Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Part 10

SIR,--I perceive with great regret, by your letter of the 3d Inst.

that, although you have followed with due precision the prescriptions of the German Doctor who

corpus recenti sparget aqua,

convalescence is not yet attained, but that the water spirit has announced that another year is required in order to obtain the full benefit of his draughts and ablutions. The fact is a source of great sorrow to your friends and of no less embarra.s.sment to the Corporation of the College. The granting the leave of six months'

absence was effected, not without difficulty. Doubts were expressed concerning the possibility of your realizing your expectations, within the period you specified; and the objections were surmounted only on your a.s.surance that you would return in October, and that the benefit of your instructions should not be lost, by any [cla.s.s]

of the college, according to the arrangements you made. It was on this fact, and on this a.s.surance alone, that a.s.sent of the Corporation was obtained. By the proposition you now make the present Senior cla.s.s will be deprived of the advantages, on which they have a right to calculate and have been taught to expect.

Under the circ.u.mstances of the case, the Corporation do not feel themselves willing absolutely to withhold their a.s.sent to your protracting your absence as you propose; at the same time they are compelled by their sense of duty & I am authorized to state, that they, regarding themselves, not as proprietors, but as trustees, of the funds under their control, cannot deem themselves justified in paying the salary of the Professorship to a Professor, not resident & not performing its duties. They value your services very highly, and are therefore willing, if you see fit to remain another year in Europe, to keep the Professorship open for your return; but I am directed to say that, in such case, your salary must cease, at the end of the current quarter--viz. on the 30 of November next.

The obligation thus imposed on the Corporation, it is very painful to them to fulfil, but they cannot otherwise execute the trust they have undertaken, conformably to their sense of duty.

And now, Sir, permit me to express my best wishes for your health; the high sense I entertain of your talents and attainments and the unaltered esteem & respect with which I am, most truly.

Your friend and hl'e S't.

JOSIAH QUINCY.{60}

CAMBRIDGE.

30. Sep. 1842.

Longfellow spent his summer at the water-cure in Marienberg, with some diverging trips, as those to Paris, Antwerp, and Bruges. In Paris he took a letter to Jules Janin, now pretty well forgotten, but then the foremost critic in Paris, who disliked the society of literary men, saying that he never saw them and never wished to see them; and who had quarrelled personally with all the French authors, except Lamartine, whom he p.r.o.nounced "as good as an angel." In Bruges the young traveller took delight in the belfry, and lived to transmit some of its charms to others. At Antwerp he had the glories of the cathedral, the memory of Quintin Matsys, and the paintings of Rubens. His home at Marienberg was in an ancient cloister for n.o.ble nuns, converted into a water-cure, then a novelty and much severer in its discipline than its later copies in America, to one of which, however, Longfellow himself went later as a patient,--that of Dr. Wesselhoeft at Brattleboro, Vermont. He met or read German poets also,--Becker, Herwegh, Lenau, Auersberg, Zedlitz, and Freiligrath, with the latter of whom he became intimate; indeed reading aloud to admiring nuns his charming poem about "The Flowers' Revenge"

(_Der Blumen Rache_). He just missed seeing Uhland, the only German poet then more popular than Freiligrath; he visited camps of 50,000 troops and another camp of naturalists at Mayence. Meantime, he heard from Prescott, Sumner, and Felton at home; the "Spanish Student" went through the press, and his friend Hawthorne was married. He finally sailed for home on October 22, 1842, and occupied himself on the voyage in writing a small volume of poems on slavery.

{56 _Harvard College Papers_ [MS.], 2d ser. ix. 318.}

{57 _Harvard College Papers_ [MS.], 2d ser. ix. 336.}

{58 _Harvard College Papers_ [MS.], 2d ser. x. 363.}

{59 _Harvard College Papers_ [MS.], 2d ser. xi. 153.}

{60 _Harvard College Papers_ [MS.], 2d ser. xi. 187.}

CHAPTER XIV

ANTI-SLAVERY POEMS AND SECOND MARRIAGE

It is difficult now to realize what an event in Longfellow's life was the fact of his writing a series of anti-slavery poems on board ship and publishing them in a thin pamphlet on his return. Parties on the subject were already strongly drawn; the anti-slavery party being itself divided into subdivisions which criticised each other sharply. Longfellow's temperament was thoroughly gentle and shunned extremes, so that the little thin yellow-covered volume came upon the community with something like a shock. As a matter of fact, various influences had led him up to it. His father had been a subscriber to Benjamin Lundy's "Genius of Universal Emanc.i.p.ation," the precursor of Garrison's "Liberator." In his youth at Brunswick, Longfellow had thought of writing a drama on the subject of "Toussaint l'Ouverture," his reason for it being thus given, "that thus I may do something in my humble way for the great cause of negro emanc.i.p.ation."

Margaret Fuller, who could by no means be called an abolitionist, described the volume as "the thinnest of all Mr. Longfellow's thin books; spirited and polished like its forerunners; but the subject would warrant a deeper tone." On the other hand, the editors of "Graham's Magazine" wrote to Mr. Longfellow that "the word slavery was never allowed to appear in a Philadelphia periodical," and that "the publisher objected to have even the name of the book appear in his pages." His friend Samuel Ward, always an agreeable man of the world, wrote from New York of the poems, "They excite a good deal of attention and sell rapidly. I have sent one copy to the South and others shall follow," and includes Longfellow among "you abolitionists." The effect of the poems was unquestionably to throw him on the right side of the great moral contest then rising to its climax, while he incurred, like his great compeers, Channing, Emerson, and Sumner, some criticism from the pioneers. Such differences are inevitable among reformers, whose internal contests are apt to be more strenuous and formidable than those incurred between opponents; and recall to mind that remark of Cosmo de Medici which Lord Bacon called "a desperate saying;" namely, that "Holy Writ bids us to forgive our enemies, but it is nowhere enjoined upon us that we should forgive our friends."

To George Lunt, a poet whose rhymes Longfellow admired, but who bitterly opposed the anti-slavery movement, he writes his programme as follows:--

"I am sorry you find so much to gainsay in my Poems on Slavery. I shall not argue the point with you, however, but will simply state to you my belief.

"1. I believe slavery to be an unrighteous inst.i.tution, based on the false maxim that Might makes Right.

"2. I have great faith in doing what is righteous, and fear no evil consequences.

"3. I believe that every one has a perfect right to express his opinion on the subject of Slavery, as on every other thing; that every one ought so to do, until the public opinion of all Christendom shall penetrate into and change the hearts of the Southerners on this subject.

"4. I would have no other _interference_ than what is sanctioned by law.

"5. I believe that where there is a _will_ there is a _way_. When the whole country sincerely wishes to get rid of Slavery, it will readily find the means.

"6. Let us, therefore, do all we can to bring about this _will_, in all gentleness and Christian charity.

"And G.o.d speed the time!"{61}

Mr. Longfellow was, I think, not quite justly treated by the critics, or even by his latest biographer, Professor Carpenter,{62} for consenting to the omission of the anti-slavery poems from his works, published by Carey and Hart in Philadelphia in November, 1845. This was an ill.u.s.trated edition which had been for some time in preparation and did not apparently, like the nearly simultaneous edition of Harper, a.s.sume to contain his complete works. The Harper edition was published in February, 1846, in cheaper form and double columns, and was the really collective edition, containing the anti-slavery poems and all. As we do not know the circ.u.mstances of the case, it cannot positively be a.s.serted why this variation occurred, but inasmuch as the Harpers were at that period, and for many years after, thoroughly conservative on the slavery question and extremely opposed to referring to it in any way, it is pretty certain that it must have been because of the positive demand of Longfellow that these poems were included by them. The criticism of the abolitionists on him was undoubtedly strengthened by the apostrophe to the Union at the close of his poem, "The Building of the Ship," in 1850, a pa.s.sage which was described by William Lloyd Garrison in the "Liberator" as "a eulogy dripping with the blood of imbruted humanity,"{63} and was quite as severely viewed by one of the most zealous of the Irish abolitionists, who thus wrote to their friends in Boston:--

DUBLIN [IRELAND], April 28, 1850.

[After speaking about Miss Weston's displeasure with Whittier and her being unfair to him, etc., the letter adds--]

Is it not a poor thing for Longfellow that he is no abolitionist--that his anti-slavery poetry is perfect dish water beside Whittier's--and that he has just penned a Paean on the Union?

I can no more comprehend what there is in the Union to make the Yankee nation adore it--than you can understand the attractions of Royalty & Aristocracy which thousands of very good people in England look on as the source & mainstay of all that is great and good in the nation....

RICH D. WEBB.{64}

Yet Mr. Whittier himself, though thus contrasted with Longfellow, had written thanking him for his "Poems on Slavery," which in tract form, he said, "had been of important service to the Liberty movement." Whittier had also asked whether Longfellow would accept a nomination to Congress from the Liberty Party, and had added, "Our friends think they could throw for thee one thousand more votes than for any other man."{65} Nor was Whittier himself ever a disunionist, even on anti-slavery grounds.

It is interesting to note that it was apparently the anti-slavery question which laid the foundation for the intimacy between Longfellow and Lowell. Lowell had been invited, on the publication of "A Year's Life," to write for an annual which was to appear in Boston and to be edited, in Lowell's own phrase, "by Longfellow, Felton, Hillard and that set."{66} Lowell subsequently wrote in the "Pioneer" kindly notices of Longfellow's "Poems on Slavery," but there is no immediate evidence of any personal relations between them at that time. In a letter to Poe, dated at Elmwood June 27, 1844, Lowell says of a recent article in the "Foreign Quarterly Review" attributed to John Forster, "Forster is a friend of some of the Longfellow clique here, which perhaps accounts for his putting L. at the top of our Parna.s.sus. These kinds of arrangements do very well, however, for the present."{67}... It will be noticed that what Lowell had originally called a "set" has now become a "clique." It is also evident that lie did not regard Longfellow as the a.s.sured head of the American Parna.s.sus, and at any rate he suggests some possible rearrangement for the future. Their real friendship seems to have begun with a visit by Longfellow to Lowell's study on October 29, 1846, when the conversation turned chiefly on the slavery question. Longfellow called to see him again on the publication of his second volume of poems, at the end of the following year, and Lowell spent an evening with Longfellow during March, 1848, while engaged on "The Fable for Critics," in which the younger poet praised the elder so warmly.

Longfellow's own state of mind at this period is well summed up in the following letter to his wife's younger sister, Mrs. Peter Thacher, then recently a mother.

CAMBRIDGE, Feb. 15, 1843.

MY DEAR MARGARET,--I was very much gratified by your brief epistle, which reached me night before last, and brought me the a.s.surances of your kind remembrance. Believe me, I have often thought of you and your husband; and have felt that your new home, though remote from many of your earlier friends, was nevertheless to you the centre of a world of happiness. With your affection, and your "young Astyanax," the "yellow house" becomes a golden palace.

For my part, Life seems to be to me "a battle and a march." I am sometimes well,--sometimes ill, and always restless. My late expedition to Germany did me a vast deal of good; and my health is better than it has been for years. So long as I keep out of doors and take exercise enough, I feel perfectly well. So soon as I shut myself up and begin to study, I feel perfectly ill. Thus the Sphinx's riddle--the secret of health--is discovered. In Germany I led an out-of-door life; bathing and walking from morning till night. I was at Boppard on the Rhine, in the old convent of Marienberg, now a Bathing establishment. I travelled a little in Germany; then pa.s.sed through Belgium to England. In London I staid with d.i.c.kens; and had a very pleasant visit. His wife is a gentle, lovely character; and he has four children, all beautiful and good.

I saw likewise _the_ raven, who is stuffed in the entry--and his successor, who stalks gravely in the garden.

I am very sorry, my dear Margaret, that I cannot grant your request in regard to Mary's Journal. Just before I sailed for Europe, being in low spirits, and reflecting on the uncertainties of such an expedition as I was then beginning, I burned a great many letters and private papers, and among them this. I now regret it; but alas!

too late.

Ah! my dear Margaret! though somewhat wayward and restless, I most affectionately cherish the memory of my wife. You know how happily we lived together; and _I_ know that never again shall I be loved with such devotion, sincerity, and utter forgetfulness of self. Make her your model, and you will make your husband ever happy; and be to him as a household lamp irradiating his darkest hours.

Give my best regards to him. I should like very much to visit you; but know not how I can bring it about. Kiss "young Astyanax" for me, and believe me ever affectionately your brother