Authors and Friends Part 1

Authors and Friends.

by Annie Fields.

LONGFELLOW: 1807-1882

Every year when the lilac buds begin to burst their sheaths and until the full-blown cl.u.s.ters have spent themselves in the early summer air, the remembrance of Longfellow--something of his presence--wakes with us in the morning and recurs with every fragrant breeze. "Now is the time to come to Cambridge," he would say; "the lilacs are getting ready to receive you."

It was the most natural thing in the world that he should care for this common flower, because in spite of a fine separateness from dusty levels which everyone felt who approached him, he was first of all a seer of beauty in common things and a singer to the universal heart.

Perhaps no one of the masters who have touched the spirits of humanity to finer issues has been more affectionately followed through his ways and haunts than Longfellow. But the lives of men and women "who rule us from their urns" have always been more or less cloistral. Public curiosity appeared to be stimulated rather than lessened in Longfellow's case by the general acquaintance with his familiar figureand by his unceasing hospitality. He was a tender father, a devoted friend, and a faithful citizen, and yet something apart and different from all these.

From his early youth Longfellow was a scholar. Especially was his power of acquiring language most unusual.

As his reputation widened, he was led to observe this to be a gift as well as an acquirement. It gave him the convenient and agreeable power of entertaining foreigners who sought his society. He said one evening, late in life, that he could not help being struck with the little trouble it was to him to recall any language he had ever studied, even though he had not spoken it for years. He had found himself talking Spanish, for instance, with considerable ease a few days before. He said he could not recall having even read anything in Spanish for many years, and it was certainly thirty since he had given it any study. Also, it was the same with German. "I cannot imagine,"

he continued, "what it would be to take up a language and try to master it at this period of my life, I cannot remember how or when I learned any of them;--to-night I have been speaking German, without finding the least difficulty."

A scholar himself, he did not write for scholars, nor study for the sole purpose of becoming a light to any university. It was the energy of a soul looking for larger expansion; a spirit true to itself and its own prompting, finding its way by labor and love to the free use and development of the power within him. Of his early years some anecdotes have been preserved in a private note-book which have not appeared elsewhere; among them this bit of reminiscence from Hawthorne, who said, in speaking of his own early life and the days at Bowdoin College, where he and Longfellow were in the same cla.s.s, that no two young men could have been more unlike. Longfellow, he explained, was a tremendous student, and always carefully dressed, while he himself was extremely careless of his appearance, no student at all, and entirely incapable at that period of appreciating Longfellow.

The friendship between these two men ripened with the years.

Throughout Longfellow's published correspondence, delightful letters are found to have been exchanged. The very contrast between the two natures attracted them more and more to each other as time went on; and among the later unpublished letters I find a little note from Longfellow in which he says he has had a sad letter from Hawthorne, and adds: "I wish we could have a little dinner for him, of two sad authors and two jolly publishers, n.o.body else!"

As early as 1849, letters and visits were familiarly exchanged between Fields and himself, and their friendship must have begun even earlier.

He writes:--

"My dear Fields,--I am extremely glad you like the new poems so well.

What think you of the enclosed instead of the sad ending of 'The Ship'? Is it better?... I send you also 'The Lighthouse,' once more: I think it is improved by your suggestions. See if you can find anything more to retouch. And finally, here is a letter from Hirst. You see what he wants, but I do not feel like giving my 'Dedication' to the 'Courier.' Therefore I hereby give it to you so that I can say it is disposed of. Am I right or wrong?"

Of Longfellow's student days, Mr. Fields once wrote: "I hope they keep bright the little room numbered twenty-seven in Maine Hall in Bowdoin College, for it was in that pleasant apartment, looking out on the pine groves, that the young poet of nineteen wrote many of those beautiful earlier pieces, now collected in his works. These early poems were all composed in 1824 and 1825, during his last years in college, and were printed first in a periodical called 'The United States Literary Gazette,' the sapient editor of which magazine once kindly advised the ardent young scholar to give up poetry and buckle down to the study of law! 'No good can come of it,' he said; 'don't let him do such things; make him stick to prose!' But the pine-trees waving outside his window kept up a perpetual melody in his heart, and he could not choose but sing back to them."

One of the earliest pictures I find of the every-day life of Longfellow when a youth is a little anecdote told by him, in humorous ill.u.s.tration of the woes of young authors. I quote from a brief diary.

"Longfellow amused us to-day by talking of his youth, and especially with a description of the first poem he ever wrote, called 'The Battle of Lovell's Pond.' It was printed in a Portland newspaper one morning, and the same evening he was invited to the house of the Chief Justice to meet his son, a rising poet just returned from Harvard. The judge rose in a stately manner during the evening and said to his son: 'Did you see a poem in to-day's paper upon the Battle of Lovell's Pond?'

'No, sir,' said the boy, 'I did not.' 'Well, sir,' responded his father, 'it was a very stiff production. G----, get your own poem on the same subject, and I will read it to the company.' The poem was read aloud, while the perpetrator of the 'stiff production' sat, as he said, very still in a corner."

The great sensitiveness of his nature, one of the poetic qualities, was observed very early, and the description of him as a little boy was the description of the heart and nature of the man. "Active, eager, impressionable; quick-tempered, but as quickly appeased; kind- hearted and affectionate,--the sunlight of the house." One day when a child of ten he came home with his eyes full of tears. His elder brother was fond of a gun, and had allowed Henry to borrow his. To the little boy's great distress, he had aimed at and shot a robin. He never tried to use a gun again.

Longfellow was said to be very like his mother. His brother wrote of him: "From her must have come to Henry the imaginative and romantic side of his nature. She was fond of poetry and music, and in her youth, of dancing and social gayety. She was a lover of nature in all its aspects. She would sit by a window during a thunderstorm enjoying the excitement of its splendors. Her disposition, through all trials and sorrows, was always cheerful, with a gentle and tranquil fort.i.tude."

No words could describe her son's nature more nearly. When he was only sixteen years old we find him writing to his father: "I wish I could be in Washington during the winter, though I suppose it is rather vain to wish when it is almost impossible for our wishes to become realities. It would be more pleasant to get a peep at Southern people and draw a breath of Southern air, than to be always freezing in the North; but I have very resolutely concluded to enjoy myself heartily wherever I am. I find it most profitable to form such plans as are least liable to failure."

His mother's sympathy with his literary tastes was certainly unusual.

He writes to her from college when he was sixteen years old. "I have this evening been reading a few pages in Gray's odes. I am very much pleased with them." ... To which she replies: "I wish you would bring Gray home with you. I have a strong inclination to read the poems, since you commend them so highly. I think I should be pleased with them, though Dr. Johnson was not. I do not think the Doctor possessed much sensibility to the charms of poetry, and he was sometimes most unmerciful in his criticism."

The single aim of Longfellow's life, the manner in which from his earliest days he dedicated himself to Letters, would prove alone, if other signs were lacking, the strength of his character. When he was only eighteen he wrote to his mother: "With all my usual delinquency, however, I should have answered your letter before this, had I not received, on Monday, Chatterton's Works, for which I had some time since sent to Boston. It is an elegant work in three large octavo volumes; and since Monday noon I have read the greater part of two of them, besides attending two lectures a day, of an hour each, and three recitations of the same length, together with my study-hours for preparation."

This is said to have been the first handsome book the young student owned, and it was earned by the work of his pen. In this same year, too, we find him hurrying with his lessons (not slighting them), that he might get leisure to read and think. "Leisure," he wrote his father, "which is to me one of the sweetest things in the world." ...

"I wish I could read and write at the same time."

The eager activity of his mind was already a.s.serting itself, an activity which hardly slackened to the very end.

The severe criticism of his poem on the Battle of Lovell's Pond may have cost him a few tears one night, but it did not alter his determination. He continued to send contributions to the newspapers, and when his father somewhat later suggested that he should consider the question of "studying for a profession," he replied: "If so, what profession? I have a particular and strong prejudice for one course of life to which you, I fear, will not agree." He was not unwilling to pay the price for what he intended to attain. He knew himself, and his only suffering was at the thought of being obliged to turn aside from the aims which Nature held before him.

He was seventeen years old when he wrote to a friend: "Somehow, and yet I hardly know why, I am unwilling to study a profession. I cannot make a lawyer of any eminence, because I have not a talent for argument; I am not good enough for a minister,--and as to Physic, I utterly and absolutely detest it."

To his father the same year he wrote: "I have already hinted to you what would best please me. I want to spend one year at Cambridge for the purpose of reading history, and of becoming familiar with the best authors in polite literature; whilst at the same time I can be acquiring the Italian language, without an acquaintance with which I shall be shut out from one of the most beautiful departments of letters.... The fact is--and I will not disguise it in the least, for I think I ought not--the fact is, I most eagerly aspire after future eminence in literature; my whole soul burns most ardently for it, and every earthly thought centres in it.... Whether Nature has given me any capacity for knowledge or not, she has at any rate given me a very strong predilection for literary pursuits, and I am almost confident in believing that, if I can ever rise in the world, it must be by the exercise of my talent in the wide field of literature. With such a belief I must say that I am unwilling to engage in the study of the law.... Whatever I do study ought to be engaged in with all my soul,-- for I WILL BE EMINENT in something.... Let me reside one year at Cambridge; let me study belles-lettres; and after that time it will not require a spirit of prophecy to predict with some degree of certainty what kind of a figure I could make in the literary world. If I fail here, there is still time left for the study of a profession."

...His father could not make up his mind to trust his son to the uncertain reed of literature. "As you have not had the fortune (I will not say whether good or ill) to be born rich, you must adopt a profession which will afford you subsistence as well as reputation."

There was, however, a friendly compromise between father and son, and the young student was allowed to pa.s.s a year in Cambridge. He replied to his father: "I am very much rejoiced that you accede so readily to my proposition of studying general literature for one year at Cambridge. My grand object in doing this will be to gain as perfect knowledge of the French and Italian languages as can be gained without travelling in France and Italy,--though to tell the truth I intend to visit both before I die.... The fact is, I have a most voracious appet.i.te for knowledge. To its acquisition I will sacrifice everything.... Nothing could induce me to relinquish the pleasures of literature;... but I can be a lawyer. This will support my real existence, literature an IDEAL one.

"I purchased last evening a beautiful pocket edition of Sir William Jones's Letters, and have just finished reading them. Eight languages he was critically versed in; eight more he read with a dictionary: and there were twelve more not wholly unknown to him. I have somewhere seen or heard the observation that as many languages as a person acquires, so many times is he a man."

Happily--how happily we can hardly say--Madam Bowdoin had left the sum of one thousand dollars towards establishing a professorship of modern languages at the college which was then only a few years older than Longfellow. No steps had yet been taken; but one of the Board, Mr.

Orr, having been struck, it appears, by the translation of an ode from Horace made by Longfellow for the senior examination, warmly presented his name for the new chair.

It is impossible to overestimate the value of these benefactions to men of talent and genius. Where would Wordsworth have been, what could he have done, without the gift bestowed upon him by Raisley Calvert!

In America such a.s.sistance is oftener given in the more impersonal way of endowment of chairs or creating of scholarships. No method less personal or more elevating for the development of the scholar and man of genius could easily be adopted.

The informal proposal of the Board that Longfellow should go to Europe to fit himself for his position was precisely in a line with his most cherished wishes. It was nearly a year from that time, however, before he was actually on his way, "winter and rough weather" and the infrequency of good ships causing many delays. Possibly also the thought of the mother's heart that he was not yet twenty--still young to cut himself off from home and friends--weighed something in the balance. He read law in his father's office, and wrote and read with ceaseless activity on his own account; publishing his poems and prose papers in the newspapers and annuals of the day. He sailed from New York at last, visiting Boston on his way. There he heard Dr. Channing preach and pa.s.sed part of an evening with him afterward. Also Professor Ticknor was kind to him, giving him letters to Washington Irving, Professor Eichhorn, and Robert Southey. Dr. Charles Lowell, the father of the future poet, gave him a letter to Mrs. Grant, of Laggan, and President Kirkland was interested in his welfare. Thus he started away with such help and advice as the world could give him.

From that moment his career was simply a question of development. How he could turn the wondrous joys, the strange and solitary experiences of life into light and knowledge and wisdom which he could give to others; this was the never-ending problem of his mind; to this end he turned the labor of his days.

His temperament did not allow him the effervescent expression common to the young. On the contrary, when writing to his sisters from Italy during these student days, he says: "But with me all deep impressions are silent ones." And thus the sorrows of life, of which he early bore so heavy a burden, found little expression. He wore them in his heart, whence they came again in his poems to soothe the spirit of humanity.

The delightful story of his three years of study and absence can be traced step by step in the journals and letters edited by his brother; but however interesting it is to follow him in every detail, it is nevertheless true that the singleness of aim and strength of character which distinguished Longfellow, combined with extreme delicacy and sensitiveness of perception, were his qualities from the beginning and remained singularly unchanged to the end.

His history is not without its tragedies, but they were cooerdinated in his spirit to a sense of the unity of life. He was the psalmist, the interpreter. How could he render again the knowledge of divine goodness and divine love which were revealed to him? First came the duty of acquiring learning; of getting the use of many languages and thus of many forms of thought, in order to master the vehicles of expression. To this end he labored without ceasing, laughing at himself for calling that labor which gave him in the acquisition great pleasure. "If you call it labor!" he wrote in one of his letters home after speaking of his incessant studies.

His journals and letters, except the few early ones to his father, seldom speak either of the heat of composition or of the toils of study. He kept any mention of these, like all his deeper experiences, to himself, but writes chiefly of more external matters; of his relaxations and pleasures,--such as are surely indispensable to an author and student after extreme tension of the brain and hours of emotion.

Longfellow was twenty-two years old when he took up his residence as professor at Bowdoin College, where he translated and prepared the French grammar and the French and Spanish text-books which he desired for his cla.s.ses. He was also made college librarian--a duty which required only one hour a day in those early times, but, added to his other duties, gave him all the occupation he needed. "The intervals of college duty I fill up with my own studies," he wrote to his friend, George W. Greene, with whom he had already formed a friendship which was to continue unbroken during their lives.

At the age of twenty-four Longfellow married a lovely young lady, the daughter of Judge Potter, of Portland. She was entirely sympathetic with his tastes, having herself received a very unusual education for those days in Greek and Latin among her other studies. In the "Footsteps of Angels" she is commemorated as

"the Being Beauteous Who unto my youth was given, More than all things else to love me."

His brother writes of this period: "They were tenderly devoted to each other: and never was a home more happy than theirs, when, soon after their marriage, they began housekeeping in Brunswick.... In this pleasant home, and with this blessed companionship, Mr. Longfellow devoted himself with fresh interest to his literary pursuits."

The monetary returns for all his labors at this period in America were inconceivably small. He amused his friends one day in later years by confessing that Mr. Buckingham paid him by one year's subscription to the "New England Magazine" for his translation of the "Coplas de Manrique" and several prose articles. After this he sent his poems to Messrs. Allen and Ticknor, who presented him the volume in which they appeared and sundry other books as compensation.

What a singular contrast was this beginning to his future literary history! Late in life his publisher wrote: "I remember how instantaneously in the year 1839 'The Voices of the Night' sped triumphantly on its way. At present his currency in Europe is almost unparalleled. Twenty-four publishing houses in England have issued the whole or a part of his works. Many of his poems have been translated into Russian and Hebrew. 'Evangeline' has been translated three times into German, and 'Hiawatha' has not only gone into nearly all the modern languages, but can now be read in Latin. I have seen translations of all Longfellow's princ.i.p.al works, in prose and poetry, in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, and Danish. The Emperor of Brazil has himself translated and published 'Robert of Sicily,' one of the poems in 'Tales of a Wayside Inn,' into his native tongue, and in China they use a fan which has become immensely popular on account of the 'Psalm of Life' being printed on it in the language of the Celestial Empire. Professor Kneeland, who went to the national millennial celebration in Iceland, told me that when he was leaving that faraway land, on the verge almost of the Arctic Circle, the people said to him: 'Tell Longfellow that we love him; tell him we read and rejoice in his poems; tell him that Iceland knows him by heart.' To-day there is no disputing the fact that Longfellow is more popular than any other living poet; that his books are more widely circulated, command greater attention, and bring more copyright money than those of any other author, not excepting Tennyson, now writing English verse."

Meanwhile the young professor, after four years of retirement and work at Bowdoin, began to look about him and to contemplate another flight.

Before his plans were laid, however, Professor Ticknor relinquished his position at Harvard, which was immediately offered to Mr.

Longfellow under what were for that period the most delightful conditions possible. President Quincy wrote to him, "The salary will be fifteen hundred dollars a year. Residence in Cambridge will be required.... Should it be your wish, previously to entering upon the duties of the office, to reside in Europe, at your own expense, a year or eighteen months for the purpose of a more perfect attainment of the German, Mr. Ticknor will retain his office till your return."

During his second visit to Europe in the year 1835, this time accompanied by his wife, she became ill and died at Rotterdam, "closing her peaceful life by a still more peaceful death." Longfellow continued his journey and his studies. Into his lonely hours, which no society and no occupation could fill, came, his brother tells us, "the sense and a.s.surance of the spiritual presence of her who had loved him and who loved him still, and whose dying lips had said, 'I will be with you and watch over you.'" At Christmas of the same year a new grief fell upon him in the death of his brother-in-law and dearest friend. He received it as an added admonition "to set about the things he had to do in greater earnestness."

"Henceforth," he wrote, "let me bear upon my shield the holy cross."