Longfellow

by Charles C. Calhoun

  A Wedding in Beacon Street

  AND THEN IT SUDDENLY HAPPENED. AT A PARTY at the Nortons’ shortly before Tom Appleton sailed for Europe in the spring of 1843, Fanny hinted to Henry that she would soon need company. He took the hint, called at 39 Beacon, was received more warmly than he once thought possible, and wrote her a candid appraisal of his feelings. She replied on April 17, declaring that “a better dawn has exorcised the phantoms” that had separated them in the past. Whether her reference to “those once-haunted walls” meant the memory of Mary Potter or some more recent misunderstanding, her letter certainly marked a great turning point in their relations. “I could not well disguise how some of your words troubled me,” she wrote. “I should never have ventured to speak so frankly to you had I not believed that the dead Past had buried its dead, and that we might safely walk over their graves, thanking God that at last we could live to give each other only happy thoughts.” It is a curious love letter, expressing at first more of Fanny’s gravity of character than any obvious passion. But the stately tone, the graveyard language melt. “I rejoiced to see how calmly you met me, until Saturday when I trembled a little, as we are apt to do for a long cherished hope, but I will put aside all anxiety and fear, trusting upon your promise. . . .”

  On May 10, Longfellow received her note accepting him. It had been almost seven years since they had met in Switzerland, perhaps five since he had first given up any real hope of marrying her. He did not hop on a horse or even order a carriage. He walked—from the Craigie House, past the College, through Cambridgeport, and across the West Boston Bridge (its successor is named in his honor). The quickest route from there would have been down Charles Street—in those days still lapped by the river—and then up the hill on Beacon Street, to the bow-fronted house overlooking the Frog Pond. A person of about Longfellow’s height can make the trip briskly by foot on modern sidewalks in good weather in about ninety minutes. He explained afterwards that he was too restless for a carriage, too fearful of meeting an acquaintance who might break the mood. In truth, he wanted to stop time. After so much anguish, so much humiliation, he wanted to savor the exquisite hour between the arrival of the news of her acceptance and his heart-pounding appearance at her door.

  He of course expressed it differently in his journal. Remembering Dante’s first glimpse of Beatrice, he said he walked that day “amid the blossoms and sunshine and songs of birds, with my heart full of gladness and my eyes full of tears! . . . Oh, Day forever blessed; that ushered in this Vita Nuova of happiness.”

  Why had it taken so long? There are several practical reasons why Fanny might have changed her mind. Her closest friend, her older sister Mary, had married a Scotsman three years earlier—Robert Mackintosh, the son of a well-known diplomat and essayist, Sir James Mackintosh—and had moved abroad. Her next best friend, Tom, had made it clear that he would spend a peripatetic life, dropping in on Boston but much preferring, at least as a young man, to live abroad, in a world of grand hotels and fashionable spas. And her widowed father had recently been remarried, to Harriet Coffin Sumner, a woman about Fanny’s age who had taken over her role in running the household and being Nathan’s companion. She was facing an unprecedented degree of loneliness, despite the brilliant social world in which she seemed to flourish. For all her disparagement of “the Prof” within her family, Longfellow was nonetheless a familiar and reassuring figure in her small Boston world, and during his sojourn abroad in 1842 she may have realized that she missed him more than she would have admitted. She had also become very religious. She was an unusually “churchly” Unitarian. Had she lived longer, she might have been attracted, like so many Bostonians of her class after the Civil War, by the liturgical richness of High Episcopalianism. It was her seriousness that had made it so easy for her to dismiss the usual suitors, but it may have been this same element in her nature that persuaded her she would not fulfill her life as a Christian woman without a husband. She never explained her decision in any depth—as she wrote to her aunt Martha Gold, “what is there to tell but the old tale that true love is very apt to win its reward”—but the notion among earlier biographers that she simply did not “know” her own mind is an insult to her intelligence.

  There is no record of exactly what was said when Henry arrived at 39 Beacon, perhaps a trifle red in the face after his hike, on that May morning. It was an occasion he was to celebrate and then commemorate each ensuing year of his life. His letter the next day to his mother survives, announcing his engagement “to a very lovely woman—Fanny Appleton—for whom I have for many years cherished a feeling of affection. I cannot say another word—save that she is very beautiful—very intellectual—and very pious—three most excellent verys.” To his sister Anne, ten days later, he confessed: “Life was too lonely—and sad;—with little to soothe and calm me. Now the future opens its long closed gates into pleasant fields and lands of quiet. The strife and struggle are over, for a season, at least, and the troubled spirit findeth its perfect rest.”

  On her part, Fanny wrote an affectionate and daughterly letter to Zilpah—she described herself as an orphan longing for a mother—and a pious one to Anne Pierce, in which she acknowledged “your brother’s long-tried affection.” All parties were aware of the social gulf separating 39 Beacon Street and “The Old Ordinary,” on Congress Street, Portland, but there is much evidence over the years to come that Fanny was gifted with enough tact to bridge it.

  The wedding was quietly sumptuous. Perhaps aware of her relatively advanced age as a bride, thirty-year-old Fanny dismissed the prospect of a “drilled bodyguard” of bridesmaids. The recent death of a cousin precluded too festive a ceremony. Some fifty family members and close friends gathered in the drawing room at 39 Beacon. The most complete account of the event comes in a letter Mary Longfellow Greenleaf wrote to brother Sam:

  . . . the groom was handsome as usual, in fine spirits, and very happy (as he ought to be). “What do you say the bride was dressed in?” Not the green glass breast pin indeed, but in a rich and simple and little muslin, trimmed with splendid thread lace—the tunic looped up with natural orange blossoms, a bunch on each side of the skirt—short sleeves, two tiny bracelets on one arm and one on the other—wedding gifts—on her head was a plain very delicate lace veil which reached to her feet and partly enveloped her person in a most becoming and graceful manner—a branch of orange blossoms was on the back of her hair. She stood a queen, admired of all. A supper-table was spread in the back-parlor with fruit, ices, and a big loaf cake beautifully dressed with flowers in the center. . . . The couple went out to the Craigie the same night by the light of a full moon, and there they seem as happy as possible.

  A SEASIDE IDYLL

  THAT THE CRAIGIE HOUSE was to be theirs was by no means certain. The property had been leased from the Craigie estate by the lexicographer Joseph E. Worcester, who rented in turn to Longfellow the eastern half of the house. Nathan Appleton did everything possible to replicate for Fanny the comforts of Beacon Street—luxurious fabrics, handsome carpets, a Chickering piano, new furniture, even “a patent Shower bath”—but the new couple was aware that their tenancy might be brief. Large, semidecayed Georgian houses were not particularly fashionable in 1843, and it is easy to imagine the Longfellows building (as her father hoped) a comfortable new house in the Italianate or Gothic revival style becoming popular in that decade. Yet “Castle Craigie” grew on Fanny. In a letter to Tom Appleton, she said that her husband’s old friend George Washington Greene had convinced them to stay there: “We have decided to let Father purchase this grand old mansion if he will. Our interest in it had been quickened by our present guest, Mr. Greene of Rome. . . . He has excited an historical apreciation [sic], or rather reminded us how noble an inheritance this is where Washington dwelt in every room.” That September, they asked Fanny’s father to buy for them not only the house but the meadow in front extending down to the Charles, lest their vista be spoilt by a block of new houses. “The house is large e
nough to introduce every modern comfort we should desire,” wrote Fanny, “and there is no position in Cambridge that can compare with it for the views and air. It is, moreover, very interesting to us from its associations.” The next month, Appleton bought the house and land for ten thousand dollars. The Worcesters became the Longfellows’ tenants, in the western half of the house, until their new house farther out on Brattle Street was completed that spring. Fanny embarked on an even more ambitious decorating scheme. Her textile-manufacturing father scolded her for buying European carpets in New York, rather than New England products, but she had her way in the end, with his generous support, and she promised for both economy and patriotism to patronize “the Lowell manufacture” in the future.

  “The Craigie house is decidedly conservative [old-fashioned]; and will remain as much in its old state as comfort permits,” Longfellow noted in his journal. Fanny assured Tom that, while they were full of plans and projects, they had “no desire to change a feature of the old countenance which Washington has rendered sacred.” This was a somewhat novel idea in the 1840s. Americans reverenced their brief past but had not yet imbued its architecture with any particular historical aura. The rescue of Mount Vernon by a committee of determined women—now considered the birth of historical preservation in this country—was a decade in the future, and as late as 1863 Bostonians were careless enough to allow John Hancock’s Georgian mansion next to the State House to be torn down.

  As historical preservationists, in other words, the Longfellows were ahead of their time. In the front hall they displayed a copy of Houdon’s bust of Washington. Over the years, people gave them odds and ends of Washington souvenirs. But, despite erroneous reports in a Boston paper in 1844 that they were assembling a kind of Washington museum, the Longfellows were more interested in preserving the structure that had seen so many great events than in restoring its interiors to some earlier period. In fact, the house quickly came to be filled with that eclectic mixture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century paintings, sculptures, books, neoclassical furniture, massive Victorian pieces in a variety of revival styles, heavy draperies, and souvenirs of travel that the visitor to the Craigie House sees today. Nonetheless, as Longfellow’s fame as a writer increased, so did public recognition that he was living in surroundings sacred to every patriotic American. For example, when John Adams Whipple compiled his Homes of American Statesmen in 1854—the first American book to be illustrated with a photograph—he included an engraving entitled “Headquarters, Cambridge 1773.” The residence still stands, the book noted, “and in worthy occupancy.” In the post–Civil War years, as the Craigie House became in the public’s estimation more and more a shrine to Longfellow himself, it seemed only appropriate to the poet’s many admirers that he should be at home in the same dwelling where the father of his country had acted out the history being commemorated in the master’s poetry.

  FIGURE 7: “Headquarters of General Washington, now the residence of Professor Longfellow.” Mid-nineteenth-century engraving.

  Courtesy National Park Service, Longfellow National Historic Site.

  But other things preoccupied the Longfellows in the 1840s: above all, their new family. Given his memories of Mary’s death in Rotterdam in 1835, one can imagine the anxiety that Longfellow must have felt about his new wife’s first pregnancy. On June 9, 1844—eleven months after their wedding—Fanny gave birth to Charles Appleton Longfellow, with both mother and child in excellent health. Five more children followed over the next eleven years: Ernest Wadsworth in 1845, Frances in 1847, Alice Mary in 1850, Edith in 1853, and Anne Allegra in 1855. All but Frances survived into adulthood.

  To escape the dust and heat of a Cambridge summer—and, in Longfellow’s case, to refresh himself with a change of scenery after the travails of the college year—the family tried out a series of vacation retreats before finally settling upon Nahant as a permanent summer residence from 1850 on. In August of 1845, for example, Longfellow sought relief for his chronic eye troubles at Dr. Robert Wesselhoeft’s new “Aquatic Institute,” a hydrotherapy spa in Brattleboro, Vermont, somewhat reminiscent of the Marienberg. (Four years later, he would send his brother Stephen there, in an unsuccessful attempt to cure him of his alcoholism.) Most of the following August was spent in far western Massachusetts, in the Berkshire town of Pittsfield, where Nathan Appleton summered at the Gold House, the homestead of Fanny’s maternal grandmother. (The house is gone, but Longfellow had made use of it in his very popular “The Old Clock on the Stairs,” ticking away its “Forever—never!/Never—forever” in the hall, which he had published in 1845 in The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems.) He continued to pay shorter summer visits to Portland, although the old-fashioned house on Congress Street was proving inconvenient for his growing family; Anne, chronically short of money, had never replaced its original outhouse.

  In 1847, Longfellow learned that a local entrepreneur, J. Kingsbury, had built a substantial modern hotel and “new watering place” with a splendid view of Casco Bay two miles north of the city, on a small, wooded peninsula known as Oak Grove (today, Martin’s Point). The Verandah Hotel—called after its wide piazzas—offered a view in one direction of rocky coastal scenery and the Casco Bay islands and harbor forts, while in the other direction the more tranquil shores of the mouth of the Presumpscot River were visible. At low tide the whole area was a mud flat, but here, too, the tidal pools and shoals of mussels, and the play of light on the rushing waters had their littoral charm. This type of hostelry marked the beginning of Maine’s transition from a remote, somewhat hazardous place to visit into the Vacationland of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kingsbury had realized that well-to-do urbanites would pay handsomely to enjoy ocean breezes, both salt and fresh water fishing, a variety of genteel outdoor sports, and hearty Down East meals—away from the city, but within easy reach of the railway. Longfellow agreed that the place was enchanting, and his family’s six-week stay—his longest sojourn in his native state after leaving it in 1835—had a discernible impact on his poetry.

  The Longfellows left Boston at 6:00 a.m. on July 15, with Tom Appleton in the party, and were in Portland that afternoon in time to see a ship launched. Longfellow declared the oak-covered promontory “delicious”—relaxing, too, for when he tried to read in the grove, “the seaside drowsiness and dreaminess stole over me; and I sat gazing at the silvery sea. . . .” He bathed in the cold waters in the mornings before breakfast, then bowled with Tom or watched little Charley begin a lifelong fascination with boats. Like many Americans that summer, he and Fanny were reading a new book called Omoo, “a series of sketches of wild adventure in the South Sea Islands” by a young travel writer named Herman Melville. (The following summer, they were to rent the eighteenth-century Melvill Farm at Pittsfield, owned by the author’s cousin.) Soon, a stream of relatives and childhood friends made their way over from Portland, including Henry’s ailing father.

  Longfellow was pleasantly surprised one day to find his old Heidelberg friends, William Cullen Bryant and family, also vacationing at the hotel. The summer had its bittersweet moments, however, for Portland was full of reminders of the past (Longfellow met Pitt Fessenen, his late sister’s fiancé, on the street one day). There was one genuine tragedy: on August 4, a ropewalk in Free Street caught fire. Before the blaze could be extinguished, a dozen or more houses burned down, among them his brother Stephen’s—one further disaster in a life increasingly marked by ill fortune. “We passed most of the day with Marianne [Stephen’s wife] looking for her scattered goods.”

  The summer also brought its holiday intrigues. “There is a party here right out of Wilhelm Meister,” Longfellow noted of the Verandah, alluding to the Goethe novel still regarded in that day as scandalous. “Mrs. Coffin, a beautiful woman; Mr. Coffin, her melancholy husband; young Meyer, her admirer, and a good musician; Mrs. Buel, whose husband is in Boston, and Dr. Codman who is very attentive to Mrs. Buel. I could sketch a chapter here for an American Wilhelm Meiste
r, but forbear, out of sheer laziness.” He was not too lazy to walk frequently over the bridge and into town, observing those changes in his boyhood haunts that were, a decade later, to give his elegiac “My Lost Youth” its poignancy. There were human landmarks that also attracted him: the once “wild” John Neal, for example, now eking out a living as an editor, and especially the family’s longtime minister at First Parish Church, Dr. Ichabod Nichols. “Ah! he is a man of genius. There is great freshness, force and originality in that man, and his long life in the little provincial town has not tamed him, nor made him in any way common-place.”

  But mostly he looked at the water. “How lovely the view of the harbour, with its pearly sea, and its almost irresistible attraction drawing me out into the ocean. A whole fleet of vessels in the horizon, looking in the vapory distance like the spires and towers of a great city.” At sunset he liked to walk with Fanny over the trestled bridge. On July 19, he noted: “The gurgling of the tide among the wooden piers was the only sound audible. Coming back through the grove we heard the evening gun from the fort, and the islands seized the sound and tossed it further and further off, with multiple reverberations, till it died away in a murmur.” Another day, after the rain stopped, he watched the sea mist roll away. “White sea-gulls sitting on the flats, with a long reflexion therein. Sunset like a conflagration. Walk on the bridge; both ends of which are lost in the sea-fog, like human life, mid-way between two eternities; beginning and ending in mist.” He also drove to Cape Elizabeth, to visit its lighthouses. He climbed to the top of “the revolving one”—the whitewashed Portland Head Light of 1791, a beacon he would revisit in “The Lighthouse”: