5

 

Moving On

Thus closes another year—everyway the most important year of my life. I pause to look back, like one awakening from a sorrowful dream. How strangely it moves before me—and how dark. Far back stands the peaceful home I have left—and the friends I love are there—and there is a painful parting, and leave-taking of those that are never to meet again on earth—and from that far distance my father’s face still looks toward me sorrowfully and beseechingly. Thus the year began in sadness. It has closed in utter sorrow.

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s journal, December 31, 1835

After arranging for the transfer of Mary’s remains to the United States, Henry wasted little time departing Holland for Germany—the sooner the better, as far as he was concerned. “A beautiful morning, spring-like,” he had written in his journal five days before his young wife died, still convinced that she would recover and be able to continue with their travels. “The ships on the river, with loose-hanging sails, are goodly and fair to see. O that we could start upon the Rhine today.” Henry and Clara left Rotterdam on December 2, making their way up the river by steamer to Cologne, and by diligence—the French word for “stagecoach”—the rest of the way to Heidelberg. “Clara is still with me and in her society I find many a soothing influence,” he recorded on the day of departure. “She has known much of sorrow and sadness in her short life, and can sympathize with those who mourn.”

In Düsseldorf, they “strolled” into a Catholic church “just at the moment of the elevation of the host,” and observed with interest the various rituals that followed. “The soft, subduing hymn that was chanted to the sounds of an organ, both soothed and cheered me. There is much in the Catholic worship which I like.” In Bonn, Henry was awestruck by the sight of ninety thousand books shelved under one roof in the university library; a greatly anticipated audience with the poet, critic, and translator August Wilhelm von Schlegel immediately afterwards, however, was a decided dud. “I could not get him upon any topic of interest to myself,” the encounter so boringly “discursive”—he “rather lectured than conversed”—that Henry “declined to record” anything the aging scholar said in his journal. “Still, I was much gratified to see the translator of Shakespeare. He is very much a gentleman—and takes snuff from an ornamented box of tortoise shell.”

They arrived in Heidelberg on December 11, renting separate rooms in the heart of the old city near the famed Karlstor Arch, Henry in the home of one Frau Himmelhahn, a woman he would caricature in Hyperion as a town gossip and mischief-maker so “ignorant of everything” that she had once asked “whether Christ was a Catholic or a Protestant.” Henry’s well-established fancy for fashionable attire did not go unnoticed by the woman, which may well have persuaded him to lampoon her so testily later. “She says you have a rakish look, because you carry a cane, and your hair curls,” Henry’s alter ego, the fictional character Paul Flemming, is told by his friend the Baron of Hohenfels, in a Heidelberg chapter he called “Owl-Towers” for the top-floor “nest” the landlady commands on the Hauptstrasse—a perch where she can observe, through “round-eyed spectacles,” everyone else’s business on the street below. “Your gloves, also, are a shade too light for a strictly virtuous man,” the Baron needles further, and “the women already call you Wilhelm Meister,” a not-so-flattering reference to the title character of Goethe’s influential coming-of-age novel, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, which Henry dismissed as being “decidedly bad” and “not good” at one point. “Do you know she has nearly ruined your character in town?”

Henry nonetheless lived under Frau Himmelhahn’s roof for close to six months, through the winter and into the late spring of 1836. “They are the best in town,” he conceded of the rooms, which had a splendid view of the famed Heidelberg Castle, a spectacular fortress dating to the thirteenth century moored atop a facing hill, a place of quiet refuge he often trekked to in late afternoons or early evenings, and where he would seek solace in the weeks leading up to his departure for Switzerland the following June. “Excepting the Alhambra of Granada,” he would write his father, “I have seen nothing to compare with this ruin.” His days, for the most part, were spent at Heidelberg University, networking periodically with key people he was constantly meeting, all the while seeking out interesting titles for the Harvard collections in the secondhand stalls and auction marts. In Hyperion, Paul Flemming—a young scholar like himself who has recently suffered a dreadful personal loss—assuages his grief by having “buried himself in books, in old, dusty books.”

Henry spent most evenings in the boardinghouse where Clara was staying, playing whist, participating in musicales, and mixing with other artistically inclined tenants, a number of them students at the university. Particularly stimulating were the long literary discussions Henry had with Julie Happ, the erudite daughter of Clara’s landlady, forging a friendship that extended beyond his stay at Heidelberg. Julie worked closely with Clara, who was determined to master the native language. “I will read and write German every day,” she affirmed, committing herself in “sober earnest” to “not dally with it any longer.” A singular accomplishment would be her translation of thirty-seven German songs with full musical accompaniments, a task that the noted philologist and linguist James Taft Hatfield declared in his 1933 monograph to have been rendered with “no mean mastery” of the language.

These distractions were helpful to Henry, but Mary was never far from his thoughts. Alone in his room one night, he was deeply disconsolate, and unable to sleep. “The clock is even now striking ten,” he jotted in his journal, “and I am alone, yet not alone, for the spirit of her, who loved me, and who I trust still loves me—is with me. Not many days before her death she said to me: ‘We shall be so happy in Heidelberg!’ I feel so assured of her presence—and am happy in knowing that she is so. O my beloved Mary—teach me to be good, and kind, and gentle as thou wert when here on earth.” A few days later, Henry learned that George Washington Pierce, one of his closest Bowdoin classmates and husband of his twenty-three-year-old sister, Anne, had died on November 15 of typhus fever, the news only reaching him now.

Late in January Henry advised his father that while “the sense of my bereavement is deep and unutterable,” he was doing all he could to soldier on with his work. “You can well imagine that it required a great effort for me to discipline my thoughts to regular study.” By good fortune he had met up with William Cullen Bryant, who was staying in Heidelberg with his family for the winter, a convenient circumstance in that Clara became friendly with the wife and two daughters of the famed American poet, journalist, and long-time editor of the New-York Evening Post, in its time one of the most influential newspapers in the United States. “It has been fortunate for Clara that they were here on our arrival,” Henry told his father. “She finds their society very pleasant,” a sentiment Clara expressed repeatedly in her journal. “I like them all very much and feel as much acquainted with them as if I had always known them,” she wrote shortly after making their acquaintance. “Their little Julia is a sweet little affectionate creature,” she said of Bryant’s younger daughter, then six. “I wish I had her with me all the time.”

Being able to be with people she liked was most welcome to Clara, since Henry was not in the habit of straying too far from the protective bubble he had built around himself. “I feel far happier and less alone than I have since I left America for I am not without sympathy,” she wrote candidly of her new circumstances. “Mr. Longfellow is not associated with me in any of my pursuits nor do I participate in any of his. Therefore we do not contribute at all to the happiness of each other and my situation would be the same if he were not here.” Henry felt it fortunate, too, to have met the man who a decade earlier had praised several of his poems without having the foggiest notion at the time of who he was. “Called on Bryant, who seemed well pleased enough to see a countryman,” Henry wrote tentatively of their introduction. “He was pleasant and talkative, though he has little animation. He has a good face—calm and thoughtful—with a mild, light-blue eye, that is very expressive.” An afternoon walk a few days later up to the ruins occasioned this further assessment: “I like him exceedingly.”

George Ticknor had learned the “dreadful news” of Mary’s death while he also was traveling in Germany, still grieving the loss of his five-year-old son. Henry informed Ticknor by letter a week after he arrived in Heidelberg that Mary “expired with perfect calmness and resignation,” adding that “the feebleness of my wife’s health” had precluded any thoughts of spending the winter in Berlin as originally planned. Responding immediately from Dresden on Christmas Day to “Monsieur le Professeur Longfellow,” Ticknor urged his young colleague to “pray give yourself to constant and interesting intellectual labor,” a form of inner healing, he stressed, “that will go further than any other remedy, at least such is my experience.”

Of the twenty-four surviving letters Henry received from Ticknor between 1830 and 1868, five were written during this critical period, each of them newsy, informed, and laden with moral support for the talented young man he had anointed to succeed him at Harvard. When they became Boston-Cambridge neighbors who saw each other often, Ticknor’s letters, with a few notable exceptions, were rarely more than perfunctory thank-you notes or formal invitations to dinner, the latter typically to start at five-thirty or six on a Friday or Saturday evening. These lengthy missives came when Henry’s spirits were fragile, and fortified his dedication to what he would call “life’s endless toil and endeavor” in the 1845 poem “The Day Is Done.” Even at these lowest of times, he tried to remain focused, unlike his time on the Continent a decade earlier, which one critic of the travelogue Outre-Mer would call “a journey of sentiment, if not a sentimental journey, made in the blithesome spirit of a troubadour.” His wife Mary had described a routine in which she and her companions kept themselves busy while her husband was absorbed in learning new languages. “Henry has become quite learned in the Swedish, and can already translate the Danish,” she informed her father-in-law from Copenhagen, a considerable achievement in that they were only there for thirteen days before moving on to Holland. “He is studying Icelandic also, as I presume he has told you.”

Henry’s journal reflects similar satisfaction with his progress, evident in his summary of a session with Professor Mellin in which they took up the study of Finnish. “We compared it this morning with the English and the Swedish, taking three lines of each.” The Finnish—and he provided a few examples—“seems to have as many vowels as consonants. Double consonants seldom occur. The diphthongs are very numerous. This language has no resemblance to the Russian nor to the Swedish, nor to the Lappish language which are spoken all around it. It is a sister of the Hungarian.” Danish, he wrote elsewhere, had “an unpleasant sound in my ear. For softness and beauty it cannot be compared with the beautiful Swedish.”

Just as impressive is the extent of his reading in these languages, much of it also logged in his journal, together with a lengthy section of commentary he called “literary criticism.” Even the three weeks Mary was bedridden in Amsterdam did not deter him. Once medical assistance was arranged and a nurse hired to attend her needs, Henry took lessons in Dutch, which he very quickly mastered. He also finished reading Esaias Tegnér’s Swedish translation of Frithiof’s Saga, and absorbed himself in the Low German epic Reynke de Vos, which he called a book that “keeps me late from my bed.” Toward the end of January, William Cullen Bryant received word from the United States that his partner at the Evening Post was seriously ill, requiring him to return home earlier than expected, though his wife and daughters would stay on through the summer. This was disappointing news for Henry, but a relief in that Clara, at least, would continue to have people around for company.

This was a matter of no small concern, as Henry was still acting as her chaperone, with a responsibility to ensure her continued well-being. Clara, for one, was not at all excited about the prospect of going home, either, a suggestion she found “rather unkind and unnatural, considering the season and the unpleasant circumstances which have ever surrounded me the whole time so far that I have been here. Even the Rhine, which is the only part of Europe that I have seen yet that was worth seeing, we saw at an unfavorable season in December!” The very idea that she return to America in the dead of winter—“and then to be set down in the strange city of New York by myself with no friend in the world ready to hasten to me and welcome me and take me home”—left her “bitterly” bemoaning “the utter desolation of my situation.” Not stated, but as Henry’s account book documents—to the penny and in local currencies—was that Clara paid her own way on this trip, and had a voice, however cowed it may have been, in the conversation.

So for the short run they would all remain in Heidelberg, at least through the winter. By the time February rolled around, Henry was working on an ambitious endeavor that he described in a letter to Greene as a literary history of the Middle Ages, a speculative project that was commanding a great deal of his attention. “I have a blank book which I divide into centuries. Under each century I write down the names of the authors who then flourished, when they wrote, where their work, or extracts from them, may be found, and what editions are best. This is done in as few words as possible, prose and poetry being separated.” He explained how the structure he had formulated “saves the process of writing and rewriting as you go along,” with the result that he had “already accumulated six centuries of German literature.”

Although this material was never published—written in a very neat and legible form, it is preserved as a bound manuscript among the Longfellow literary archives at Harvard—it nonetheless kept him occupied. His book acquisitions for the courses he would be teaching at Harvard flourished as well—the two-thousand-dollar stipend he had been given for this purpose was being spent productively. At one point Henry expressed concern to Ticknor that he had heard nothing about a shipment he sent to Cambridge several months earlier, anxious for some validation of the judgment he was showing in his choice of titles and hopeful of securing more funds for additional materials.

“I am sorry you feel disappointed at hearing nothing about your purchase of books for the college,” Ticknor replied, “but, if you were as much used to the management of things there as I am, you would not even be surprised. The truth is, the sum that was given to you was considered as given to your discretion entirely; and nobody will undertake to pronounce a judgement upon the result of your purchases. Indeed, who knows whether you have chosen well in Swedish, Danish, in Dutch, but yourself, or who else knows whether it be worthwhile to have Schiller or not? But of one thing, you may, I think, be sure;—I mean a kind reception when you get home and a confiding trust that what you shall do, will be right.”

As a diversion, Henry had begun to write an article on the origin of the modern drama, though his heart was not entirely in it. “The part relevant to the German Drama I shall write now, the remainder after I return home,” though the essay was never completed and submitted for publication. Two days after he finished compiling his notes for the project—and a day after he “nearly froze myself to death in the University Library” reading classic German texts—his resolve began to weaken. “The winter,” he groused, “has no end. I cannot go out into the fields and woods—but am shut up within these four walls—till I am ready to die of sadness.” But his greatest need was for companionship. “Now that I most need a friend—and am lonely and distressed, and look around in vain for consolation—alas! No one who can be with me by day and by night and keep my thoughts from preying upon themselves.”

A few weeks later, almost miraculously, just such an individual appeared in the person of one Samuel Ward Jr., a cousin of George Washington Greene’s who for the previous two years had been enjoying the good life in Europe as an itinerant scholar and well-connected man of many interests, establishing a friendship that would thrive for the next half century. Seven years younger than Henry, Ward was the son of a wealthy Manhattan banker who had indulged his happy-go-lucky son’s insistent desire to study abroad before joining the family investment firm, Prime, Ward & King. Henry recorded having met Ward on March 6 while attending a dinner party in honor of Mrs. Bryant, returning with him afterwards to his hotel, where they talked until four o’clock in the morning. There was a style and swagger to Ward that appealed to Henry. Impeccably dressed, cultivated, at ease in every social setting, the New Yorker’s easy brashness and winning charm had a palliative effect on the otherwise straitlaced New Englander.

“He knows many of my Cambridge friends,” Henry enthused. “Topics of conversation were not wanting. Ward seems to have many fine qualities—quickness and acuteness of intellect and a generous openhearted disposition.” They continued their “desultory tatter of men and things” over dinner the next day, with Ward sharing stories of his recent meetings in Dresden with Professor Ticknor, yet another mutual acquaintance. Ward struck Henry as a person who tries “to impose upon strangers a high idea of his own scholarship and talents,” judging him also to be a “great talker,” albeit one who is “himself too often the subject of his own discourse.”

Their friendship was marked by a correspondence that Andrew Hilen calculated at more than three hundred and fifty exchanges. Ward’s younger sister Julia, best known today as the author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” would become a close friend as well, thought even by people who knew both to be a worthy match for Henry during his years as a brooding widower, most vocally Harvard colleague Cornelius Conway Felton, who called her “the most remarkable person I ever knew.” Julia married another Longfellow acquaintance, Samuel Gridley Howe, yet remained a lifelong friend, giving Henry the affectionate nickname “Longo,” by which she and other members of the Ward and Howe families often addressed him.

Two months after Henry’s death in 1882, Sam Ward wrote an appreciative essay of their friendship, recalling how pleased he had been to meet the poet in Heidelberg, having heard so much about him from his cousin. “Longfellow had led a secluded life since the death of his young wife, in Holland,” he wrote. “My budget of rattling talk was, therefore, a cheering and interesting peep into the social world from which his mourning had so long excluded him; and I also had glimpses to unfold of literary men and the artists and scientists of Paris, where I had spent two winters and a summer. The day following I visited him at his rooms, which were strewn with books, in a house in the main street embracing a view of the castle.”

Their conversations covered a full gamut of interests. “We had discussed German poetry and philosophy,” Ward wrote, noting with special pleasure how Henry’s “eyes sparkled” when he described his visit to the cemetery in Weimar where Goethe and Schiller lie side by side in a mausoleum. Ward corroborated Henry’s account of the marathon get-together in his hotel—and that he did pretty much all of the talking—adding how “never a word” of Henry’s creative aspirations had “passed his lips.” It was only when he read “The Psalm of Life” in The Knickerbocker two years later “that I realized how I had entertained an angel unawares.” Ward treasured his memory of that first meeting. “With me it was a case of a love at first sight, which has burned with the steady light of a Jewish tabernacle ever since.”

The forming of a new friendship—in that time and in that place—buoyed Henry’s sprits, if only momentarily, but once Ward had left Heidelberg—and Henry accompanied him on horseback to make his stagecoach connection in a nearby town—he was alone once again with his grief. Clara wrote one night after Henry had helped her with her lessons how he confessed to taking “no interest in anything and that all his energy is gone.” There was a brief respite in early April when they were joined by Mrs. Bryant, Julie Hepp, and a fellow boarder in the house of Frau Himmelhahn, a young Russian nobleman named Baron Jacques von Ramm—the model for the Baron in Hyperion—on a five-day excursion to Frankfurt.

An interesting side note to that trip was the purchase in Frankfurt of a plaster cast statuette of Goethe, which Henry used in Hyperion as the focal point of a conversation between Paul Flemming and the Baron, whom he described in the romance as “a miscellaneous youth, rather a universal genius,” who “pursued all things with eagerness, but for a short time only”—a friendly description, perhaps, of his newly acquired real-life friend, Sam Ward. After visiting Goethe’s birthplace, Flemming and the Baron pause outside the window of a downtown shop, taking note of the statuette inside, all the while discussing the recently deceased writer’s many virtues and flaws. “It is strange how soon, when a great man dies, his place is filled; and so completely, that he seems no longer wanted,” Flemming muses distantly, sounding a familiar Longfellow concern—the ephemeral nature of critical acclaim and celebrity. “But let us step in here,” he says next. “I wish to buy that cast.”

The first illustrated edition of Hyperion appeared in 1853 with one hundred wood engravings by the British artist Myles Birket Foster, who in an artist’s note emphasized his commitment to achieving a “perfectly faithful representation” of everything he drew for the book, traveling, by his reckoning, “between two and three thousand miles” in pursuit of that goal. That Paul Flemming’s plaster cast and Henry’s plaster cast are one and the same is strikingly evident by comparing Foster’s drawing with the actual object that stands atop Henry’s Craigie House writing desk, positioned directly in front of him every time he stood to write, there for inspiration or nostalgia, or merely decoration—who can say? In all likelihood, it was a mix of all three.

Once he returned to Heidelberg, Henry’s spirits floundered once again. “The clock is just striking three in the morning,” he wrote on Saturday, June 4. “I have not closed my eyes all night; and have at length got up in despair of sleep, and having lighted two wax candles, am patiently waiting for day which just begins to dawn. The birds are singing—and even and anon the cock crows.” A few days later, Henry and Clara set off on a somewhat longer trip down the Rhine to Koblenz, returning overland through Bad Ems, Bad Schwalbach, Wiesbaden, Frankfurt, and Schlangenbad, taking in the natural baths at various stops along the way. They were accompanied this time by Mrs. Bryant and her older daughter, Fanny Bryant. “At table,” Clara wrote of one dinner they shared together on the road, “a gentleman began to talk with Mr. Longfellow and praised his German, as all foreigners do when we speak.” For Clara, the brief journey had delivered a satisfying taste of what she had been hoping for all along. “It is certainly the most beautiful country I have ever seen,” she wrote when they returned. “We had delightful weather all the time and I can truly say it is the pleasantest journey I ever made. Now if we can accomplish the journey to Munich and Switzerland I shall be quite happy.”

But that trip—the one they had been talking about from the very beginning of their European adventure—would prove to be the most elusive of them all. Part of Henry’s plan—and Clara very definitely figured into it—was to include a side trip to Milan and a reunion there with George Washington Greene, who had married an Italian woman, Maria Carlotta Sforzosi and was living in Florence. “I have a proposition to make,” Henry wrote Greene on June 5, explaining that he was on “the eve” of leaving in a few weeks for Munich, hoping to travel from there across the Alps into Italy. “Now,” he asked, “will you and Maria meet us in Milan, and travel in Switzerland with us? I say us, because Miss Crowninshield goes with me.”

Henry had informed Ticknor a few weeks earlier that Clara would be accompanying him to Munich, the single condition being then “if we can find suitable companions,” a matter of no small delicacy in these prudent years of what was about to become known as the Victorian age. Appearances—the “optics,” as we might say today, of a single woman of twenty-three traveling alone abroad with a twenty-eight-year-old widower—was a matter of no small concern for the prim-and-proper Henry. A letter he wrote to Sam Ward at this time goes a long way to understanding the sense of propriety he always applied to personal matters. Ward had sent Henry a piece of short fiction he had written, seeking some feedback. “I think you must be crazy,” Henry replied. “The phantoms of your brain are beautiful, but they are not holy, and in the silence of the night they visit ladies’ chambers. There is a wild beauty in your episode of the Creole girl, but I must tell you as I have told you before: these matters belong to the great volume of unwritten sensations which ought to remain unwritten. Let me speak candidly. Your imagination needs baptism in cool pure water.”

Henry and Clara returned from their eight-day trip with the Bryant women on June 19. “So once more in Heidelberg,” he wrote in his journal the next day, languor again evident in his tone. Four letters that had arrived in his absence were waiting, including personal ones from Greene, Sam Ward, and George Ticknor, but the pleasure of their words was fleeting. “Torpor steals over me again,” he decided, “and the monotonous every day life begins anew. My mind has lost its sensibility and does not feel the spirit. I cannot study: and therefore think I better go home.” In the next sentence, he cast that thought aside with yet another idea. “Perhaps the air of the Fatherland will do me good.”

Four days later, he chose the second option. “The day is bright and warm and I feel within me a strong desire to start on a journey.” Mrs. Bryant had decided that she did not want to spend too much time away from her daughters, and declined to go along. A provisional commitment from Baron von Ramm, the Russian nobleman who had come along on the earlier excursion to Frankfurt, to join Henry and Clara with his sisters on this trip, did not pan out, either. “I think,” Henry wrote finally, “I shall leave Clara here with Mrs. Bryant and start for Nuremberg and Munich.” Once the decision was made, he wasted no time. “It is now nearly midnight and I start tomorrow morning at five for Stuttgart on my way to Munich.” Clara recorded nothing of the change in plans, but it had to have been devastating to be left behind.

Sam Longfellow made no direct mention of Clara in the reverential biography he wrote of his brother, and her name was carefully excised from the excerpts that he used from Henry’s journals and letters. He gave her two cameo mentions of no importance, in each case changing her identity from “Clara” to “C,” with no context or explanation of who that might be, or even the gender. In the paragraph where Henry and Clara travel together from Amsterdam to Heidelberg—the one leg of their eighteen months abroad where they were not in company with someone else—Sam made fleeting reference simply to a “companion,” who could have been anyone.

A few Longfellow scholars have wondered over the years if there was ever any intimacy between these two, the question fair enough given the time they were together in such close quarters, but the answer is always inconclusive. Fueling such speculation is a letter Clara wrote Henry in March 1837—a year after they had returned to the United States—that suggests a disagreement they may have had—over what, exactly, is lost in the mists of time. Written in German—a confident expression, it is fair to say, of what she had mastered while abroad—it was translated into English by Andrew Hilen in his 1956 edition of Clara’s diary. “You always say that you are misunderstood, but I say you have misunderstood me,” she wrote. “I make only one reproach to you, and you are not to blame for it either, only your disposition. You lack constancy.” A few puzzling sentences later, there is this: “This indifference of yours will not cause me any eternal sorrow. But whenever I see you or write to you I must think of it and feel it too. Otherwise I have had no complaints. That I am right about this you will have to admit.”

Nobody spent more time studying these materials than Hilen—close to half a century—and he admitted having no clue what Clara might have been alluding to in that letter. “What this paragraph means,” he concluded, “written as it was in a moment of confidence, must unfortunately remain a matter for speculation.” Only a few other letters between the two are extant, from which Hilen postulated only that their friendship had probably “progressed toward intimacy as well as informality,” and in the absence of any corroborative evidence, quite correctly, in my view, left it there. In March 1838—a year after receiving that enigmatic letter—Henry paid a visit to Clara in Salem, arriving at six in the evening. “Went to find my good, gentle Clara; and took a long walk with her. She is a remarkable child;—and has most admirable traits of character: and an abundance of talent. Only too mean an opinion of herself.”

Whatever the nature of their relationship, had Clara accompanied Henry on his journey to Switzerland, as both intended up to the last minute, the arc of this narrative would be following another trajectory entirely. As circumstances played out, Henry made his way alone to Munich and then to Innsbruck in Austria, where he arranged to travel across the Alps to Milan, still hoping to meet up with Greene. Sam Longfellow’s explanation for what happened there is as good as any, understated as it may be. “But a trifle,” he wrote, “may often change one’s plans, and sometimes with important results.” The trifle, in this instance, was an irregularity with Henry’s documents—he later called it “some informality in my passport.” Whatever it was, the border police did not issue him a visa to enter Italy, requiring a change in plans that diverted him to the lakes region of Switzerland.

Ownership signature in Longfellow’s travel journal for 1835, in Houghton Library

The tenor of Henry’s journal during these solitary weeks on the road reflects a growing sense of literary awareness—a feeling that he was doing something measurably more than recording each day’s events. Key-word titles appear at the top of each page, and where there is dialogue, it is arranged to support the ongoing narrative. The overall structure follows a coherent theme, with majestic surroundings providing a balm to bouts of melancholy and soul searching. That so much of this material would be repurposed in a quasi-fictional work should come as no surprise—Henry had told his father he coveted eminence in a “literary way” above everything else, and the sobering experiences of these recent months had only fortified that aspiration.

As a written document, the journal for this period is clean throughout. The inclusive dates are May 21, 1835, to July 17, 1836, beginning on arrival in England and ending on the eve of departure for Switzerland. Pressed between the two front pages are a pair of green leaves, with no notation of where they are from, though on the next page is an excerpt from the medieval ballad Reynard the Foxe, with a phrase that evokes a scene among “trees clad with levys and blossoms, and the ground with herbes and flowers sweete smelling.” Above that is a note, written in pencil: “A private journal, not to be printed in whole or part, on any consideration,” clear-cut evidence of an authorial sensibility at work, and an awareness of its possible interest down the road to scholars. Henry had thrown himself into the study of languages and foreign literatures on this trip—the Scandinavian tongues he learned were add-ons he had pursued on his own—and he would commit himself to teaching them when he took up his post at Harvard in the fall. But at this critical juncture in his life, he was simply moving on. And in the summer of 1836, all roads led to Interlaken.