One further story of Longfellow’s Danish visit merits telling, however, as testimony to his own ability to laugh at himself. He had encountered a wonderful specimen of Jacksonian America in the person of Colonel Johnathan Woodside, the U.S. chargé d’affaires at the Danish court. “He has never seen a European Court before, and seems like a cat in a strange garret,” Longfellow noted. The colonel had achieved some renown back home in Ohio in 1830 as the result of a political quarrel with the editor of a politically hostile newspaper. The editor had come after him with a knife, cutting Woodside’s right hand so badly he had to learn to write with his left. The editor got three years at hard labor; the colonel, eventually, a diplomatic posting abroad. Woodside showed Longfellow some of his fifteen scars. Glancing over the small ambassadorial library, Longfellow spotted a copy of the first volume of Outre-Mer and fished for a compliment.
“Ah, you have a copy of that book, I see.”
“Yes. I brought it from London. It is very highly spoken of there, but for my part I do not see much merit in it.”
Recovering his composure, Longfellow admitted he was the author. Woodside looked at him blankly. Smiling desperately, Longfellow continued: “I am glad to hear your opinion of the book, before you knew me to be the author of it.” Woodside admitted he had spoken more candidly than he would have, had he known who his visitor was, then calmly proceeded to explain to the author what the book’s faults were. Too much triviality, for example: “A man of your talents”—(sweetly put in, that)—“might employ his time to more advantage, than writing about such foolish stories as Robert the Devil.” Longfellow declined to yield. “These old stories—though trivial in themselves, are not so as scraps of literary history. I put this paper in my book as you put a Chinese ornament on your mantle-piece, not for its intrinsic value, but because it illustrates manners, customs and feelings of another age or country.” Woodside appeared unconvinced.
By October 1, the travelers had got only as far as Amsterdam, where they lodged at the Wapen van Amsterdam. Despite some signs of exhaustion on Mary’s part (serious enough to seek a doctor’s advice), they began their usual routines, Longfellow haunting the bookshops and studying Dutch, and the two young women buying rolls of linen which they hoped to smuggle through American customs. It was Clara’s task to hide this “contraband” among the folds of clothing in their trunks. The condition of Mary’s health in these days has to be guessed at from some very sketchy references in the otherwise detailed journals kept by Crowninshield and Longfellow. Candid discussion of pregnancy was not a fit subject even for a personal journal, which might at some point be read by family and friends. If Mary kept her own record, it was destroyed. Nothing that has survived suggests any sense of danger. The first indication that something was seriously wrong appears, in novelistic detail, in Crowninshield’s diary entry for October 5. She was awakened by a tap at her door. It was Longfellow in search of a candle. His had burned down. “Is there anything wrong?” she asked.
“Yes,” said he, “Mary is sick—worse than ever.”
“Shall I come in?”
“No,” said he, “you can’t do any good.”
Clara found him a fresh candle and put on her clothes in case she should be needed. She lay on her bed, shivering and dozing until morning.
I heard Mr. Longfellow’s bell ring and much passing up and down the entry, but I lay quietly till Mr. Longfellow came to my door. I went out and he stood a moment at the window. I asked him if Mary had an ague fit. “Something worse than that,” said he. “You can’t go in just now,” said he—so I waited a moment. When I went in I found Mary in the other bed looking very pale. I asked her how she did. She said she felt better but that she had not slept any through the night. After a while Mr. Longfellow took his pipe and walked out and Mary called me to her bed and related the occurrences of the night and there they were in utter darkness.
Longfellow’s own entry was more laconic:
Was up before daylight—Mary being very ill. The very deuce to pay, and all in the dark; for it was a long time before I could muster flint, steel and matches and strike a light. Sent for the Dr. in a hurry; but before he arrived it was all over. . . .
In the dark hotel room she had once again miscarried, probably in her sixth month of pregnancy, attended only by a young husband stumbling about for a candle and trying to staunch the blood. It took Mary two weeks to recover her strength, and by October 22, after sightseeing at The Hague and elsewhere, they reached the Hotel des Pays Bas in Rotterdam, near the mouth of the Rhine. Mary was not well.
They would miss the sights and scents of the vendange; Clara consoled herself with a volume of engravings of romantic Rhine scenery. Longfellow, knowing that they could not leave Rotterdam until Mary had recovered, set out to make the best use of his time—studying Dutch, buying books for the Harvard library, translating the Danish ballad “King Christian.” He told his father that Dutch was the most disagreeable-sounding language he had heard, except for Russian, “but a very important language to me, being of all the modern Gothic tongues, the one which bears the strongest resemblance to the mother-tongue, from which they all come.” He was aided in his studies by an English clergyman, the Reverend Dr. Joseph Bosworth, an early authority on Anglo-Saxon who invited Longfellow to contribute to his forthcoming dictionary. Rotterdam they found as pretty as Amsterdam, and Henry had managed to locate a first-class hotel. Their apartments were carpeted (a luxury they had not enjoyed since leaving England) and decorated in the rococo style, with French furniture, chinoiserie panels, and paintings of Apollo and Flora over the fireplace. The rooms were large, quiet, and comfortable, but north-facing, without a ray of sun.
While doing everything possible, with the aid of the local physicians, to hasten Mary’s recovery, Henry and Clara went about their daily routines amid no sign that there was any emergency; it was Henry in fact who was suffering, with a very bad cold. On October 27, however, Mary took a turn for the worse. Her doctor found her a nurse, who spoke no English but seemed to know her business, and by the end of the month Mary felt stronger. On October 30, Henry took Clara for a walk—the first time she had been able to leave the hotel for a week—and they looked at the boats on the river and speculated on which might be the most reliable for the long voyage up the Rhine. Mary still had sleepless nights and frequent headaches, but through the first week of November gave no one cause for alarm. Clara busied herself sewing, studying German, reading to Mary, and sketching; Longfellow criticized her drawing for its unsteady “feminine style.” Even the life of a hotel de luxe was beginning to wear: Clara yearned for plain bread and butter instead of the delicacies regularly set before them: “four kinds of meat, cauliflower, brockily and salad, appelmoes, tarts, and then the dessert, consisting of 8 dishes, among them grapes, delicious ones, nice pears, nuts, cakes, and bonbons.” They awoke on November 9 to find the rooftops covered with snow. Would they be winter-bound? The gloom was settling in. Clara started making flannel drawers for the patient, who by the 11th seemed to her husband “as pale as a snowflake.”
By the week of November 22, it was clear that Mary was not recovering. After several days of rheumatism (which Clara treated with pieces of flannel soaked in brandy), nausea (the sweetness of the blancmange Clara had cooked for her over a brazier made her vomit), and feverishness, she was in great pain. On the 24th, Longfellow thought she was “sinking,” but she rallied the next day. The doctor was not fooled. As Clara recorded:
The doctor called at the usual time, said she had a good deal of fever, and knit his brow when he turned from the bed saying “M’est faible, toujours faible.” His expression alarmed Mr. Longfellow and he followed the doctor into the entry. I was afraid Mary might hear him and be alarmed, so I went to her bed and talked as calmly as I could that she need not hear her husband’s voice. But she missed him from the room and asked where he was. I told her very quietly that he had only stepped into the entry. He came back soon and spoke cheerfully to Mary, but I
saw that there was a cloud upon his brow.
By the 28th, she was steadily weakening, and Longfellow tried to cushion the blow as best he could in a letter to his father. “It is the effect of a miscarriage, which happened some weeks ago, in spite of all our precautions. I hope she may yet revive; but my anxiety is very great; and I write this to prepare your minds for what may happen.” He added that Clara had been a “great consolation”—“She takes the place of a sister. . . .”
In Mary’s final hours, her pain seemed to lift somewhat and, according to Clara, she was bright and attentive. Letters from her family seemed to have cheered her. She was unquenchably thirsty and gasped for breath; but—and there is no reason to doubt Clara’s firsthand account—she left her life with the grace and presence of mind of a young woman who had nothing to fear from what was to come.
When she first began to feel her breathing more difficult, she was conscious she was near her end and with the most perfect composure said to Henry, “Tell all my friends I thought of them in my last moments. How my poor father will mourn for me. He has always been so kind to me and so have all my friends.” “Because you have always been such a good, gentle girl,” said Henry. “Will God take me to him?” “Yes,” said Henry. “I shall see my dear mother, shan’t I?” Then she clasped Henry’s neck with her almost lifeless arm and said, “Henry, it is hard to die and leave you. I remember all your kindness to me.” “You are going to your best friend,” said Henry. She was perfectly tranquil and this was the only expression like regret that she uttered at the prospect of dying. She said once, “I ought to bless God that he makes one suffer so little.”
Henry was sufficiently in control of his feelings to read to Mary from the prayer book; they prayed together when Dr. Bosworth arrived sometime before 2:00 a.m. Henry closed one of Mary’s eyes and let Clara close the other. Later, when the nurse had laid out the body, Henry kissed Mary’s lips and drew the rings from her hand and placed them on his own. Clara adds: “I gave him some wine and prevailed upon him to lie down upon my bed. I wrapped a cloak round me and reposed as well I could on two chairs. Now that there was no longer cause for restraint he gave vent to his grief and wept bitterly till sleep came to his relief.”
The next day Clara set to work separating and packing Mary’s things; the odor of spices filled the rooms, for Longfellow had the doctors embalm his wife’s body and seal it in a leaden coffin, then in an oaken one. He found a ship bound for Boston and asked that the body be kept at the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge until he returned and could purchase a plot. He wrote a pain-filled letter to Mary’s father on December 1, and the next day he and Clara left in the steamer for Cologne and the darkness of the long German winter.
An Alpine Interlude
IN JULY OF 1836, TWO YOUNG NEW ENGLANDERS found themselves in the Bernese Alps, each seeking a kind of healing.
The younger, Frances Appleton, was with her father, her younger sister Mary, her older brother, and a sickly young cousin, halfway through a two-year European tour. It had turned into a voyage of convalescence for their cousin William Appleton, a frail, tubercular twenty-one-year-old whom they had long treated as a member of their immediate family. At nineteen, Fanny, as she was called by her intimates, was perhaps more handsome than beautiful—brown-haired, serious, self-possessed, and the sort of young woman whose arrival in the spa towns and European capitals was an event of note, for she and her sister were expected to be heiresses on a scale that could have repaired many an aristocrat’s fortunes. Their father was Nathan Appleton of Boston, a leading member of the dominant Whig Party in New England and a pioneer in the development of that region’s lucrative textile industry. Joining them for much of their journey was another young cousin, Isaac Appleton Jewett, part of a clan of Appletons that was making its influence felt in every aspect of Boston life. Their tour was being conducted on a princely scale—Fanny would be presented to Louis Philippe in Paris and would attend a soiree at the Court of St. James (catching a glimpse of the young Princess Victoria, Fanny pronounced her “a short, thick, commonplace, stupid-looking girl”)—but it had been undertaken in a rehabilitative spirit by the entire party. Fanny’s mother, Theresa Gold Appleton, had died of consumption in 1833. The European tour had originally been conceived as a coming of age gift for Fanny’s brother Charles, who had died of the same disease in 1834, weakening her father’s hopes that he had an heir capable of taking over his vast network of business and civic interests.
The other young New Englander had also sought a change of scenery—more literally, a change of atmosphere after the damp German spring—by ascending, as soon as the snows had melted in the Alpine passes, into Switzerland. The British had discovered its scenery some fifty years earlier and made it a place one had to visit. It was a country that still had an enticing air of remoteness, for the railroads had not yet arrived, ushering in the modern age of European tourism. Travel was by horseback, or in slow coaches, or in little lake steamers. Still, it was a land that had lost some its ability to awe travelers by the frightfulness of its mountains; it was being reconceived as picturesque. Longfellow had spent the winter at Heidelberg, on the Necker, a small university town of great charm, rendered romantic by the brooding ruins of its castle. He had gone through the motions of attending classes, buying books, making calls in genteel society, and serving as companion and chaperone to Clara Crowninshield, who was at the start of what would be her own lifelong love of Germany. Longfellow’s fascination with the more sentimental side of German romanticism had deepened, as he sought refuge from his own sorrow in the poetry of Novalis and Uhland and Jean Paul. He was tormented by guilt, blaming himself for exposing his late wife to the dangers of foreign travel. His life seemed pointless. “Good God, what a solitary, lonely being I am,” he wrote in his journal when he reached the lakeside medieval Swiss town of Thun. “Why do I travel? Every hour my heart aches with sadness.” As the glacial meadows blossomed, he sought an end to his Winterreise of the spirit through the sheer physical exertion of tramping through the green Alpine foothills.
On July 20 at Thun, Fanny Appleton noted in her journal: “Prof. Longfellow sends up his card to Father. Hope the venerable gentleman won’t pop in on us, though I did like his Outre-Mer.” Finding the Appletons out of the hotel, Longfellow continued by water to Interlaken, where he met them on the 31st. “A young man after all,” she noted, “or else the son of the poet.” For almost three weeks, amid the Balthusian landscape of the Thunersee, they were in and out of each other’s company, walking, reading and translating German romantic poetry, discussing art, sketching, and boating. Longfellow’s spirits lifted. He had met intelligent and attractive Americans who shared his interests. They liked him enough to invite him to travel for the time being with them. Perhaps because of his experience in nursing Mary in her final weeks, he felt a special affinity for William Appleton, whose lungs were beyond any healing the dry mountain air might have accomplished. And he was charmed by the witty (and sexually ambiguous) Thomas Gold Appleton, the most artistic and poetical of the family; indeed a Jamesian American avant la lettre, who would become one of Longfellow’s closest friends and a much sought-out social figure on both sides of the Atlantic.
This Alpine idyll abruptly ended at Schaffhausen on July 17. Clara Crowninshield, eager to arrange for her return home to America, had summoned him back to Heidelberg. Longfellow could find at least some consolation in knowing that he would see the Appletons again, although perhaps not for another year, in Boston—except for William. Longfellow, who had spent many hours reading to him, paid a final call. Fanny wrote that “she was quite sorry to have him go; he has been so kind to William and helped keep up our spirits.” On August 19, she wrote: “Miss Mr. L considerably.” On the 24th, William died at Schaffhausen and was buried there. The Appleton party set off for Paris. On the 30th, while sitting at the window of their inn at Strasbourg, Fanny saw Henry walking down the street, with Clara and the wife and daughter of William Cullen Bryant (the B
ryants were spending a year in Europe and had befriended Longfellow in Heidelberg). But they would not meet again until the fall of 1837, when the poet-professor would discover an old truth about the nature of holiday romances.
But what kind of romance had it been? The traditional accounts of Longfellow’s life tend to assume that he had fallen passionately in love with Miss Appleton more or less as soon as he saw her at Interlaken. He wooed her—a bit awkwardly, it is implied in these accounts—by reading German poetry aloud and translating it for her on the spot. Yet Paolo and Francesca they were not. Longfellow seems to have spent as much time with Mary Appleton, not to mention Tom, as with Fanny. The increasing certainty of William’s death must have rendered somber most of those days. More important, would a man as self-controlled as Longfellow have allowed himself to pursue an eligible young woman only six months after his own young wife had died in horrific circumstances?
We do not know the significance of the confidences exchanged, the words deliciously lingered over, in those afternoons between Interlachen and Zurich. Here is one way of viewing the encounter. Longfellow, a deeply wounded man, had met a young woman who had borne her own share of sorrows, and they discovered that they could console each other, not least through reading poetry together. After her mother’s death, Fanny had taken on much of the responsibility of running her father’s large and complicated household and had no intention of falling quickly in love with anyone. She had found a role that fulfilled her. In Longfellow, she had met a new social type for her—the idealistic, poetry-besotted young professor—and had allowed herself to be charmed by him and diverted by him, even educated by him, in the midst of another unfolding tragedy for her family. Longfellow cannot have been unaware that he had stumbled upon a very important band of Bostonians whose friendship he would do well to cultivate. He perhaps underestimated the social gap between even a Harvard professor of good family and the Appletons of 39 Beacon Street (although in truth the Appletons’ fortune had been made with dazzling rapidity). Might he have been infatuated by the Appleton glamour, as much as by Miss Appleton herself? He had plenty of time to think about it, on his own slow voyage back to America in 1836. His tentative, self-defeating attempt later that fall to rekindle what he imagined a flame suggests that the “crystallization” (in Stendhal’s sense) of this hopeless affair may have taken place in the emptiness of his rented rooms at the Craigie House. A glimpse of Fanny in some Beacon Hill drawing room, her figure in the distance on the promenade on the Common, an overheard reference to one of her many suitors in Boston—anything might have served to quicken his pulse. He knew, at any rate, that he was living in a house worthy to receive such a bride.
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