11
Magic Circle
Oh come to me my dearest Henry I cannot live until Saturday without seeing thee. I could not help hoping for thee today altho’ I forbade it, trembling at the weakness of my heart.
I cannot write—oh come and let me tell thee how wholly I am thine. Let no eye ready thy joy before mine—
—Fanny’s acceptance of Henry’s marriage proposal, May 10, 1843
The Tenth of May! Day to be recorded with sunbeams! Day of light and love! The day of our engagement; when in the bright morning—one year ago—I received Fanny’s note, and walked to town, amid the blossoms and sunshine and song of birds, with my heart full of gladness and my eyes full of tears! I walked with the speed of an arrow—too restless to sit in a carriage—too impatient and fearful of encountering anyone! O Day forever blessed; that ushered in this Vita Nuova of happiness! How full the year has been!
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s journal, May 10, 1844
A beautiful rain. Fanny sitting up to her breakfast in the darkened chamber, lovely as June itself. Dear Fanny—you grow more beautiful—more precious every hour.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s journal, June 22, 1844
What a year this day completed! What a golden chain of months and days, and with this diamond clasp—born a month ago! I wonder if these old walls ever looked upon happier faces or thro’ them down into happier hearts.
—Fanny Longfellow’s journal, July 13, 1844
Whatever Henry said to Fanny in that corner alcove of the Norton house, it calmed the resentment she had harbored since the publication of Hyperion four years earlier. One of the few letters she sent to him known to survive—only nine, by my count, the obvious reason being that once together, they pretty much remained together—was written six days later, on April 19, 1843. “Dear friend,” she began—not “Henry” or “Professor,” but definitely a start in the right direction—“I have just received your note and I cannot forbear telling you that it has comforted me greatly. I trust with all my heart that it is—and will be as you say—that a better dawn has exorcised the phantoms for aye, that its cheering, healthy beams will rest there as in a perpetual home within those once-haunted walls you speak of.”
The “note” from Henry she mentioned has been lost, but the thrust of what it had to say can be deduced from her next paragraph. “I could not well disguise, I own, how much some of your words troubled me. I should never have ventured to speak so frankly to you had I not believed the dead Past had buried its dead, and that we might safely walk over their graves, thanking God at last that we could live to give each other only happy thoughts. 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 treasured hope. But I will put aside all anxiety and fear, trusting upon your promise.” She closed by remarking on the passing of a “sulky April shower” outside, “but how the grass is brightening under it.”
For many decades, and well into the twentieth century, what Fanny said, exactly, in her note of May 10—quoted in its entirety above—has been characterized vaguely by Henry’s other biographers as an acceptance of his proposal, with no further elaboration. Edward Wagenknecht’s judicious selection of Fanny’s letters and journals, published in 1956, ignored it entirely. In his landmark edition of Henry’s correspondence, Andrew Hilen wrote simply that Fanny had “surrendered unconditionally” to him in accepting his proposal. But Hilen did not downplay its overriding significance: “The date is a most important one, for with his engagement Longfellow began the long career of material comfort and spiritual placidity that the public has generally associated with his name.”
Lawrance Thompson wanted dearly to reproduce what Fanny had written in the April 19 and May 10 letters in Young Longfellow, but was soundly rebuffed by the Longfellow family in both instances. Correspondence I examined in the Longfellow House Trust archives leaves no ambiguity over why they were suppressed, a latent expression of Victorian reticence to acknowledge physical attraction of any kind being at the core, even if no impropriety whatsoever was being suggested. In denying Thompson’s request, Harry Dana wrote that the family was “reluctant to give permission to print letters that were never intended to be made public. Mr. Longfellow himself, by not merely tearing out pages from the diary, but by blacking out many other passages, evidently intended that curious eyes should not in future peer into these matters. If a few passages escaped his attempts at obliteration and a few notes have by chance survived, it seems almost unfair to try to reconstruct the narrative on these slender threads.”
The one problem with that logic is that Henry appears to have mindfully held on to the letter, not destroyed it as he had done with his first wife’s, Mary’s, journal and courtship correspondence, materials that had brought him unendurable pain. This letter, by contrast, “ushered in” Henry’s “Vita Nuova of happiness.” Even more telling, Henry kept the precious note in its original envelope, addressed in Fanny’s hand to “Professor Longfellow” in Cambridge, postmarked in Boston “May 10 MS.” It was further endorsed—and indisputably in his hand—with the full date, “May 10, 1843,” rendering the idea that a tsunamic declaration of commitment such as this survived “by chance” highly unlikely.
Winter view of the State House from Boston Common, by Thomas E. Marr, 1898
Lawrance Thompson tried to make that point in a futile plea that the family reconsider Dana’s refusal. “It isn’t likely that these two letters would shock anyone, or be considered indelicate,” he argued. “One is purely a letter in which two estranged people settle an old quarrel and end by discussing the weather. That could hardly be called a love letter. The second, so short, is like a lightning flash that clears the atmosphere—and it does, I confess, make such a perfect climax to my study that I should be greatly disappointed to leave it out.” But Dana required Thompson to leave it out, along with a “staggering” number of other materials deemed “too personal” as well.
Anything that suggested intimacy was out of bounds, “passion” being a word Victorians avoided when characterizing their relationships; yet it certainly applies here. Once Henry and Fanny were a couple, they were rarely apart, as Henry himself made clear when asked once if he might be traveling to England any time soon, and if so, would he be bringing his wife? “It is part of our theory of life,” he replied, “never to be separated.” Not only were they happily married, all available evidence suggests they were contentedly married. Fanny’s heated reaction to a rumor about the nature of their love life coming out of Northampton is a telling case in point. James Russell Lowell, she confided to Emmeline, had heard that “Henry and I were among the unhappy slaves of the matrimonial oar!! It is frightful to me that anybody could ever conceive, or fabricate, such an impossibility, and when I heard it it gave me a fit of misanthropy to think what calumnies and lies may be circulating about us while we fancy ourselves living peaceably secure from the wagging of a malicious tongue.”
Henry never tired of expressing his gratitude at having once again attained marital bliss, however restrained his comments may have been. But he did let his guard down a tad on December 21, 1845, an otherwise “dull, dark and dismal day following snow in the night, sending a chill through every door and bore” of the house. Fanny was just then emerging from confinement following the birth four weeks earlier of Ernest, their second child, whom they called Erny. “Crept about the house like an octogenarian,” he logged of the previous night’s assignation, exultant in having enjoyed a “delicious”—the next word is indecipherable, but the suggestion is “interlude”—“with Fanny in her chamber where we dined like a law student and a grisette in their mansarde.”
Henry’s sly use here of grisette—synonymous in nineteenth-century France with pretty working-class women who frequented the bohemian arts scene, often posing seductively as models—and mansarde—an attic or garret—is a clear reference, according to the Longfellow scholar Christoph Irmscher, “to George Sand’s provocative novel Horace (1842), which describes an affair between a young man from the provinces and a Parisian working-class girl,” the young man of the story being a law student. Given Henry’s numerous mentions of George Sand in his journal—at least twenty of them by my count—along with no fewer than eight appreciative references to her work in Fanny’s correspondence, that is an entirely plausible theory. There are, moreover, ten books by Sand in the Craigie House collections. So her work was known to both. As for the reference to a law student, it is possible that Henry may have been thinking of just such a person who had occupied the rooms when he visited Craigie House for the first time eight years earlier—“Mr. McLane, a law-student, who occupied the south-eastern chamber.”
A MONTH AFTER clearing the air to each other’s satisfaction, Henry and Fanny were engaged, a turn of events that intimates in both their circles found extraordinary. “This news will astonish you doubtless as it is just beginning to many others,” Fanny wrote her aunt Martha “Matty” Gold in Pittsfield a few days after accepting Henry’s proposal. “How it was gradually brought about you shall hear by and bye, or rather what is there to tell but the old tale that true love is very apt to win its reward. My heart has always been of tenderer stuff than any body believed and it needed not many propitious circumstances to set it visibly flowing.”
They were married on a Thursday evening in a simple ceremony with no groomsmen or bridesmaids, exchanging vows by candlelight in Nathan Appleton’s majestic 39 Beacon Street town house. Some fifty friends and family members were there to toast their happiness. With the grand spiral Bulfinch staircase serving as a backdrop, Fanny made her entrance dramatically to the front parlor, where the groom awaited. “Fanny was in all respects the perfection of all brides,” Henry’s sister Anne Longfellow Pierce wrote, and her “darling brother never looked one half so handsome in all his life.” Fanny wore a “simple white muslin dress,” her veil and adornments “of natural orange blossoms.” A storage box containing “natural history specimens” once treasured and preserved by Fanny includes a fragile object identified as the “garland worn by Miss Appleton on her wedding day.” As a wedding present—and I regard this as one of the most telling material objects preserved in Longfellow House—Fanny gave Henry the elegantly bound volume of sketches she had executed in Switzerland when they first met seven years earlier. On the front pastedown opposite the first sketch, she wrote the date, July 13, 1843, and this inscription: “Mary Ashburton to Paul Flemming,” her reference to Hyperion’s principal fictional characters a clever variant of the line in “A Psalm of Life” that she had quoted in her note to him of April 19—that the dead past had buried its dead.
HENRY AND FANNY SPENT their first few months as Mr. and Mrs. Longfellow in motion, a fortnight in Cambridge, brief stays in Portland and Nahant getting to know each other’s in-laws, then off on an eleven-day wedding excursion to the Berkshires and Catskills, with Charles Sumner, Francis Lieber, and Emmeline Austin tagging along for portions of the trip. Returning to Cambridge, they rented rooms at 105 Brattle from the lexicographer Joseph Emerson Worcester, who had leased the property from Mrs. Craigie’s estate, although the arrangement was unambiguously short-term.
Nathan Appleton would have preferred seeing his adored younger daughter take up residence on Beacon Hill, where she had been born, raised, and introduced to proper society, and not across the river in an aging house that needed serious work, regardless of the impressive provenance it may have had as the onetime residence of General Washington. But with Harvard faculty still expected to live in Cambridge—and since subleasing rooms from Worcester was not a long-term solution—another course of action took shape, as Fanny informed her brother Tom. “I wish you could see how freshly, richly green our meadows are looking, frequent rains have put a June varnish upon all the country, and our river expands at full tide into a lake. We have decided to let Father purchase this grand old mansion if he will.” Nathan Appleton was still giving the idea some thought a week later, as Fanny implied in a letter to Matilda Lieber, Francis’s wife. “We have got to love so much this old house with its fine views and associations (Washington slept where I am now writing) that I think Father will buy it for us to abide in always.”
Come September, Nathan Appleton was still at his summer retreat in Lynn on the North Shore, and still making up his mind—to which Fanny added another thought for consideration. “If you decide to purchase this would it not be important to secure the land in front, for the view would be ruined by a block of houses?” Once back in Boston, Appleton wasted no time, and bought the property from the Craigie estate for $10,000. For another $2,000, he added the stretch of land in front down to Mount Auburn Street facing the Charles River, today the site of Longfellow Park, an open space with a memorial to the poet in bronze and marble executed in 1913 by Daniel Chester French. And he signed off on an additional $3,000 for household necessities, all of them fully itemized—carpeting, wallpaper, a piano, mirrors, china, even a marble-topped mahogany commode for the master bedroom. “It is a fine thing,” Zilpah Longfellow deadpanned in a letter to her son Sam, “to have a noble heart with a noble fortune.”
With that detail settled, the couple left for a six-week stay in New York City to deal with Henry’s eyes, which were causing him tremendous discomfort. His overall vision was fine—he never wore glasses—but unspecified pain made it difficult for him to read and write (he suspected too much work by candlelight to be the culprit). They arranged for treatment with Dr. Samuel MacKenzie Elliott, a prominent oculist whose patient list included John Jacob Astor and Horace Greeley, and took rooms at the Astor House on the corner of Broadway and Vesey Street in lower Manhattan, a bustling neighborhood that proved a little too fast and loose for Fanny’s taste. She described New York City for Charles Sumner as a “maelstrom” that “does not improve on acquaintance,” finding herself “more and more wearied with its feverish devotion to perishable things.” For amusement, she and Henry had met socially with a number of well-placed people. “We were greatly struck with the want of beauty in the women and of culture in the faces of the men—after Boston,” she had decided. “The houses too seem as ignorant of books—one stumbles upon everything else that money can buy, but nothing like a Library have I seen.”
On the plus side, they had gotten together with Fanny Kemble, who was performing in the city, and dined several times with the writer Nathaniel Parker Willis, whom Fanny had ridiculed in Switzerland seven years earlier. “Willis I half like in spite of myself,” she now decided, admitting that his “manners are greatly changed since he went abroad, they are more natural and gentlemanly.” Willis had become a columnist of some local repute, a man about town with many contacts. “It is amusing to read his gossip in the Mirror as we got it au natural first,” she joked to Emmeline. “We have a stately sullen looking bride here he thinks very elegant and high bred and beautiful to which his wife says, ‘I always qualify Willis’ very beautifuls.’ ”
Henry’s eye treatments finally concluded, the couple took up permanent residence in Craigie House in late October. “We have but just returned to our home and are enraptured with its quiet and comfort after that Pandemonium, New York,” Fanny duly informed Sam Longfellow, who was rapidly becoming one of her regular correspondents. “It has now, too, the sentiment of the Future as well as the Past to render it dearer than ever, for since we left it has become our own, and we are full of plans and projects, with no desire, however to change a feature of the old countenance which Washington has rendered sacred.”
THE NEWLYWEDS SPENT their first New Year’s Eve together quietly at home with Emmeline Austin as their houseguest. In the afternoon, they called on a few acquaintances to exchange seasonal greetings, then returned for a quiet dinner by candlelight. Afterwards they took a nighttime drive “in a broken backed sleigh” around Mount Auburn Cemetery, just a half mile west of Craigie House off Brattle Street. Fanny found “the landscape ghostly with skeleton trees upon hills of frozen snow” that night, “gleaming like marble sepulchers.” The pristine sky had been “all roses,” the evening star “as pure and full of love as the eye of an angel,” the moon’s “winter shadows” strikingly beautiful and “delicately penciled in snow,” suggesting to her finely tuned artistic sensibility “the shadow of a shade.” Before retiring for the night, she read a commentary in The North American Review of Rufus Griswold’s The Poets and Poetry of America by the up-and-coming Boston essayist Edwin P. Whipple, which she judged to be a “brilliant and a remarkable production” for a young man of just twenty-two, “but too many youthful arabesques if one must be critical.”
The journal Fanny kept on her honeymoon, 1843
Fanny’s sharp eye for detail was not lost on her husband, who had been putting her to work on a mammoth anthology of more than four hundred poems he was translating into English with her enthusiastic assistance. The Poets and Poetry of Europe—the first effort of its kind in the United States—would be published the following year by Carey & Hart of Philadelphia in two volumes, some nine hundred pages containing material selected from ten European literary traditions. Fanny was contributing on a number of fronts, most immediately by reading aloud pertinent passages for her husband, but helping on the translations as well. “How much time I wasted over Latin Grammar and Caesar’s Commentaries which should have been given to English grammar and English history,” she complained at one point, “but I do not repent the aid Latin has been to me in other languages and in my own.” In a detailed update to George Washington Greene, Fanny reports how she and Henry “get on bravely with our book of Translations, and are now upon the German having printed the Anglo-Saxon, Icelandic, Danish, and Swedish.” The original manuscript in the Houghton Library shows numerous textual notations in her hand. She also contributed some commentary: “Wrote a little in Swedish preface,” she stated proudly one morning; another entry boldly described the ongoing effort as “our book.”
After spending one morning on Danish poetry, the couple went into Boston for an early dinner at 39 Beacon Street, returning in time to meet with Francis Bowen, the editor of The North American Review. Fanny wrote of having “read him into” a “better appreciation” of the “heart and talent” of James Russell Lowell, a former student of Henry’s and a promising poet who would stop by several weeks later for tea. Fanny described “Young Lowell” that afternoon as “looking very picturesque with his shapely beard” and eager to discuss “the great reforms this country is to display,” prefiguring the stance he would take as an opponent of slavery in the years ahead; in time, Lowell would succeed Henry as Smith Professor at Harvard.
For a change of pace from a full day devoted to Icelandic literature, they relaxed in the evening with Les Mystères de Paris, a serial novel by the French writer Eugène Sue that had appeared in ninety parts in Journal des débats over the previous eighteen months. Fanny confessed being “sickened at heart with its horrors,” shocked that “such hells of infamy exist in the souls God has made.” They were also making good progress with History of the Conquest of Mexico, the newly released best seller written by Fanny’s former Beacon Hill neighbor William Hickling Prescott, which Henry advised his brother Sam was “making a great noise in the literary world.”
One Friday, Fanny did double duty, reading some “Danish ballads to Henry,” then correcting “proofs all morning,” of what she did not specify, but presumably the translations, or possibly some of the other editions of Henry’s earlier work they were preparing for the press. Six days later, she paused to admire her husband’s painstaking work habits. “H. is so careful to be right that we get on slowly, but surely. I have fairly entered into a league with the devil (printer’s) whose red locks appear daily at our threshold. Walked with my beloved to the Printing Office and inspected woodcuts in the metal.” She listened carefully, too, to the lectures Henry prepared for his students, complaining at one point that she could not attend because women were not allowed in the classrooms. “I have proposed, à la Portia,” she told her sister-in-law, making reference to a famous scene in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, “disguising myself in male attire to hear them, but have now resigned myself to getting a rehearsal only.”
To fill herself in on Henry’s earlier life, she had also been reading his journal. “How I wish I had the record of every hour of his dear life. I am thankful to glean any part of it that was lost to me, how much thro’ my own strange blindness. It is intensely, painfully interesting to me to see how his great heart rode over the billows of every cruel experience, as over the sunny sea which I trust it will now never lose. I regain my birth-right in him, as it were, by reading these faithful pages.” What would now become a hallmark of their partnership—an energetic union that was mutually rewarding—is readily apparent: “Enjoy with all my heart Henry’s dictations; never weary with quaffing the flowing waters fresh from the spring of his rich mind.”
The evening readings had become precious for Henry, whose vision problems had not improved, as he confirmed in a letter to his brother Sam, then on the island of Fayal in the Azores serving as a tutor to the children of the American consul. “Since last summer I have not been able to read nor write, from having strained my eyes by carelessly using them in twilight.” Sam had lived in Craigie House with Henry while studying at Harvard Divinity School, and had himself taken dictation for many of his brother’s letters. What Henry did not mention—but which would have been immediately apparent to his brother’s practiced eye—was that other than Henry’s closing signature, the full body of the text was in Fanny’s hand, including a cheery postscript of personal greeting of her own at the bottom.
Another letter Henry dictated to Fanny asked the English scholar and lexicographer Joseph Bosworth if he had yet seen “the shilling edition” of Voices of the Night, which had just been published in England by Clarke & Co. It is an interesting aside for the light it sheds on Henry’s growing savvy in the world of book making. “It is very pretty, though, I am sorry to see, rather carelessly printed,” yet he was “glad” nonetheless “to see it in this form, being an advocate of cheap editions, which, like light and well trimmed vessels, run far inland up the scarcely navigable streams, where heavier ships of the line cannot follow them.” At that point, Henry picked up the pen and scratched out a paragraph in his own hand. “I believe I have written you about the bad state of my eyes. Since midsummer I have not been able to use them for reading or writing. Within a week or two, however, I have so far recovered my sight as to add a few lines to a friendly letter, now and then. This enables me to tell you how truly happy I am in the affection of my beautiful wife, and to praise her for many endowments of mind, and heart and person.”
In January, Fanny was making plans to attend a forthcoming ball in Boston being organized by Harriot Coffin Sumner Appleton, her father’s second wife, and trying to decide what she should wear. “Such things seem to me now upon another planet—so out of the whirl of city life are we; within a magic circle of repose I care not to break,” she remarked, quite an admission for a woman who just a year earlier was one of the most talked-about socialites of them all. “Our fire-side evening readings are delicious,” she declared of her new regimen, “and any interruption is a grievous jar in the harmony that encircles our happy hearts and hours.”
Not long after the Longfellows took title to Craigie House, the Boston Evening Transcript published an article under the headline “Washington’s Headquarters at Cambridge,” which reported this: “It is understood that the apartments in the house, which were occupied by Washington have undergone no alteration since that time, and the Professor will suffer no changes in their architecture to make them conform to fashion. It is also said that he intends to enrich one room, at least, with furniture that has been in the possession of Washington.” The idea that the house would become a museum was news to Henry. “Some of the Boston papers say we are going to have one room filled with old furniture, once belonging to General Washington; but we know nothing of this.”
Henry’s sketch of Fanny relaxing after an evening of reading, dated January 31, 1847
Though determined to retain the character of the house, Henry and Fanny had no interest whatsoever in creating a shrine or museum dedicated to General Washington, their fundamental responsibility, as they saw it, to ensure the integrity of the building. “[George M.] Dexter, the architect, comes out to look upon the field of battle and contemplate the pulling down of old barns and general changes of house and grounds,” Henry reported during the early stages of restoration. “In the repairs I shall have as little done as possible. The Craigie house is decidedly conservative and will remain as much in its old state as comfort permits.”
Upgrades they did authorize enabled Henry to appreciate the craftsmanship that had gone into the original construction. “On taking off the old shingles we found on the roof 5045 pounds of lead. This would have been worth knowing in Washington’s day, when they melted the pipes of the church organ for bullets and here over his head were nearly three tons of lead, concealed under the shingles.” The old mansion was not precisely what it was in Washington’s time, either. The original footprint had been retained, but the Craigies had put on an extension—an ell, as it is known—and added the two porches on either side they called piazzas.
What records we have of the fare served at their table indicate that it was always first-class, “champagne and cold oysters” being a favorite for Henry’s closest friends. Fanny wrote in one entry of being disappointed Emmeline Austin had been unable to come over as planned. “Expected dearest Em to dinner but she did not appear, so my chowder, and ducks and olives came to a poor market.” Venison appears periodically in her notes as an entrée, reported, in one instance when served at her father’s town house, as being “rather tough despite Papa’s exulting, à la Cratchit”—a reference to Bob Cratchit in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, which they had recently read—“that there never was such a haunch.”
Henry, in his journal, mentioned an afternoon call on Emmeline “in town” being highlighted by “tea and strawberries.” An afternoon visit in March from some friends featured pleasant conversation and chicken salad. On an “oppressively warm” day in April—so uncomfortable “we arrayed ourselves in white and read Job as a bracer”—Sumner “walked out to dinner a-blaze with the heat—cooled him with a cold dinner and salad.” A meal with two proper Bostonians from prominent families, Edward “Ned” Newton Perkins and Harry Lee—“the former certainly very handsome and elegant,” Fanny remarked approvingly, “the latter overflowing with Parisian delights and full of French vivacity”—was highlighted by an evocative discussion of Europe, “until visions of Venice began to disturb my American content. I am now glad I have not seen it, for if I ever can see it, how glorious to share its marvels with the poetic heart which keeps pace with every throb of my own.”
There is a cookbook in Fanny’s hand in the archives that contains recipes for such dishes as “celery sauce,” “salad dressing,” “oysters and macaroni,” and “hunting pudding,” though nothing to suggest she ever did any cooking of her own. Those chores were handled by a domestic staff that during the years of her marriage varied from four to six people, including a cook, a maid, a nurse for the children, a gardener, and, while Tom Appleton was traveling, occasional use of his coachman. In the aftermath of the financial Panic of 1857—what Fanny called “the evil times” to her sister—“a little money just now is very welcome, for our household expenses seem to absorb everything, tho’ we live simply enough, and never indulge in parties.” She had even given up her seamstress—“and yet the four servants are [still] a great expense.”
SOMETHING FANNY WAS not discussing at great length in the early weeks of 1844, at least in her journal or letters, was that she was then expecting her first child. She mentioned a “fever flush” on January 24, and that “the ague has returned today with double power,” but she was hazy about the cause. She did offer one decidedly vague assessment of her condition, however: “Poor mortal bodies how can ye stand so well these screwings up and lettings down.” The first direct statement from Fanny that she was with child appears on February 21 in the context of her changing appearance, and the practical matter of what she would wear at her stepmother’s ball.
Clothing designed specifically for maternity wear did not exist yet as a fashion concept—that was entirely a development of the twentieth century—and women of a certain station who chose to be seen in public during the later stages of pregnancy usually did so by wearing improvised garments that obscured their expectant status as much as possible. Fanny was no exception to this, as her notation makes clear. “I have out grown my wedding dress and it will no longer cover one beating heart only.”
As the gala approached, she had a seamstress modify the gown in an expandable manner that softened her appearance—and wore it that night to 39 Beacon Street. Fanny would describe the evening as a “very magnifique affair,” the “whole house thrown open and the display of flowers unsurpassable.” Many “lovely girls” were in attendance, all “very well dressed.” She admitted to being “amused after my seclusion by seeing so many familiar faces,” but felt “no inclination for more balls,” at least in the foreseeable future. “Beautiful as this was it seemed prose after the poetry of my every day life. The pleasing flutter of such things is gone, but ‘beauty is a joy forever’ and these human and vegetable flowers delighted my eyes.”
Fanny’s declaration of impending parenthood expressed a week earlier had also sparked a spiritual reflection on the path she had chosen for herself. “Oh Father let the child but be as happy, and far better, than the mother and I pray for no other boon. Feel sometimes an awe and fear of myself,—a fear that my heart is not pure and holy enough to give its life-blood, perhaps its nature to another. What an awful responsibility already is upon me! God alone knows how much my thoughts and temper may mould the future spirit. Let me strive to be all truth, and gentleness and heavenly mindedness,—to be already the guardian-angel of my child.”
FOLLOWING A “VERY AGREEABLE” February dinner for “The Club” in which the talk was “more literary than merry,” Fanny and Sumner lobbied Henry to strengthen a poem they had been urging him to write since their visit to the Springfield Armory in western Massachusetts the previous July during the couple’s honeymoon. They were struck during that visit by the surreal sight of many thousands of firearms—notably the Springfield rifle later of Civil War fame—racked vertically in open tiers, the muzzles pointed upward, suggesting to the young bride the image of organ pipes. To Fanny’s amusement, Sumner had mistaken another guest in the arsenal for the tour guide, “and tried to enlighten him upon the folly and wickedness of collecting guns instead of books.” Having herself felt “very warlike against war” by the sight of so much firepower gathered in one place, Fanny thereupon “pleased Henry” with her comment that the weapons reminded her of “organ pipes for that fearful musician Death to play upon.” The image led her to ponder further “upon the noble uses the money wasted upon these murderous purposes might be put,” leading her to “spur” Henry into writing “a peace poem” that would use the stacked muskets for a central metaphor.
Seven months after putting the bug for such a premise in her husband’s ear, she enthused that the poem “has already a spirit-stirring sound which must unseal men’s eyes, as the song of the angels at Bethlehem.” Sumner had joined Fanny in insisting upon “a more ferocious verse.” She suggested “Cain’s curse as a good ending,” stressing, however, that Henry would make the final call. “We could throw in raw metal to the furnace—but he alone could fashion it into a useful, graceful weapon.” Three weeks later, she was pleased to record that the “peace-poem is fully cast and comes forth perfect,” and that she had “found” for her husband “a good motto” for him to use in the writings of the Christian Fathers.
“The Arsenal at Springfield”—a full, fair-copy of the text in Fanny’s hand is kept among her personal papers—consists of twelve quatrains that reflect on the unspeakable horrors of warfare, and foresees a time in which universal peace eliminates the need for weapons. For the central image, Henry used precisely what his wife had proposed, a huge cluster of burnished gun barrels that rise from floor to ceiling in a cavernous armory not unlike the pipes of a church organ. For a climactic sequence at the end, he summoned forth the biblical references Fanny suggested, along with the argument that she had also proposed—the idea of committing national resources to the production of good works instead of armaments:
Were half the power, that fills the world with terror,
Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts,
Given to redeem the human mind from error,
There were no need of arsenals or forts:
The warrior’s name would be a name abhorred!
And every nation, that should lift again
Its hand against a brother, on its forehead
Would wear forevermore the curse of Cain!
A MONTH BEFORE her due date, Fanny allowed herself to wish for a girl. “Lined a basket with pink cambric for an expected guest,” she wrote hopefully, then turned more serious. “The house entirely ours tonight: ran, like a child, thro’ the rooms to enjoy the feeling of possession, but felt the desolation likewise. Cannot resist planning for the future with a confidence in life and happiness I never knew before, and yet I am so near what is thought a dangerous crisis! Be moderate in hopes, oh heart.”
As the big day approached, Fanny’s stepmother and a few of her Beacon Hill friends paid a visit, bringing along some “diverse Lilliputian garments” sent from Europe by her brother Tom. When they left, Fanny took a seat at the elegant writing desk that had come with her to Cambridge from Boston, and took up her pen. “Henry took his sunset row on the river,” she began. “Sat at window and followed the flashing of his oars with my eyes and heart. He rowed around one bend of the river, then another, now under the shadow of the woods and now in the golden sun-light. Longed to be with him and grew impatient for wings he looked so far away. How completely my life is bound up in this love—how broken and incomplete when he is absent a moment; what infinite peace and fullness when he is present. And he loves me to the utter most desire of my heart. Can any child excite as strong a passion as this we feel for each other?”
Charles Appleton Longfellow—“Charley” to one and all—was welcomed into the world on June 9, 1844. Fanny reported on July 13 of having “joyfully” celebrated her first wedding anniversary with a carriage ride through the neighborhood, her first outing with the new baby. A festive dinner—“our first in the dining room”—was highlighted by the surprise serving of “some of our wedding-cake” from the previous year. It was on this occasion, too, that she ended the practice of keeping a daily journal, the demands of motherhood more compelling. She would continue to write long, thoughtful letters and record the goings-on of her “chicks” in several notebooks she charmingly titled “Chronicle of the Children of Craigie Castle,” but she now had other responsibilities. “With this day my Journal ends,” she wrote with a flourish, “for I have now a living one to keep faithfully, more faithfully than this.”
“THE ARSENAL AT SPRINGFIELD” appeared in Graham’s Magazine in May 1845, and was reprinted seven months later in The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems. Its appearance coincided with the entry into public affairs of Charles Sumner, whose reformist agenda opposed the use of armed combat to resolve national differences. In a controversial Independence Day oration he delivered in Boston’s Tremont Temple on July 4, 1845, called “The True Grandeur of Nations,” he decried the wisdom of spending $200,000 each year to warehouse 175,118 muskets at the Springfield Armory, a stockpile that had cost taxpayers $3 million to acquire, “but whose highest value will ever be, in the judgment of all lovers of truth, that it inspired a poem, which, in its influence, shall be mightier than a battle, and shall endure when arsenals and fortifications have crumbled to the earth.”
Three days after Henry completed writing “The Arsenal at Springfield,” he put the finishing touches on “Nuremberg,” which Fanny described as being “perfect of its kind, so rich and flowing and with a good soul in its Gothic frame.” It, too, was published in The Belfry of Bruges. Included in another section set aside for “songs” was “The Old Clock on the Stairs,” inspired by an “ancient timepiece” in the childhood home of Fanny’s late mother in Lenox. And in a small grouping of “sonnets”—a form Henry had used sparingly to this point in his career—there appeared “The Evening Star,” a fourteen-line tribute to his “beloved, sweet Hesperus”—in Greek mythology, the personification of the planet Venus as viewed in the evening. This would be the only love poem Henry ever personally saw through the press:
Lo! in the painted oriel of the West,
Whose panes the sunken sun incarnadines,
Like a fair lady at her casement, shines
The evening star, the star of love and rest!
And then anon she doth herself divest
Of all her radiant garments, and reclines
Behind the sombre screen of yonder pines,
With slumber and soft dreams of love oppressed.
O my beloved, my sweet Hesperus!
My morning and my evening star of love!
My best and gentlest lady! even thus,
As that fair planet in the sky above,
Dost thou retire unto thy rest at night,
And from thy darkened window fades the light.
The Belfry of Bruges appeared in print two days before Christmas, by which time there was another new member of the family, Ernest, who had arrived on November 23, 1845. “Got my last proof from the printer; so that my second boy and my fourth volume of poems come into the world about the same time,” Henry wrote. Sumner joined the Longfellows for Thanksgiving that Thursday, “with such a rain as I have seldom seen at any season,” and together they “drank the baby’s health.” Over dinner, Sumner and Fanny discussed with Henry his next project, a long narrative poem he was calling “my idyll in hexameters,” which he began the following morning, tentatively titled Gabrielle for the heroine, an Acadian woman he would later name Evangeline. “I do not mean to let a day go by without adding something to it, if it be but a single line. Fanny and Sumner are both doubtful of the measure. To me it seems the only one for such a poem.”
It was good talk in the dining room a few years earlier that inspired Henry to write Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie in the first place. Nathaniel Hawthorne had come over one night from Salem, bringing with him a local minister, the Reverend Horace Lorenzo Conolly. After the table had been cleared, Henry asked Hawthorne what he was working on to keep himself busy. “I have nothing to write about,” Hawthorne replied, whereupon Conolly reminded him of an idea he had suggested just a few months earlier; what was wrong with that? he wondered. “It is not in my vein,” Hawthorne said blithely, rousing Henry’s curiosity. “What is the story? Do tell it. Perhaps it will be in my vein.”
As passed on to Conolly by a parishioner, the story—possibly apocryphal, possibly not—told of a bride and groom in British-ruled Nova Scotia separated on their wedding day by a notorious episode of forced deportation imposed during the French and Indian War known as the Expulsion of the Acadians. Having no idea where her husband had been sent, the distraught bride wandered “all her lifetime” in a futile search, finding him finally on his deathbed. “The shock was so great,” Hawthorne had written in a notebook he kept for ideas and suggestions, “that it killed her likewise.”
Henry confirmed years later that he had been surprised “this legend did not strike the fancy of Hawthorne,” and stressed that he had sought reassurance from his friend before proceeding. “If you have really made up your mind not to use it for a story, will you give it to me for a poem?” Hawthorne readily “assented,” according to Henry, and “moreover promised not to treat the subject in prose” until he saw what “I could do with it in verse.” In his telling, the fictional Evangeline Bellefontaine crisscrosses the eastern United States, finding her husband, Gabriel Lajeunesse, at long last, in a Philadelphia almshouse. Not long after the poem appeared in print to widespread acclaim, Hawthorne extended his congratulations, and Henry replied in gratitude. “I owe entirely to you, for being willing to forgo the pleasure of writing a prose tale, which many people would have taken for poetry, that I might write a poem which many people take for prose.”Among those to applaud Henry’s use of hexameters was the English novelist Anthony Trollope, whose fulsome praise for Evangeline came thirty-five years after its publication, the benefit of hindsight informing his judgment. “A friend consulted before the writing would have cautioned him of difficulties, and would have told him that their rhythm better suits the Greek or Latin language, with its closely defined prosody, than the English, which depends chiefly upon its verbal attractions, or rhymes and cadences. He would have warned the poet against the monotony of this measure when applied to English, and would have proved to him by reading a passage aloud that it falls into a sing-song melody. But, had the friend waited till the total result had been accomplished, he would not have repelled the attempt.”