His schoolmate Elijah Kellogg, later to be famous for his children’s stories, recalled young Henry in these words in 1885: “He was a very handsome boy, retiring, without being reserved, there was a frankness about him that won you at once. He looked you square in the face. His eyes were full of expression, and it seemed as though you could look down into them as into a clear spring.” Kellogg remembered him as thoughtful, but not melancholy, and totally lacking that tinge of sadness that his later years would bring.
Much of his real education, of course, took place in his father’s library, which was small but well stocked in the classics of British literature, as filtered by eighteenth-century taste. Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Dryden, Thomson, Goldsmith, The Spectator, The Rambler, Plutarch’s Lives; the histories of Hume, Gibbon, Gillies, and Robertson; Hannah More (to be read on Sundays)—these were the books that Samuel remembered seeing there. The Longfellow children also read aloud Cowper’s poems, Moore’s Lalla Rookh, Robinson Crusoe, The Arabian Nights, “and Henry took delight in Don Quixote, and Ossian, and would go about the house declaiming the windy and misty utterances of the latter.” Below the Longfellows’ house, on the western side of the Back Cove, was a tangle of trees, tidal estuaries, and overgrown ravines that separated the Deering estate from the town. This was the Deering’s Woods of “My Lost Youth”—today’s much tamer Deering Oaks Park—a place where Portland boys went to shoot birds and squirrels and escape the confines of home. Henry went along, but to sit under the trees and read and mediate the rough and resiny Maine forest into the greenwood of his British literary masters.
Then finally he found an American book that revealed to him how unpredictable the border between imagination and reality could be—or, rather, how seamlessly the imagination could transform everyday life into something deliciously sweet. He never quite got over it. In his own words, forty years later:
Every reader has his first book; I mean to say, one book among all others which in early youth first fascinates his imagination, and at once excites and satisfies the desires of his mind. To me, this first book was the Sketch-Book of Washington Irving. I was a school-boy when it was published [in 1819], and read each succeeding number with ever increasing wonder and delight, spell-bound by its pleasant humor, its melancholy tenderness, its atmosphere of revery,—nay, even by its gray-brown covers, the shaded letters of its titles, and the fair clear type, which seemed an outward symbol of its style. . . . [W]henever I open its pages, I open also that mysterious door which leads back into the haunted chambers of youth.
By this point, Longfellow had already written a good deal of verse. But so had his brother and his older sisters; it was a social skill, like playing the piano or being able to sketch, and one which every genteel person was expected to attempt for personal or familial amusement. Henry wanted to see his in print. As a result, on November 17, 1820, readers of the Portland Gazette—a pro-Federalist weekly—found in its columns four stanzas entitled “The Battle of Lovell’s Pond.” It was a patriotic elegy for the colonists killed near Hiram in 1725 in a battle that had already achieved folkloric status in the Maine back country, as a kind of proto–Custer’s Last Stand. The Massachusetts men had died at the hands of “howling savages,” but civilization had marched on, as the myth had it. The poem was signed “HENRY.” According to Samuel Longfellow’s reverential biography of his older brother, Henry was visiting that evening in the house of his school friend Frederic Mellen (himself a future poet). Frederic’s father, Judge Mellen, picked up the Gazette and asked if anyone had read the new poem. “Very stiff, remarkably stiff; moreover, it is all borrowed, every word of it.” Henry was mortified but kept his mouth shut. The judge was not entirely wrong: a poem called “Lovellspond” by the future Bowdoin professor (and future Longfellow friend) Thomas C. Upham had appeared the previous year in his collection American Sketches. The theme is the same, as is some of the language. But Upham took five stanzas to do what the thirteen-year-old Longfellow did in four, and the boy managed to speed up and tighten the poem while giving it a patriotic flourish at the end. Neither poem is memorable, but judge which is worse—
In the earth’s verdant bosom, still, crumbling, and cold,
Sleep the soldiers who mingled in battle of old;
They rushed to the slaughter, they struggled, and fell
And the clarion of glory was heard in their knell . . .
Or—
Cold, cold is the north wind and rude is the blast
That sweeps like a hurricane loudly and fast,
As it moans through the tall waving pines lone and drear,
Sighs a requiem sad o’er the warrior’s bier . . .
In “Cold, cold is the north wind . . .” and what follows we catch the first hint of the familiar music and pulsating beat that was to make Longfellow, for more than a century, the most famous poet in the English-speaking world. What the thirteen-year-old boy had done was to write an imitation of Upham’s work, in the best eighteenth-century sense of that word. (The grisly, racist subject of the two poems did prove atypical for both poets: Upham was to become a major force in the American peace movement of the 1840s; Longfellow was to conceive of his Indian hero Hiawatha as anything but a savage.)
What Henry had to do now was to learn how to be a nineteenth-century poet.
A SMALL COLLEGE IN MAINE
PORTLAND IN THE 1820s was not a bad place in which to learn that lesson. Despite its apparent remoteness, it was a maritime center, linked through its coasting trade with Boston and through its lumber-based economy with an international market that stretched from the West Indies to the Baltic. In a sense, Portland was not a distant appendage of Massachusetts at all; economically speaking, it was part of a North Atlantic matrix of seafaring cities. Not only had a Wadsworth died “on the shores of Tripoli” to protect this rapidly expanding American commercial empire, but virtually every Portlander had friends and relations in distant lands. Zilpah, who hated the northern winters, daydreamed of visiting her friend in Guadeloupe; when her third son, Alexander, sailed with his uncle’s squadron to the Pacific, he discovered a familiar Portland family settled as merchants in Peru; Zilpah’s brothers traded in England, Russia, and France. Maine had products much of the world wanted—every manner of wood, from raw pine to skillfully shaved cedar shingles; every variety of naval store, from ropes to tar; fish, smoked or dried; even ice, cut from the frozen rivers, packed in sawdust in the holds of ships, and sent as far as India. What Maine did not produce—cotton, for example—was transported to Europe and beyond in Maine-built ships owned and captained by Maine men, not infrequently accompanied by their wives and families. By a nice coincidence, the oldest continually operated ship chandlery in the United States still does business, facing Canada, on the waterfront of Eastport, Maine—S. L. Wadsworth & Son, founded by the poet’s uncle.
Portland unfortunately produced no Thomas Mann to chronicle the rise and fall of its great merchant families; but as in that other northern Protestant seaport, Mann’s Lübeck, the commercial activity on Casco Bay masked a good deal of human and economic upheaval. Stephen Longfellow had begun his law practice at the height of Maine’s post-Revolutionary expansion, when almost overnight its population trebled and its merchants and lumber lords grew rich. When Henry was born in 1807, Jefferson’s hated embargo was about to cripple the coastal New England economy and, in an image popular at that time, grass would grow on the wharves. This image of nature reclaiming what had so painstakingly been created by the backs and brains of New Englanders was a particularly chilling one. New England’s mission was not simply to grow rich; it was to convert a wilderness into a civilized, Christianized land. In the 1790s it was considered a happy instance of God’s blessings that the Maine lands that needed to be cleared before they could be settled and farmed were covered with trees whose lumber could be harvested. It would take another hundred years before the beauty of these forests as forests would be widely appreciated, and almost another hundred before there w
as any widespread understanding of environmentalism. But to an observer in Longfellow’s youth, there was no necessary contradiction between “enjoying” nature as sublime and calculating the number of board feet of timber that same piece of nature might yield. Zilpah, for example, wrote from Hiram to her daughter Anne in June of 1825, after an excursion into the woods with her brother Peleg: “We remained there two or three hours, contemplating the grandeur and beauty of the scene, and observing the descent of the logs over the falls. The river drivers were at work . . . and innumerable logs some of them very large, came thundering over the falls with the utmost rapidity, much to our amusement.” By the time Longfellow was ready for college, the Maine frontier had been pushed far up the river valleys. Both residents and visitors assumed that in time the entire state would be covered with farms and villages and that even the climate would improve. (The theory was that removing the dense cover of trees would allow the soil to be more easily warmed.) Portland would serve as the great entrepot, shipping the produce of the hinterland and marketing the luxury goods imported by its far-ranging merchant fleet.
Despite the unpredictability of foreign commerce, by the 1820s Portland was again a prosperous and optimistic place, and a young man growing up there might easily have felt that he had broad horizons. Among the many objects that have survived in the Wadsworth-Longfellow House from the world of Longfellow’s childhood—blue-and-white willowware china, hide-covered traveling chests, stacks of sheet music for piano and voice—perhaps none is so evocative as the brightly colored book of geography lessons painstakingly copied by Aunt Lucia as a child in 1794. Her nephews must have spent many hours poring over it, on that third floor of the house they shared with her. In vivid pinks and blues, and with exquisite penmanship, she had recreated the world: Lapland, Muscovy, Hindostan, Tartary, New Holland, Cochin China, the Mogul Empire. None of it was beyond a Portlander’s reach.
But did trade bring culture? Could a poet survive in the counting rooms? The general pattern of American life—already so widely lamented, so rarely amended—was not encouraging: people were too busy. Nonetheless, the small city of Portland in the 1820s and early 1830s supported an exceptionally talented circle of writers and artists. The best known of these were a recent Bowdoin graduate, Seba Smith (whose journalistic creation “Major Jack Downing” made him the first in a long line of back-country political satirists and dialect humorists), and the more controversial John Neal, a novelist and pioneering art critic who had returned to Portland after a decade of travel. Still abroad but widely read at home was the Portland-born Nathaniel Parker Willis, who had shown how a smooth and charming American could conquer London (where Longfellow would meet him in 1835). Add to these the names of Elizabeth Oakes Smith (Seba’s wife), Isaac McClellan, Ann Stephens, Joseph Holt Ingraham, Nathaniel Deering, Frederic and Prentice Mellen, and the young Longfellow, and you had the makings of what, by the standards of Jacksonian America, was a major literary center. In Lawrence Buell’s words, “one could even argue that the Portland contribution to antebellum New England letters came close to rivaling that of Cambridge or Concord.”
The promise was never fulfilled, and by the end of the 1830s many of these people had moved away or had failed to develop their careers. The most obvious explanation is that Portland was too far from the major publishing centers—at that time, Philadelphia and New York—with their networks of editors, critics, booksellers, and distributors. The ease with which American publishers pirated British writing also made it more difficult for native writers to establish themselves in the marketplace. Nonetheless, for a young man with literary interests, Portland in the 1820s would have been a heady place in which to live and write—a community in which the notion of a literary career would have seemed neither inconceivable nor entirely quixotic.
Longfellow would gladly have gone off to Harvard—he had already had an exhilarating taste of Boston life on a trip with Aunt Lucia—but there were compelling reasons to go instead to the new college at Brunswick, some thirty miles farther “Down East.” His paternal grandfather had been among its founders; his father took seriously his duties as first an overseer, then a trustee of the promising “literary institution”; many of his family’s closest associates had a large stake in its success. Chartered in 1794, and in operation since 1802, Bowdoin College was the physical embodiment of the cultural and civic aspirations of “the great and the good” of the District of Maine—an enterprise that would make the desert bloom (to use a phrase from Isaiah often quoted by Bowdoin’s founders), and the District a safe haven for republican values and rational religion. And it was cheaper than Harvard.
The family tradition handed on to biographers was that while Stephen Longfellow had allowed the well-prepared Henry to matriculate at Bowdoin in 1821, he kept the fourteen-year-old boy at home that first year because he was too young to live in college. A more likely explanation is that he was not sure sixteen-year-old Stephen Jr. was ready to leave his supervision. It had long been clear that Stephen was a difficult and exasperating child, though certainly not an unlovable one—indeed, part of the pathos of Stephen’s life was that he was so charming, so well meaning, so quick to acknowledge his shortcomings. Writing from Hiram in 1809, when Stephen was four, Zilpah noted: “Poor fellow. He always has something to bear. Something to prevent his enjoyment.” Eight years later, when he balked at performing for a school prize in reading poetry aloud, she wrote: “This dear son wants peculiar management, he is so diffident of his powers so easily depressed, that he needs much encouragement from his friends.” (Henry, on the other hand, was “in high spirits,” eager to compete.) By midadolescence Stephen was drinking heavily, keeping dubious company, and causing his parents considerable anxiety. In 1824, for example, smallpox swept through Portland, reportedly spread on the waterfront by a Mrs. Brown “of dubious repute who caught it laundering a sailor’s clothing.” The males of Portland, Zilpah wrote to her husband attending Congress in Washington, dreaded being diagnosed with the disease, lest they were “found out as acquaintances of Mrs. Brown . . .” Young Stephen escaped that stigma, but his late-night roving and lack of self-control caused his mother much anguish.
“Your plan for the education of your sons was liberal and judicious,” she wrote to Stephen Sr. in Washington, after seeing the eighteen-year-old Stephen Jr.’s list of college fines, “and as it respected one of them perfectly right. . . . But our sons are different, very different. I think they are so naturally, and it cannot, I think be imputed as a fault to one that he is not like the other.” Following her father’s advice, she urged Stephen Sr. to consult his son’s own inclinations as to a career, suggesting the army or going to sea as an alternative to college and the law. “Indolence is his easily besotting sin, and only being subjected to the strictest discipline will rouse him from it.” She even enrolled Henry in the effort to monitor the behavior of an older brother who rarely wrote letters home from college. “I should like to know the truth and the whole truth,” she instructed him.
Henry was too much the peacemaker to oblige, and there is every indication that he deeply loved his brother, indeed was much closer to him than to the younger boys in the family, Alexander and Samuel. Zilpah continued to “feel great anxiety on [Stephen’s] account, he is so unsteady; and he appears to have no power to resist temptation. What shall we do with him? Or what will he do with himself?”
But she had other worries. “My dear husband,” she wrote to Stephen in Congress in 1824, “I beg of you not to entertain the idea that your mind is at all impaired.” She assured him that she had noticed no change in his behavior “excepting an increased diffidence.” In a series of letters designed to bolster his confidence, she tried to coax him to go out more into the capital’s society and, more important, to speak on some subject—preferably the tariff bill—on the floor of the House. His friends at home—that is, the Portland merchants and lawyers who had elected him—were beginning to wonder why they never saw his name in the records of debate
. The congressman was suffering a depression that went beyond homesickness. It was to be his only term of national office. He would continue to play the role of Portland attorney and engaged citizen for another quarter century, but with an increasing feebleness of will and greatly reduced physical stamina.
The many letters exchanged between Stephen and Zilpah in those two Congressional years are supportive and affectionate—she refers to herself again and again as his “best friend”—and the only time she snaps back at him is when he criticizes her inability to control their eldest son. “You do well to preach patience, but you must practice too. I feel as if we have a severe trial to bear. But we must not cast off our son, though his errors were greater than they are; we must endeavor to reclaim him, for who will be his friend if his parents are not.” These years took a toll on her. She wrote to her mother at Hiram in November of 1824:
[I] frequently wish that I could enjoy a few hours in your society, in your quiet little room. I have no room here where worldly cares are shut out. The office is full of business, the parlor full of company and music, the back parlor is full of noisy children, the kitchen full of cares and domestics and very little time do I get to retire to the solitude of my own chamber, for reflextion or self-examination.
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