Authors and Friends Part 3

"'Siloa's brook that flowed Fast by the oracle of G.o.d,'

as

"'Le ruisseau de Siloa qui coulait rapidement.'"

In talking about natural differences in character and temperament, he said of his own children that he agreed with one of the old English divines who said, "Happy is that household wherein Martha still reproves Mary!"

In February, 1868, it was decided that Longfellow should go to Europe with his family. He said that the first time he went abroad it was to see places alone and not persons; the second time he saw a few persons, and so pleasantly combined the two; he thought once that on a third visit he should prefer to see persons only; but all that was changed now. He had returned to the feeling of his youth. He was eager to seek out quiet places and wayside nooks, where he might rest in retirement and enjoy the consecrated memorials of Europe undisturbed.

The following year found him again in Cambridge, refreshed by his absence. The diary continues: "He has been trying to further the idea of buying some of the lowlands in Cambridge for the colleges. If this can be done, it will save much future annoyance to the inhabitants from wretched hovels and bad odors, beside holding the land for a beautiful possession forever. He has given a good deal of money himself. This might be called 'his latest work.'"

"_January_, 1870.--Longfellow and Bayard Taylor came to dine.

Longfellow talked of translators and translating. He advanced the idea that the English, from the insularity of their character, were incapable of making a perfect translation. Americans, French, and Germans, he said, have much larger adaptability to and sympathy in the thought of others. He would not hear Chapman's Homer or anything else quoted on the other side, but was zealous in enforcing this argument.

He antic.i.p.ates much from Taylor's version of 'Faust.' All this was strikingly interesting, as showing how his imagination wrought with him, because he was arguing from his own theory of the capacity of the races and in the face of his knowledge of the best actual translations existing to-day, the result of the scholarship of England.

"Longfellow speaks of difficulty in sleeping. In his college days and later he had the habit of studying until midnight and rising at six in the morning, finding his way as soon as possible to his books.

Possibly this habit still prevents him from getting sufficient rest.

However light may be the literature in which he indulges before going to bed, some chance thought may strike him as he goes up the stairs with the bedroom candle in his hand which will preclude all possibility of sleep until long after midnight.

"His account of Sainte-Beuve during his last visit to Europe was an odd little drama. He had grown excessively fat, and could scarcely move. He did not attempt to rise from his chair as Longfellow entered, but motioned him to a seat by his side. Talking of Victor Hugo and Lamartine, 'Take them for all in all, which do you prefer?' asked Longfellow.

"'Charlatan pour charlatan, je crois que je prefere Monsieur de Lamartine,' was the reply.

"Longfellow amused me by making two epigrams:--

"'What is autobiography?

It is what a biography ought to be.'

"And again:--

"'When you ask one friend to dine, Give him your best wine!

When you ask two, The second best will do!'

"He brought in with him two poems translated from Platen's 'Night Songs.' They are very beautiful.

"'What dusky splendors of song there are in King Alfred's new volume,'

he said. 'It is always a delight to get anything new from him. His "Holy Grail" and Lowell's "Cathedral" are enough for a holiday, and make this one notable.'"

When Longfellow talked freely as at this dinner, it was difficult to remember that he was not really a talker. The natural reserve of his nature made it sometimes impossible for him to express himself in ordinary intercourse. He never truly made a confidant of anybody except his Muse.

"I never thought," he wrote about this time, "that I should come back to this kind of work." He was busying himself with collecting and editing "The Poems of Places." "It transports me to my happiest years, and the contrast is too painful to think of." And again in calmer mood: "The 'ruler of the inverted year' (whatever that may mean) has, you perceive, returned again, like a Bourbon from banishment, and is having it all his own way, and it is not a pleasant way. Very well, one can sit by the fire and read, and hear the wind roar in the chimney, and write to one's friends, and sign one's self 'yours faithfully,' or as in the present instance, 'yours always.'"

His sympathetic nature was ever ready to share and further the gayety of others. He wrote one evening:--

"I have been kept at home by a little dancing-party to-night.... I write this arrayed in my dress-coat with a rose in my b.u.t.tonhole, a circ.u.mstance, I think, worth mentioning. It reminds me of Buffon, who used to array himself in his full dress for writing 'Natural History.'

Why should we not always do it when we write letters? We should, no doubt, be more courtly and polite, and perhaps say handsome things to each other. It was said of Villemain that when he spoke to a lady he seemed to be presenting her a bouquet. Allow me to present you this postscript in the same polite manner, to make good my theory of the rose in the b.u.t.tonhole."

How delightful it is to catch the intoxication of the little festival in this way. In his endeavor to further the gayeties of his children he had received a reflected light and life which his love for them had helped to create.

"_December_ 14, 1870.--Taylor's 'Faust' is finished, and Longfellow is coming with other friends to dinner to celebrate the ending of the work....

"A statuette of Goethe was on the table. Longfellow said Goethe never liked the statue of himself by Rauch, from which this copy was made.

He preferred above all others a bust of himself by a Swiss sculptor, a copy of which Taylor owns. He could never understand, he continued, the story of that unpleasant interview between Napoleon and Goethe.

Eckermann says Goethe liked it, but Longfellow thought the emperor's manner of address had a touch of insolence in it. The haunts of Goethe in Weimar were pleasantly recalled by both Longfellow and Taylor, to whom they were familiar; also that strange portrait of him taken standing at a window, and looking out over Rome, in which nothing but his back can be seen.

"I find it impossible to recall what Longfellow said, but he scintillated all the evening. It was an occasion such as he loved best. His _jeux d'esprit_ flew rapidly right and left, often setting the table in a roar of laughter, a most unusual thing with him."

There was evidently no such pleasure to Longfellow as that of doing kindnesses. One of many notes bearing on such subjects belongs to this year, and begins:--

"A thousand thanks for your note and its inclosure. There goes a gleam of sunshine into a dark house, which is always pleasant to think of. I have not yet got the senator's sunbeam to add to it; but as soon as I do, both shall go shining on their way."

"_January_, 1871.--Dined at Longfellow's, and afterwards went upstairs to see an interesting collection of East Indian curiosities.

Pa.s.sing through his dressing-room, I was struck with the likeness of his private rooms to those of a German student or professor; a Goethean aspect of simplicity and s.p.a.ce everywhere, with books put in the nooks and corners and all over the walls. It is surely a most attractive house!"

Again I find a record of a dinner at Cambridge: "The day was springlike, and the air full of the odors of fresh blossoms. As we came down over the picturesque old staircase, he was standing with a group of gentlemen near by, and I heard him say aloud unconsciously, in a way peculiar to himself, 'Ah, now we shall see the ladies come downstairs!' Nothing escapes his keen observation--as delicate as it is keen."

And in the same vein the journal rambles on:--

"_Friday._--Longfellow came into luncheon at one o'clock. He was looking very well;... his beautiful eyes fairly shone. He had been at Manchester-by-the-Sea the day before to dine with the Curtises. Their truly romantic and lovely place had left a pleasant picture in his mind. Coming away by the train, he pa.s.sed in Chelsea a new soldiers'

monument which suggested an epigram to him that he said, laughingly, would suit any of the thousand of such monuments to be seen about the country. He began somewhat in this style:--

"'The soldier asked for bread, But they waited till he was dead, And gave him a stone instead, Sixty and one feet high!'

"We all returned to Cambridge together, and, being early for our own appointment elsewhere, he carried us into his library and read aloud

'The Marriage of Lady Wentworth.' E----, with pretty girlish ways and eyes like his own, had let us into the old mansion by the side door, and then lingered to ask if she might be allowed to stay and hear the reading too. He, consenting, laughingly, lighted a cigar and soon began. His voice in reading was sweet and melodious, and it was touched with tremulousness, although this was an easier poem to read aloud than many others, being strictly narrative. It is full of New England life and is a beautiful addition to his works. He has a fancy for making a volume, or getting some one else to do it, of his favorite ghost stories, 'The Flying Dutchman,' 'Peter Rugg,' and a few others."

On another occasion the record says:--

"Pa.s.sed the evening at Longfellow's. As we lifted the latch and entered the hall door, we saw him reading an old book by his study lamp. It was the 'Chansons d'Espagne,' which he had just purchased at what he called the ma.s.sacre of the poets; in other words, at the sale that day of the library of William H. Prescott. He was rather melancholy, he said: first, on account of the sacrifice and separation of that fine library; also because he is doubtful about his new poem, the one on the life of our Saviour. He says he has never before felt so cast down.

"What an orderly man he is! Well-ordered, I should have written.

Diary, accounts, sc.r.a.ps, books,--everything where he can put his hand upon it in a moment."

"_December_, 1871.--Sat.u.r.day Mr. Longfellow came in town and went with us to hear twelve hundred school children sing a welcome to the Russian Grand Duke in the Music Hall. It was a fine sight, and Dr.

Holmes's hymn, written for the occasion, was n.o.ble and inspiring. Just before the Grand Duke came in I saw a smile creep over Longfellow's face. 'I can never get over the ludicrousness of it,' he said. 'All this array and fuss over one man!' He came home with us afterwards, and lingered awhile by the fire. He talked of Russian literature,-- its modernness, and said he had sent us a delightful novel by Tourgueneff, 'Liza,' in which we should find charming and vivid glimpses of landscape and life like those seen from a carriage window.

We left him alone in the library for a while, and returning found him amusing himself over the 'Ingoldsby Legends.' He was reading the 'Coronation of Victoria,' and laughing over Count Froganoff, who could not get 'prog enough,' and was 'found eating underneath the stairs.'

He wants to have a dinner for Bayard Taylor, whose coming is always the signal for a series of small festivities. His own 'Divine Tragedy'

is just out, and everybody speaks of its simplicity and beauty."

"_April._--In the evening Longfellow came in town for the purpose of hearing a German gentleman read an original poem, and he persuaded me to go with him. The reader twisted his face up into frightful knots, and delivered his poem with vast apparent satisfaction to himself if not to his audience. It was fortunate on the whole that the production was in a foreign tongue, because it gave us the occupation, at least, of trying to understand the words,--the poem itself possessing not the remotest interest for either of us. It was in the old sentimental German style familiar to the readers of that literature. Longfellow amused me as we walked home by imitating the sing-song voice we had been following all the evening. He also recited in the original that beautiful little poem by Platen, 'In der Nacht, in der Nacht,' in a most delightful manner. 'Ah,' he said, 'to translate a poem properly it must be done into the metre of the original, and Bryant's "Homer," fine as it is, has this great fault, that it does not give the music of the poem itself.' He came in and took a cigar before walking home over the bridge alone....

"Emerson asked Longfellow at dinner about his last visit to England, of Ruskin and other celebrities. Longfellow is always reticent upon such subjects, but he was eager to tell us how very much he had enjoyed Mr. Ruskin. He said it was one of the most surprising things in the world to see the quiet, gentlemanly way in which Ruskin gave vent to his extreme opinions. It seems to be no effort to him, but as if it were a matter of course that every one should give expression to the faith that is in him in the same unvarnished way as he does himself, not looking for agreement, but for conversation and discussion. 'It is strange,' Ruskin said, 'being considered so much out of harmony with America as I am, that the two Americans I have known and loved best, you and Norton, should give me such a feeling of friendship and repose.' Longfellow then spoke of Mrs. Matthew Arnold, whom he liked very much,--thought her, as he said, 'a most lovely person.' Also of the 'beautiful Lady Herbert,' as one of the most delightful of women....

"Longfellow came in to an early dinner to meet Mr. Joseph Jefferson, Mr. William Warren, and Dr. Holmes. He said he felt like one on a journey. He had left home early in the morning, had been sight-seeing in Boston all day, was to dine and go to the theatre with us afterwards. The talk naturally turned upon the stage. Longfellow said he thought Mr. Charles Mathews was entirely unjust in his criticisms upon Mr. Forrest's King Lear. He considered Mr. Forrest's rendering of the part as very fine and close to nature. He could not understand why Mr. Mathews should underrate it as he did. Longfellow showed us a book given him by Charles Sumner. In it was an old engraving (from a painting by Giulio Clovio) of the moon, in which Dante is walking with his companion. He said it was a most impressive picture to him. He knew it in the original; also there is a very good copy in the Cambridge Library among the copies of illuminated ma.n.u.scripts."

There is a little note belonging to this period full of poetic feeling and giving more than a hint at the wearifulness of interrupting visitors:--