16
Hour of Darkness
First grand display of buttercups in the grass. How beautiful they are! The purple buds of the lilacs tip the hedges; and the flowery tide of spring sweeps on. Everywhere in the air the war like rumor of drums mingles discordantly with the song of birds.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s journal, May 20, 1861
As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods.
They kill us for their sport.
—Shakespeare, King Lear, act 4, scene 1
The election of Abraham Lincoln on November 6, 1860, did nothing to ease tensions between North and South; it only heightened them. As the year drew to a close, the prospect of what was once unthinkable—fratricidal conflict on American soil—moved closer to certainty. Nerves were on edge, pessimism was rampant, even a “very pretty” ball a week before Christmas could not dampen the prevailing gloom. Fanny wore a “much admired” gown of “moire antique” silk with black flourishes that her brother Tom had just sent over from Paris, “prettily trimmed with lace and ruches,” but frivolity was nowhere apparent that night in Papanti’s Hall. “There has been little gaiety anywhere as you may suppose under these absorbing anxieties, and the newspapers are the only rich harvesters,” she bemoaned to Mary in England. “The news-boys’ voices resound in the streets, in one unbroken chorus, like that of a Greek tragedy, full of ominous matter.”
The opening gambit arrived on December 20, with the secession of South Carolina. On that same day, the January 1861 issue of The Atlantic Monthly came off the presses, featuring a tale in verse of heroism in pursuit of liberty that Henry had hoped would inspire his fellow citizens to preserve their precious patrimony. “Paul Revere’s Ride” putatively recalled the American Revolution, but its more immediate purpose was hammered home in the six concluding lines, where the verbs shift from past to future tense:
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.
Henry had begun writing the poem the previous April after making an “expedition” to the “old town” neighborhood in the North End of Boston with George Sumner, visiting many of the same historic sites he had shown Charles Dickens eighteen years earlier. “We go to the Copp’s Hill burial-ground and see the tomb of Cotton Mather, his father and his son; then to the old North Church, which looks like a parish church in London. We climb the tower to the chime of bells, now the home of innumerable pigeons. From this tower were hung the lanterns as a signal that the British troops had left Boston for Concord.” Whether or not this excursion inspired what came next is unstated, but his notation four days later suggests a clear linkage: “I wrote a few lines in ‘Paul Revere’s Ride,’ this being the day of that achievement.”
Critics of the poem relish nothing more than to nitpick its factual inaccuracies, entirely missing the point of what Henry had in mind. As much as anything else he ever wrote, this was a ballad in the traditional sense, an exercise in homegrown folklore composed with the quaint hope of eliciting an emotional response. Had Henry intended otherwise, he would surely have drawn on a narrative the historical Paul Revere wrote in 1798, with which he was fully familiar. While Henry was teaching at Bowdoin and moonlighting as a freelance writer, the full text of Revere’s personal recollections was included in a lengthy biographical essay that appeared in the October 1832 issue of The New-England Magazine, illustrated with a full-page lithographic image of the patriot. On the page preceding that image appears a sonnet, “Art and Nature,” identified as being “from the Spanish of Francisco de Medrano,” the translator not credited, but unquestionably Henry, since the poem appears in the eleven-volume edition of his collected works published in 1886 in an appendix for previously “unacknowledged and uncollected translations.”
“Paul Revere’s Ride,” prepared during World War II by the Office of War Information, 1942–45, from National Archives series Pictures of the Revolutionary War
Also included in that same issue of the magazine—and also “unacknowledged and unattributed”—was the fifth installment of an experimental novel Henry had been tinkering with called The Schoolmaster, drawing heavily on his recent travels to Europe. Much of that material would find its way into Outre-Mer, which appeared in pamphlet form in 1834, and between hard covers the following year. Packrat that he was, he held on to his copies, especially those documenting his own work, and in this instance we do not have to guess. On April 27, 1877, a full forty-five years after the fact, he answered a reader’s query with a one-sentence reply: “Dear Sir, In Buckingham’s New-England Magazine, Vol. III, p. 310, you will find a letter of Paul Revere, giving a full account of his Lanterns and his ride. Yours truly, Henry W. Longfellow.”
In commemorating the poem’s one hundred and fiftieth anniversary in 2011, the Harvard historian Jill Lepore quoted from a letter Henry received in 1880 from a nine-year-old girl in Ohio, one of hundreds sent to him by admiring youngsters over the years. “I have learned some of your poems and love them very much,” Berta Shaffer wrote, leading Lepore to observe dourly that “for a poet’s literary reputation, to be read by children—and especially to be loved by children—is the sweet, sloppy kiss of death.” Yet for all its issues, “Paul Revere’s Ride” remains the most memorized poem in American history, its cadence mimicking the sound of a horse galloping through the countryside, the rider alerting the citizenry to redcoats on the march.
“THE DISSOLUTION OF THE UNION goes slowly on,” Henry lamented in January, as six more Southern states seceded, with four more to follow. “Behind it all I hear the low murmur of the slaves, like the chorus in a Greek tragedy, prophesying, Woe, woe!” Fanny expressed fleeting hope that “after the 4th of March”—the inauguration of Lincoln—“a firmer hand will guide us to calmer waters.” Formed on February 4, 1861, in Alabama, the Confederate States of America named Jefferson Davis, a onetime United States senator and Member of Congress from Mississippi, to be its president. Davis had served as secretary of state under Franklin Pierce, a Bowdoin alumnus, class of 1824, and a dear friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, who had written his campaign biography and served as consul to Liverpool during his administration. Henry kept discretely to himself whatever he felt about Pierce, remaining mum, even, when Hawthorne, in 1863, defiantly dedicated Our Old Home, a collection of English sketches, to the former president, then greatly out of favor, “as a slight memorial of a college friendship, prolonged through manhood, and retaining all its vitality in our autumnal years.”
Henry learned of the attack on Fort Sumter within hours of the first salvos being fired in Charleston Harbor. “And so the War begins! Who can foresee the end?” In the early days of probing gamesmanship that followed, he found himself able to concentrate on little else. “When the times have such a gunpowder flavor as at present, all literature loses its taste. Newspapers are the only reading. They are at once the Record and the Romance of the day.” Hoping to find some “contrast” to the dispiriting developments, he dipped into a volume of the seventeenth-century Spanish poet Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s Autos sacramentales, a form of dramatic literature notable for offering solace in troubled times. “It has a far-off, dreamy sound, like the ringing of church bells in a little Spanish village.”
On the last Sunday of the month, the Longfellows attended a service at Appleton Chapel in Harvard Yard, which had been built three years earlier with a bequest from Fanny’s uncle Samuel Appleton. “I was glad the pulpit did not thunder a war-sermon to-day,” Henry wrote. “We are given to too much talk and at present the North is warlike enough, and does not need arousing.” Then came May Day, historically an occasion for hope and renewal—but not this year. “The word May is a perfumed word,” Henry decided. “It means youth, love, song; and all that is beautiful in life. But what a May-day is this! Bleak and cheerless. And the little girls with bare necks, and rose-wreaths on their heads, remind me less of dancing than of death. They look like little victims. A sad thought for May-day!” A visit from Charles Sumner did little to relieve the gloom. “It is indeed a heavy atmosphere to breathe, the impending doom of a nation,” a depressing conviction compounded even further by the steady deterioration of Nathan Appleton, his father-in-law, who “looks death in the face with perfect calmness.”
Before long Henry found himself neglecting his work, and he used an Italian phrase—dolce far niente, literally “sweet idleness”—to vent his frustration. A good deal of his inactivity, too, was related to the moribund state of publishing. “Nothing alive but the military,” he groused after a trip into town to see William Ticknor, who looked “dark and dreary,” and James T. Fields, who “was going home ill,” the reason for both he surmised with a sparsity of words: “Book-selling dead.” Ten days later came more of the same. “Ticknor looks grim and Fields is fierce—business at a standstill. So much for war and books.” One bright spot in the Longfellow household was the purchase, after many years of renting, of a roomy cottage on Willow Street in Nahant with gables and a long piazza overlooking the southern shore. Henry had purchased the property with Fanny’s brother Tom Appleton for $5,000. A full summer at their newly acquired retreat had been an appealing prospect, but given Nathan Appleton’s fragile condition, short stays and periodic day trips would have to suffice, at least for the adults.
As June drew to a close, Henry had a sense of imminence, of what, he could not say. “If one could only foresee one’s fate,” a gratuitous comment he jotted down that would seem cruelly prophetic a few weeks later, when viewed in retrospect. “We seem on the eve of great events. The two armies are drawing nearer to each other, and a battle somewhere is looked for.” June 27 was spent uneventfully at Nahant; the day after that Henry and Fanny were back in Cambridge. A dinner meeting of the Saturday Club at the Parker House included a measure of solemn conversation; the month ended Sunday with a sermon in Appleton Chapel by the biblical scholar Dr. George R. Noyes, followed by a quiet afternoon at home.
July arrived the following morning, a “bright, joyous, triumphant summer’s day.” Louis Agassiz came to dinner later in the week; Robert Mackintosh, Fanny’s brother-in-law, then in the United States by himself, dropped by as well. Between visits with Nathan Appleton in Boston, Henry and Fanny took Alice to see a hippopotamus, “a cumbersome fellow in his tank,” brought to Boston from the Royal Zoological Gardens in London for public viewing. That night they all admired “a splendid comet” in the northern sky, “near the Great Bear.” There were fireworks on Independence Day, and a visit from Charley, who had been having “a grand time” swimming and boating on Nahant. July 6 was so “sweltering” they all longed for the seashore; the next day was even “hotter and hotter,” leaving the ground “parched and sun-burnt.”
Henry’s entry for Monday, July 8, is concise: “Still, the fervent sunshine and heat with a south wind fanning in at the window. Charley starts again for Nahant.” After that appears the heading “9. 10…13,” denoting the span, presumably, of the next five days. Written out beneath that, undated, in Henry’s hand, are the last two stanzas of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s touching poem of bereavement, “To J. S.”—words of his own, for once, having eluded him:
Sleep sweetly, tender heart, in peace;
Sleep, holy spirit, blessed soul.
While the stars burn, the moons increase,
And the great ages onward roll.
Sleep till the end, true soul and sweet,
Nothing comes to thee new or strange,
Sleep full of rest from head to feet.
Lie still, dry dust, secure of change.
LONGFELLOW HOUSE–Washington’s Headquarters stands alone among National Park Service sites as a laboratory for American history. It is not just a historically significant building; it also is a research center teeming with archival materials and artifacts that illuminate the larger narrative in ways that are immediate and personal. I examined thousands of documents and objects for this book, a good many of the latter in this place—writing desks, bedroom furniture, paintings, sculptures, curios and knickknacks, books shelved according to their original scheme, rooms where fascinating individuals from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries gathered, broke bread, sipped wine, smoked cigars, discussed, and in many instances influenced, the events of the day.
But nothing moved me more profoundly—actually made me sit back and pause before proceeding—than to hold in my hands five tiny white envelopes bearing, on the front of each, and in Fanny Longfellow’s distinctive handwriting, the words “Edith’s hair July 1861.” Neatly inserted inside four of them are individual locks of luxurious blond hair—the same “golden hair” made famous in “The Children’s Hour,” Henry’s joyful poem of parenthood, published just nine months earlier in the September 1860 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. Artifacts cannot speak, of course; they can only point the way—which raises, in this instance, a question: What are we to make of the fifth envelope, which is empty? Does it suggest a domestic task undertaken by Fanny but never completed? Once again, context is everything.
While largely out of fashion today, keeping locks of human hair as relics has deep historical roots, and was popular in Victorian times. It was used, too, in women’s jewelry, including several pieces for a young Fanny Appleton, whose elegant hand-tooled jewelry box with the initials “F.E.A.” on the lid still contains assorted earrings, bracelets, and brooches inset with strands of her own black hair. The practice figured as well in fictional works of the period. The narrator of Wilkie Collins’s 1854 crime novel Hide and Seek asserts that a hair bracelet central to the plot was also “one of the commonest ornaments of woman’s wear” in England at the time, rendering its evidentiary value marginal. “This literary fascination with the magical power of women’s hair coincided in Victorian everyday life with an intense popular preoccupation with hair and hair tokens,” a professor emerita of nineteenth-century culture at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Elizabeth Gitter, has written. “At the peak of the fad, in the forties and fifties, hair became something of a Victorian culture obsession: whole suites of jewelry were fashioned, as if through alchemy, from the plaited hair of family members, lovers, and friends, living and dead.”
There are numerous snippets of hair preserved in Craigie House, including one taken from Little Fanny, who died as a toddler in 1848; the Houghton Library has a lock identified as Henry’s that was clipped on his seventy-fifth birthday, snow white, and housed in a red leather pouch. Another packet contains a cutting from Fanny, black with a strand of gray, and dated July 10, 1861—the day of her death. Somewhat unsettling—“creepy” may be the apter way to put it—is a seven-stanza poem by Gustav Pfizer translated years earlier from the German by Henry, and written out by Fanny on a single sheet of paper, and kept with a pair of hair clippings. It is titled “Two Locks of Hair” (“Der Junggeselle,” The Bachelor); these are the final two stanzas:
Two locks—and they are wondrous fair—
Left me that vision mild;
The brown is from the mother’s hair,
The blond is from the child.
And when I see that lock of gold,
Pale grows the evening-red;
And when the dark lock I behold,
I wish that I were dead.
“IF I COULD HAVE KNOWN the heat would last so long, I should have tried to get down a week sooner,” Fanny had written on July 7 to Erny, who was then on Nahant with his brother Charley and uncle Tom. “You are lucky in such hot weather, and we are all sighing for the good sea breeze instead of this stifling land one filled with dust.” She mentioned the “very feeble” condition of “Dear Grandpapa,” disappointed they could not bring him out to his own summer retreat in nearby Lynn, where “the sea air might strengthen him a little,” but he was too weak to travel. “Poor Annie is very droopy with the heat,” she continued in this—the last surviving letter she ever wrote—“and Edie has to get her hair in a net to free her neck from its weight.”
The only eyewitnesses to what happened in the Craigie House library two days later were Edith Longfellow, seven years old at the time, and her younger sister, Annie Allegra, five. Erny had come home that day for lunch, but left just before Fanny returned from her father’s bedside. Charley was still with his uncle Tom in Nahant, Alice was away from the house, visiting with friends. “As I was stepping on the horse-car to go into town to take the boat to Nahant, my mother drove by in a carriage and waved her hand to me,” Erny recalled many years later. “That was the last I saw of her alive. She met with the accident that afternoon and the next morning she was dead. This was my first great grief, and my first acquaintance with death, that great mystery.”
Outfitted in a hooped summer dress of light muslin, Fanny was seated at the long, carved Italian table that overlooks the eastern piazza. We can fairly well assume that she had done something with Edie’s cumbersome folds of heavy blond hair, and taken a few cuttings while she was at it. The lock-snipping process, apparently, was mostly done—the envelopes tell us that—and a candle had been lit to melt some hot wax for use as a sealant. What followed then is uncertain; a gust of wind “fanning in” through the open window, to use Henry’s description of the day before, possibly knocking a burning taper onto Fanny’s lap, or perhaps an errant drop of molten wax somehow igniting the hem or sleeve of her highly flammable dress? It may have been, too, as one of Henry’s biographers has suggested, that one of the girls was playing with matches, though there is no contemporary evidence to support that. Whatever the cause, Fanny’s dress was in an instant consumed in flames and she ran toward the study, where Henry was taking an afternoon nap. Jolted to his feet by the commotion, he did what he could, hugging his wife with his arms in a futile attempt to suffocate the flames, losing hold when she broke away in a panic, managing, finally, to snuff out the fire with a small throw rug that proved woefully inadequate to the task.
Someone among the domestic staff was dispatched to get help, someone else tried to calm the hysterical children, others still cut loose the smoldering dress and carried Fanny upstairs to her bedroom. Among the first to arrive on the scene was Cornelius Conway Felton, recently appointed president of Harvard College. A messenger was sent to summon Tom Appleton and the boys on Nahant, someone else took the girls to the home on nearby Berkeley Street of Richard Henry Dana Jr., where they would remain until after their mother’s funeral. “This was before the days of telephones or swift-moving vehicles,” Henrietta Dana Skinner, one of the children in the Dana house when Edith and Annie arrived, would write of the tragedy in An Echo from Parnassus: Girlhood Memories of Longfellow and His Friends. “The family physician, Dr. Morrill Wyman, was out of town; a second doctor summoned was also away; half the houses in Brattle Street were closed, their occupants in the country.” Finally, a stranger, Dr. William Otis Johnson, arrived to administer ether to Fanny. “In after years I came to know Dr. Johnson’s widow,” Mrs. Skinner recalled. “As she described the scene to me, Mrs. Longfellow lay calm and beautiful as if in sleep, her face unmarred by the flames, and wearing an expression so spiritual, so far removed from this world of suffering, that the physician in ministering to her felt a hushed reverence as if in the presence of a martyred saint.”
Four lengthy letters Felton wrote to Sumner in the immediate aftermath provide the most thorough reconstruction of the events. He told of Henry’s consuming fear that he was “growing idiotic” from what he had witnessed, and how he begged not to “be sent to an asylum,” though he began to calm down a few days later. “His sweet and lovely nature never showed itself so beautifully,” Felton wrote. “It will be long before he will recover perfectly from his wounds. His hands are badly burned, and give him more pain: but he says he sleeps best when he suffers the most physical pain.”
Charles Eliot Norton spared few words in describing Fanny’s ordeal for Elizabeth Gaskell, the English novelist and biographer of Charlotte Brontë. “There was nothing to be done but to alleviate her suffering which for an hour or two was intense. She was rendered unconscious by ether,—and when it was discontinued the suffering was over and did not return. Through the night she was perfectly calm, patient and gentle, all the lovely sweetness and elevation of her character showing itself in her looks and words. In the morning she lost consciousness and about eleven o’clock she died.”
Norton lauded Fanny as being “very beautiful” in these final hours, her beauty distinguished by “the loveliness and nobility” of her character. “There is nothing in her life that is not delightful to remember. There was no pause and no decline in her.” Only those who knew Fanny could fully appreciate “how quick and deep and true her sympathies were, how poetic was her temperament, how pure and elevated her thoughts. Longfellow was worthy of such a wife.” The public response to the horror had been overwhelming. “I have never known any domestic calamity so sad and tragic as this. Of all happy homes theirs was in many ways the happiest.”
George William Curtis would recall a carriage ride he shared with Oliver Wendell Holmes a few weeks before the accident. As they passed 105 Brattle Street, he noticed that Holmes turned his head abruptly away from the house, explaining later that he had momentarily “trembled to look” at the dwelling, his feeling then that “those who lived there had their happiness so perfect that no change, of all the changes which must come to them, could fail to be for the worst.”
John Lothrop Motley, a Boston author, diplomat, and family friend, wrote two lengthy letters about the accident to his wife, Mary Benjamin Motley, then on Nahant. A few weeks after the funeral, he reported that Henry’s hands were “becoming serviceable,” and that he was now “suffering more feebleness” than pain. “I have never seen any one who bore a great sorrow in a more simple and noble way. But he is very desolate,—and, however manfully and religiously he may bear up, his life must hereafter be desolate. I hope he may find happiness in his children; his three little girls are very dear and charming, and his two boys are just growing into manhood.” He shared Felton’s concern for Henry’s mental stability, confiding guardedly that he was being “spoken of as in almost a raving condition.”
Motley was the author of several learned works, one of which—The History of the United Netherlands—had been released a few months earlier. Shortly after it was published, he wrote two deeply considered letters to The Times of London entitled “The Causes of the Civil War.” Reprinted in the United States, they attracted the attention of President Lincoln, who thereupon named him minister to Austria, where he would be credited with persuading the nations of Europe to remain neutral throughout the rebellion. Motley shared with his wife the misery he felt over the senselessness of Fanny’s death:
There is something almost too terrible to reflect upon in this utterly trivial way in which this noble, magnificent woman has been put to a hideous death. When you hear of a shipwreck, or a stroke of lightening, or even a railway accident, the mind does not shrink appalled from the contemplation of the tragedy so utterly as it now does, from finding all this misery resulting from such an invisible cause—a drop of sealing-wax on a muslin dress. Deaths in battle are telegraphed to us hourly, and hosts of our young men are marching forth to mortal combat day by day, but these are in the natural course of events. Fate, acting on its large scale, has decreed that a great war shall rage, and we are prepared for tragedies, and we know that those who fall have been discharging the highest of duties. But what compensation or consolation is there for such a calamity as this?”
While decidedly gruesome, Fanny’s accident was by no means an isolated incident. Serious injury and death in this manner was distressingly common during much of the nineteenth century, the fashion for billowy dresses known as crinolines made with highly flammable open-weave fabrics making for a deadly combination. “Crinoline” was a coinage of the Latin words crinis for horsehair, often used as a fabric stiffener essential for the look, and linum, for the thread used to fashion the hooped petticoats that made a woman’s skirt flare out from the body, creating a bell-shaped cage around the lower torso that functioned as an air duct in the event of fire.
Nine months before Fanny’s accident, one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious medical journals, The Lancet, reported that hundreds of women in Britain were dying each year in an “almost daily holocaust” of accidents resulting from “the combustibility of their dress and the expansion of their crinoline,” and cited government inquest figures to back up the claim. “This is a very serious evil, and one which cannot be regarded without a regret deepened by the reflection that such accidents are preventable.” Punch, the famous satirical weekly, published derisive poems and merciless cartoons in issue after issue condemning what it called “that inflated absurdity, Crinoline,” denouncing its existence as a “living institution, which nothing seemingly can crush nor compress.” Another Punch article called crinoline dresses “the detestable cages which depraved vanity has invented to conceal three-quarters of a woman’s figure under a scaffolding for drapery.” Yet another appeared under the headline “Suicide by Crinoline.”
While this crusade was going on, The Examiner, an influential London weekly through most of the nineteenth century, was publishing a continuing log of “crinoline accidents causing death by fire,” opening its compilation often with the remark: “We have more to record this week.” The circumstances were numbingly similar. A fourteen-year-old girl “catches fire” while standing by the grate in her home, “the only part of her person which escaped unburned being her feet.” A twenty-five-year-old female “inmate” at a “lunatic asylum” outside of London is consumed in flames after she “tore down” the “fire-guard” from a stove in her room. A sixteen-year-old domestic servant in Leeds becomes “enveloped in flames” while placing an object on the mantelpiece in her house, and succumbs after two days of intense suffering.
Being the wife of a famous American poet, Fanny attracted international attention with her fatal mishap, but she was by no means the only woman of prominence to be victimized in this manner, and would not be the last. Within three weeks of her accident, The Spectator of London reported the death of the thirty-two-year-old wife of a London lawyer under similar circumstances—she had leaned over a candle while writing letters. “Every means was tried to extinguish” the flames, but “the hoops had to be cut off before the fire could be extinguished.”
Just two months after Fanny’s death, an even more horrifying incident took place in a Philadelphia theater packed with fifteen hundred people waiting for the curtain to go up in an elaborately staged production of Shakespeare’s Tempest. One of the dancers putting on her costume backstage came in contact with a gaslight that ignited her dress. Several other women in the corps de ballet who came to her aid became enflamed as well, spreading chaos and panic throughout the theater. Six women died, four of them sisters from England, one of whom jumped to her death from a window in the dressing room; eight others were severely injured. Harper’s Weekly would describe the scene at the Continental Theater on Walnut Street that night as “most piteous and agonizing.”
In its coverage of the horror, Scientific American cited other instances in which “the dresses of ballet girls have caught fire from the foot lights, causing death in the most terrifying and excruciating form.” The magazine repeated a caveat it had issued in its pages following the “death of the wife of Professor Longfellow”—that “all such accidents can be prevented” by simply treating garments with a solution of “tungstate of soda and the sulphate of ammonia,” an intervention that effectively serves as a fire retardant, and was already being used in England for Queen Victoria’s dresses. “We again urge this subject upon the attention of the public, and we solicit our readers to use their influence to disseminating such humane and useful information.”
FANNY’S FUNERAL TOOK PLACE on July 13, 1861, on what would have been her eighteenth wedding anniversary. Services were conducted in the Craigie House library, just a few feet from where she had suffered her fatal injuries. Though private, the ceremonies were attended, according to press accounts, by “most of the clergymen of Boston and Cambridge, the Faculty of Harvard College, and a number of prominent literary gentlemen.” Fanny had been placed in a “heavily silvered” casket of “rich rosewood,” surrounded by “numberless wreaths of rare flowers and bouquets.” Sprigs of fresh orange blossoms, the same arrangement that adorned her wedding bouquet, had been placed on her breast.
The service began shortly after noon, “at which hour the bells in Cambridge were tolling in honor of the deceased,” according to the Lowell Daily Citizen & News. “Rev. Dr. Peabody was the officiating clergyman, and at the close of the religious ceremonies the body was removed to the family burying place” on Indian Ridge Road in Mount Auburn Cemetery, the rustic burial ground a half mile due west of Craigie House, a quiet place of rural beauty where the Longfellows had enjoyed so many walks and carriage rides through the years of their marriage. The funeral cortege numbered one hundred carriages, thirty of them carrying dignitaries from Boston. The burial preceded by a day the death of Nathan Appleton, who died within hours of being told of Fanny’s passing. The Daily Citizen reported further that “it was a singular circumstance that the flames in no wise disfigured the beautiful face of their victim.”
Many dozens of well-wishers had come calling to pay their respects, a steady outpouring of grief that Henry could only hear, and not witness, as he remained in seclusion, tending to his bodily wounds and battered psyche. His younger brother Sam, a Unitarian minister, was unable to provide any comfort; he was in England, and learned of Fanny’s death from the London newspapers. Ernest Longfellow would recall his father’s distress with clarity. “I remember his lying in bed and holding up his poor bandaged hands and murmuring, ‘Oh, why could I not save her?’ It was a terrible blow to him, from which he never recovered.” Twelve days after the accident, Felton reported that Henry’s face was still swollen, “and he cannot yet shave; the burn to his nose and his left cheek are already healed.”
There had been a flood of sympathetic letters, which Henry found nearly impossible to answer fully, though he did send a few notes of acknowledgment. Charles Sumner wrote from Washington immediately upon hearing the devastating news. “Dearest Longfellow,” he began. “God bless and comfort you! I am overwhelmed with grief, and long to be with you. Nothing but duties here, which cannot be postponed, prevents me from going on at once!” Sumner’s personal anguish at Fanny’s loss was expressed even more poignantly ten days later:
Daily, hourly, constantly I think of you, and my thoughts end with myself; for I cannot forget my own great and irreparable loss. In all visions of life I have always included her, for it never occurred to me that I should be the survivor, and I counted upon her friendship to the last. How strong must be your grief, I know and feel in my heart. But your happiness has been great, and the memories which remain are precious. I long to talk with you, and to enter into all this experience so trying, and help you to bear it, if I can. I must go with you to Mount Auburn. I hear of the children with great interest; they will be to you a comfort and consolation. I wish Charley would write me about you, and tell me how you are doing. I have been unhappy away. I wish I had seen her once more; but duties here stood sentinel in the way. Mr. William Appleton [a cousin of Nathan Appleton’s, at that time a member of Congress in the Massachusetts delegation] and myself have been together a good deal to talk of this bereavement. He is well. God bless you!
Julia Ward Howe posted a heartfelt letter the day after the funeral, expressing the inadequacy of “words, human or divine” to give comfort in the “terrible sorrow” that now consumed her close acquaintance of many years, the man she playfully called “Longo” in most letters, my “dear friend” here:
What is there for any of us in such moments but the one simple word: “Thy will be done.” This expresses at once our helplessness and our hope. My eyes are blinded with bitter tears while I try to write. This tremble is so great that it overflows into the hearts of your friends, filling them like a personal sorrow. The vision of beauty that has passed away from the earth—the mother’s heart grown cold with those mighty words of love clinging to it. Oh! This is something in which we all have a part—we can not be human, and not weep for you. I know how darkly this must fall upon you, how long it will be for your kindly nature will become reconciled to such a maiming and mutilation of life. Your children will plead most tenderly with you for its endurance. For their sake you will try now for composure, and hereafter for cheerfulness, but that will take time, much time. May all the sweet comfort that you have flung abroad for others return tenfold to your own bosom. “As ye do unto others, it shall be done unto you.” Your words have consoled many—they have embellished suffering to thousands of mourners. May some of them come back home to you with consolation. I know that none of us can do you any good, only but our love…God bless you.
That same day, July 14, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote James T. Fields, the editor both men shared and trusted unconditionally, unable, he admitted, to contact Henry directly, at least not then. “How does Longfellow bear this terrible misfortune? How are his own injuries? Do write, and tell me all about him. I cannot at all reconcile this calamity to my sense of fitness. One would think that there ought to have been no deep sorrow to the life of a man like him; and now comes this blackest of shadows, which no sunshine hereafter can ever penetrate! I shall be afraid ever to meet him again; he cannot again be the man that I have known.”
Writing from Italy, the artist Thomas Buchanan Read, whose painting of Henry’s three daughters hangs prominently in the dining room, related how “your terrific disaster burst upon us here in Rome, as it did indeed over the whole world, wherever your poetry has endeared your name and made it a household word.”
Taking pen to paper finally on August 18, Henry wrote his sister-in-law in London, Mary Appleton Mackintosh, from Nahant, where he had retreated for a few days of solitude by the seashore. “I feel that only you and I knew her thoroughly. You can understand what an inexpressible delight she was to me, always and in all things. I never looked at her without a thrill of pleasure;—she never came into a room where I was without my heart beating quicker, nor went out without my feeling that something of the light went with her. I loved her so entirely, and I know she was very happy.”
The magnitude of the loss they both shared, and the inexpressible horror of what he had witnessed the previous month, was central to Henry’s thoughts. “How I am alive after what my eyes have seen, I know not. I am at least patient, if not resigned; and thank God hourly—as I have from the beginning—for the beautiful life we led together, and that I loved her more and more to the end.” Looking ahead, “I have no plans,” he admitted, being unable to “lift my eyes in that direction,” managing only to “look backward, not forward. The only question is, what will be best for the children?” He closed by asking Mary to “think of me here, by this haunted sea-shore,” where “the sense of her presence upon me” was so strong “that I should hardly be surprised to meet her in our favorite walk, or, if I looked up now to see her in the room. My heart aches and bleeds sorely for the poor children. To lose such a mother, and all the divine influences of her character and care. They do not know their loss, but I do. God will provide. His will be done!”
George William Curtis had written Tom Appleton within days of the accident, assuring him that “many thousand hearts” were mourning for Fanny, people who had reached out to him, a mere acquaintance, with their condolences. He predicted that Henry would one day “feel that every heart he has comforted—and no man living has so personal a relation with his unknown friends—is a friendly heart to him.” Speaking for himself, he considered having known Fanny “one of the great blessings” of his life, “and one of its best influences.” Reaching out to Henry, finally, on September 7, Curtis described a “dark valley that opened so suddenly” for everyone who knew her. “I see her smiling through it always—as that beautiful light of heavenly womanhood which shone in her, will shine through all our memories forever.” He described the devastation he felt when learning the horrible news. “My heart was so loyal to her that there is nothing with which I associate her that does not make me see her and hear her again. Books, the sea, the summer day, the heroic men and the heroic ladies of the time, all bring me into her presence.” From all these “scenes she knew,” she “cries to me, immortal,” her memory “a constant purification” for him.
“In very dangerous and trying moments of my life she was a wonderfully true and controlling friend,” he continued. “Those days are long gone, and I have fallen upon the undeserved and serene happiness that so few know in this world—but the great fidelity, the exquisite instinct, the good word in season, how much of my happiness I owe to those, how much of my real life, to her!” He closed with typical grace and elegance: “Good bye, dear heart, and God bless you. You know how I love and honor you, but we can’t talk of such things.” In a brief reply, Henry thanked Curtis for his “affectionate and touching letter,” and apologized for not writing a fuller response. “Even now I can not answer it; I can only thank you for it. I am too utterly wretched and overwhelmed,—to the eyes of others, outwardly, calm; but inwardly bleeding to death. I can not say more. God bless you, and protect your household.”
There remained one person Henry felt obligated to contact, his wife’s dearest friend through most of her life, and the recipient of at least 225 letters from Fanny over a twenty-five-year period (1836–61), the frequency increasing when Emmeline married in 1846 and moved to Geneseo, in the Finger Lakes region of New York. “Henry is jealous when I tell him this,” Fanny once said of their special bond, “but he has his male friends and I can well know the peculiar pleasure their society must give him, while I have no darling Emmeline with whom to chatter and talk as only women can.”
Written three months after Fanny’s death, Henry’s letter to Emmeline came to Harvard University in 1979 from the Wadsworth family, arriving too late to be included in Andrew Hilen’s volume of correspondence for that period, and thus unpublished previously anywhere until now. “Your letters I find carefully put away in a box by themselves,” he informed her, stressing how they had occupied a special place among his wife’s possessions. “I shall keep them safely for you till you come, should you wish to reclaim them.” Whether Emmeline ever did take the letters, or if she did, what happened to them, is not known; their fate remains a mystery to this day. The letters Fanny wrote to Emmeline made their way back to Brattle Street, and were an essential resource for this book; fifteen Emmeline sent to Henry between 1850 and 1866 are in the Houghton Library.
The discovery of the cache had given Henry pause to reflect. “When I come upon such things, I have no more fortitude than a child; and it is only little by little that I can bring myself to go through the dear but dreadful task, of opening a closet, or a drawer or a box. I keep everything in the home, exactly as it was—as if she were only absent for a short while, and soon coming back: and do by illusions try to make the ruin of my household less terrible.” He apologized for suggesting that the pain of loss was his alone. “I fear I think of my own sorrow only, and forget wholly that of others; and that I shall sadden you rather than comfort you. At first one’s grief must have way. My thoughts have worn this channel for themselves, and it is difficult for me to turn them aside; particularly in writing to you, whom she loved most, next to her sister, Dear Mary, with her double weight of woe!” He then reflected on the “unwonted splendor” of autumn then in full color. “I have driven again and again through all the haunted lanes of Brookline and Waltham. It is indescribably painful yet sweet, to revisit often the familiar places. They are full of ghosts, they do not terrify me. No harm can ever come from them. You see how it is. Wherever I begin, I drift and sway back to the same place again, for my mind is troubled and bewildered.”
A few weeks later, James T. Fields, who had recently acquired The Atlantic Monthly with William Ticknor and succeeded James Russell Lowell as editor, asked Henry to write something, anything, for the January 1862 issue. The answer was respectfully short: “I am sorry to say No, instead of Yes; but so it must be. I can neither write nor think; and have nothing fit to send you, but my love—which you cannot put into the Magazine.” A single entry in Henry’s journal for August had taken stock of the situation, a month having passed since his world had been turned upside down. “So closes the Second Act of Life’s Drama, and the Third begins,” the first two, presumably, having been his marriages to Mary and Fanny. The next would embrace the final twenty-one years of his life—and be a triumphant validation of the first two.