by Jim Bernhard
Eight days later he was buried, as he had instructed, in the cemetery at Rednal Hill, Birmingham, in the same grave as his friend and fellow priest, Ambrose St. John, with whom he had shared a house for thirty-two years. Newman was beatified in 2010 by Pope Benedict XVI.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
“The Sage of Concord,” Ralph Waldo Emerson, spent his final years unable to remember his own name. Until that unhappy turn of events, he was a highly regarded intellectual, known as the Father of Transcendentalism, a philosophy that holds that a divine spirit dwells in everything that exists, and that each person’s own moral sense is the standard that should dictate conduct. Emerson came by these beliefs through Unitarianism, his father being a minister of that denomination in Boston, where Waldo—as he later liked to call himself—was born on May 25, 1803. His father died when he was seven, and Waldo was sent to Boston Latin School and thereafter to Harvard College, from which he graduated at age eighteen. He taught school for several years, then attended Harvard Divinity School.
Ailing with chronic tuberculosis, which caused him chest pains, visual problems, and muscle weakness, Emerson became a “snowbird” and went south to St. Augustine, Florida, when he was twenty-three. He remained there for several months and met Prince Achille Murat, Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew. The two had many philosophical discussions that Emerson later credited with helping to form his own views.
Emerson returned to Boston, married Ellen Tucker, and accepted a position as junior pastor of Boston’s Second (Unitarian) Church. His wife died less than two years later. Emerson resigned his pastorate in a dispute with church officials about the nature of communion, a commemoration that he said was “not suitable” to him. He took an extended journey to Europe, where he met John Stuart Mill, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle.
On his return to the United States, he moved in with his mother in Concord, Massachusetts. In 1835, he married for the second time, to Lydia Jackson—whom he insisted on calling Lidian, because the name sounded better ending with a consonant preceding “Emerson.” With his wife and his mother, he moved into the Concord home where he would live until it burned in 1872. He and Lidian had four children, one of whom died in childhood of scarlet fever.
Emerson made his living from lecture fees and from a settlement of his first wife’s estate, although he had to sue her family to get it. Among Emerson’s notable works were several collections of essays, on such topics as “Nature,” “The American Scholar,” “Self-Reliance,” and “The Over-Soul,” and numerous poems, of which the most famous is “Concord Hymn,” with the well-worn line “the shot heard round the world.”
Tuberculosis haunted Emerson throughout his life. Not only did he suffer from it as a young man, but also two of his brothers, his first wife, and his close friend Henry David Thoreau all died of it at early ages.
Emerson’s religious beliefs were rooted in Unitarianism, but developed into the vaguely pantheistic notions associated with Transcendentalism. “Trust thyself” was his motto. In 1837, Emerson delivered a lengthy graduation address at his old alma mater, Harvard Divinity School, and so outraged the establishment by denying the divinity of Christ and comparing him to a “demigod” like Osiris or Apollo, that he was condemned as an atheist and not invited back to Harvard for thirty years.
Immortality of the soul was a nebulous topic for Emerson, as can be seen from his comments in his essay on “Worship” from Conduct of Life:
Of immortality, the soul, when well employed, is incurious. It asks no questions of the Supreme Power. . . . Higher than the question of our duration is the question of our deserving. Immortality will come to such as are fit for it, and he who would be a great soul in future, must be a great soul now. It is a doctrine too great to rest on any legend, that is, on any man’s experience but our own. It must be proved, if at all, from our own activity and designs, which imply an interminable future for their play. . . . You must do your work, before you shall be released. And as far as it is a question of fact respecting the government of the Universe, Marcus Antoninus summed the whole in a word, “It is pleasant to die, if there be gods; and sad to live, if there be none.”
Poor health began to affect Emerson in his sixties, and he greatly reduced his activities. He began to suffer memory loss that eventually resulted in his not being able to recall his own name. When asked how he was, he would reply, “Quite well. I’ve lost my mental faculties, but I am perfectly well.” The lung problems that had plagued him in his youth caught up with him, and on April 21, 1882, he was diagnosed with pneumonia and died six days later at the age of seventy-eight.
He is buried in what is now known as Authors Ridge, in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, where his friends Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne had earlier been laid to rest.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
At Nathaniel Hawthorne’s funeral, his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke of “the painful solitude of the man, which I suppose could no longer be endured, and he died of it.” Shunning social life almost to the point of being a recluse, Hawthorne grappled with his family legacy of strict Puritanism in all his stories and novels, the most famous of which are Twice-Told Tales, The Scarlet Letter, and The House of Seven Gables.
The Puritan family into which he was born on July 4, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts, had a long history; one of Nathaniel’s ancestors was a judge in the Salem witch trials of 1692. When Nathaniel was four, his father, a sea-captain, died of yellow fever in Surinam, and his mother and an uncle saw to Nathaniel’s education, sending him to Bowdoin College. Among his college friends were the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Franklin Pierce, a future U.S. president of modest achievement.
As early as age seventeen, Hawthorne knew he wanted to be an author, and for several years after college he lived with his mother and wrote stories. He published Twice-Told Tales and then took a job in the Boston Custom House. He married Sophia Peabody, a shy girl who shared Hawthorne’s antisocial tendencies, and they moved to Concord, where they rented a house from Emerson and embraced his Transcendental philosophy. Among Hawthorne’s friends and associates were Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., and Herman Melville.
The Hawthornes then moved to Salem, where Nathaniel worked briefly in the Salem Custom House, and over the next few years they lived in various other Massachusetts towns. His old classmate Franklin Pierce asked Hawthorne to write a biography for his presidential campaign, and when he was elected, he rewarded Hawthorne with the lucrative post of United States consul in Liverpool, England. He remained in the job for seven years, also traveling throughout Europe and completing his last novel, The Marble Faun.
Always torn between his family’s Puritanism and the Transcendental ideas he was first exposed to during a youthful stay at the experimental commune Brook Farm, Hawthorne adhered precariously to orthodox beliefs, at least in his concept of life after death. In Mosses from an Old Manse, he expressed an approving view of immortality:
I recline upon the still unwithered grass, and whisper to myself:—“Oh, perfect day!—Oh, beautiful world!—Oh, beneficent God!” And it is the promise of a blessed Eternity; for our Creator would never have made such lovely days, and have given us the deep hearts to enjoy them, above and beyond all thought, unless we were meant to be immortal. The sunshine is the golden pledge thereof. It beams through the gates of Paradise and shows us glimpses far inward.
On his return to the United States from Europe, Hawthorne’s health began to fail, but he refused to consult a doctor, and so the true nature of his illness is unknown. It is speculated that it might have been some form of cancer, possibly a brain tumor. In May of 1864, he set out with his friend, former President Pierce, on a trip to the hills of New Hampshire, which he hoped might help restore his health. But on May 19, the second night out, in Plymouth, New Hampshire, Hawthorne died unexpectedly in his sleep at the age of fifty-nine.
Emerson, Longfellow, and Louisa May Alcott were among the mo
urners as he was interred in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery at Concord.
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
Half of the world’s most famous poetic love affair, Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett, was born on March 6, 1806, in Durham, England, the eldest of twelve children. Barrett was part of her given name as well as the family name, as a result of her grandfather’s desire to perpetuate the name among his heirs. Both her tyrannical father and her mother came from wealthy families with large land holdings dependent on slave labor in Jamaica. The Moulton Barretts moved to Hope End, a secluded part of Herefordshire, where Elizabeth grew up, reading the classics and writing poetry at an early age. The family had business reverses and lost much of its wealth, then moved to London to a house at 50 Wimpole Street.
When she was fifteen, Elizabeth began suffering from a lifelong undiagnosed illness, which affected both her lungs and her spine and eventually led to her dependence upon laudanum and morphine. Her poetic output was prolific, including a translation of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound when she was twenty-seven. By the 1840s, Elizabeth B. Barrett was a well-known literary name. A friend of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle, and Tennyson, she was Tennyson’s rival for appointment as England’s Poet Laureate on the death of Wordsworth in 1850.
In 1844, Robert Browning, a poet six years her junior, was so dazzled by her work that he wrote to her, “I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett.” This infatuation blossomed into a love affair, vigorously opposed by Elizabeth’s father, and memorialized in the famous 1930 play by Rudolf Besier, The Barretts of Wimpole Street. After a secret courtship, Elizabeth and Robert were married on September 12, 1846, at St. Marylebone Parish Church, after which Elizabeth returned alone to her father’s home. One week later, on the pretext of walking her dog, Elizabeth left the house, taking her dog and her maid with her, and went with Browning to Paris for a honeymoon. Regarding Browning as a grasping gold-digger, Elizabeth’s father promptly disinherited her—as he did each of his three children who married during his lifetime.
The Brownings remained on the Continent for the rest of Elizabeth’s life, living on their literary earnings and occasional financial aid from friends. They resided in Paris and in various Italian cities—Rome, Siena, Lucca, and, for fourteen years, in Florence. Literary luminaries including William Makepeace Thackeray, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Ruskin, and George Sand were among their acquaintances.
Devoutly Christian in her faith, Elizabeth was influenced by both Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Paradise Lost, and once observed that “Christ’s religion is essentially poetry—poetry glorified.” She was also interested in spiritualism and dabbled in Mesmerism and Swedenborgianism. One of Browning’s pet names for her was “my little Portuguese,” and this undoubtedly was the inspiration for her Sonnets from the Portuguese. In one of the sonnets, she exhibits not only her love for Browning, but also her confident Christian faith:
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
In 1860, Elizabeth’s old lung disease began to plague her again, and her health steadily deteriorated, increasing her dependence on morphine. Although the exact nature of her illness is not known, later medical experts have speculated that the symptoms might have indicated hypokalemic periodic paralysis, a genetic disorder of body chemistry.
On June 29, 1861, at the age of fifty-five, Elizabeth Barrett Browning died at home in Casa Guidi in Florence, in the arms of her husband, who later wrote, “Then came what my heart will keep till I see her again and longer—the most perfect expression of her love to me within my whole knowledge of her. Always smilingly, happily, and with a face like a girl’s, and in a few minutes she died in my arms, her head on my cheek. . . . There was no lingering, nor acute pain, nor consciousness of separation, but God took her to himself as you would lift a sleeping child from a dark uneasy bed into your arms and the light. Thank God. . . . Her last word was—‘Beautiful’.”
She was buried in the Protestant Cemetery of Florence.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s literary reputation took a nosedive in the years following his death. Although no longer a favorite of the literati, during his lifetime he was among the most acclaimed and financially successful poets who ever lived. In an era when poetry could actually make money, he was famous on both sides of the Atlantic, admired by Queen Victoria, and one of his volumes sold ten thousand copies in a single day in England. His annual income in 1868 was close to a million dollars in today’s values.
This literary lion was born on February 27, 1807, in Portland, Maine (then part of Massachusetts), to Stephen and Zilpah Longfellow. His father was a lawyer, state legislator, and trustee of Maine’s Bowdoin College, to which young Henry was admitted at age fourteen. Gifted in languages, he was named Bowdoin’s first professor of modern European languages, teaching French, Italian, and Spanish; writing poetry; and turning out several textbooks. In 1834, he accepted a similar position at Harvard.
He and his wife, Mary, celebrated his appointment with a trip to Europe, where she died of complications of a miscarriage. Profoundly grieved, Longfellow returned to Cambridge and plunged into his work: teaching, chairing the department, and continuing to write poetry—which made him an international celebrity. His often-quoted poems, memorized by millions of schoolchildren, include Evangeline (“This is the forest primeval”), The Song of Hiawatha (“By the shore of Gitche Gumee/By the shining Big-Sea-Water”), The Courtship of Miles Standish (“Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?”), Tales of A Wayside Inn (which includes “Paul Revere’s Ride”), and hundreds of lyric poems such as “The Day is Done” (“And the night shall be filled with music”), “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” “The Village Blacksmith” (“Under a spreading chestnut-tree”), “The Children’s Hour,” “The Arrow and the Song” (“I shot an arrow into the air”) and “Excelsior.”
In 1843, he married Fanny Appleton, whom he had courted for seven years, and they had five children. At the age of forty-seven, Longfellow resigned his burdensome academic job at Harvard and devoted himself full-time to poetry and literary celebrity. He continued to live in Cambridge for the rest of his life, traveling on occasion to Europe. His circle of friends and acquaintances included his Bowdoin classmate Nathaniel Hawthorne; Ralph Waldo Emerson; Oliver Wendell Holmes; James Russell Lowell; Walt Whitman; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; John Ruskin; William Gladstone; and Oscar Wilde.
Longfellow’s wife, Fanny, died tragically in 1861. The family story is that she was melting sealing wax when her clothing caught fire, and she died of burns the next day. There is some evidence, however, that the fire was caused by the Longfellows’ five-year-old daughter playing with matches. Longfellow himself, in trying to save Fanny, was badly burned on the lower part of his face, and to hide the scars he grew the beard that is seen in his famous portraits. After Fanny’s death, Longfellow confined himself largely to translations, including his monumental version of Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Longfellow’s religious views were uncertain, sometimes veering toward Unitarianism and on other occasions taking a more orthodox Christian tone. One view of life after death is found in his poem “Resignation,” an elegy for his one-year-old daughter:
We see but diml
y through the mists and vapors;
Amid these earthly damps
What seem to us but sad, funereal tapers
May be heaven’s distant lamps.
There is no Death! What seems so is transition;
This life of mortal breath
Is but a suburb of the life elysian,
Whose portal we call Death.
Longfellow was plagued throughout his life by poor health. He suffered constant pain from neuralgia, his eyesight was bad, and in his later years he was afflicted with rheumatism. Resigned to constant ailments, he wrote to his friend Charles Sumner, “I do not believe anyone can be perfectly well, who has a brain and a heart.” On one occasion, a woman admirer knocked on the door of his house in Cambridge, and, unaware that she was greeted by Longfellow himself, asked, “Is this the house where Longfellow was born?” Longfellow told her it was not. She then asked if he had died here. “Not yet,” he replied.
Death did come in March of 1882, when Longfellow took to his bed with a severe stomach pain, now known to be peritonitis, which he treated for several days with opium. He died on Friday, March 24, at the age of seventy-five, surrounded by members of his family.
He was buried beside both of his wives in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge. He left an estate of more than eight million dollars in current values.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
Macabre twists and turns marked Edgar Allan Poe’s life, his works, and, especially, his death. Born January 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts, to two actors who were appearing in King Lear, he was named Edgar after a character in that play who feigns madness, and he was orphaned by the age of two.
