair and deep-set eyes, and a clean, aquiline profile, appeared one afternoon in 1837 and asked for lodgings. She said she had none vacant. In the temporizing dialogue which followed it developed that his name was Longfellow and that he was the author of a book she had quite recently been reading, and her manner thawed so readily that he got the room.
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.
They are where the poet left them, and so they will stay. When the actual tenancy of the house by the Longfellow heirs comes to a period, it will be held securely in trust just as it is, just as he left it one March day in 1882. Those generous and tactful heirs have already given the city of Cambridge the park which affords the house a clear vista to the Charles, and have given Longfellow land across the Charles to make up most of Soldiers Field, the great playground of Harvard. Now they have wisely provided that the house shall not become a museum, but that it shall remain the home of whose atmosphere and influence they cherish so acute an appreciation.
Longfellow’s bust stands in Westminster Abbey, the first American so to be honored. It is made of marble, and is a good likeness. Longfellow’s soul lives in Cambridge, in his home. The house is a better likeness than the bust, and of warmer stuff. His children’s trust will perpetuate their generosity for our children’s children.
* * * * *
A dignified old clock stands on the stairs, and ticks:
“Forever—never
Never—forever.”