Delphi Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Delphi Poets Series Book 13)

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Thus, wherever he goes, his natural good spirits prevail over everything. Washington Irving, in his diary, speaks of Longfellow at Madrid as having “arrived safely and cheerily, having met with no robbers.” Mrs. Alexander Everett, wife of the American minister at Madrid, writes back to America, “His countenance is itself a letter of recommendation.” He went into good Spanish society and also danced in the streets on village holidays. At the Alhambra, he saw the refinement of beauty within the halls, and the clusters of gypsy caves in the hillside opposite. After eight months of Spain he went on to Italy, where he remained until December, and passed to Germany with the new year. He sums up his knowledge of the languages at this point by saying, “With the French and Spanish languages I am familiarly conversant so as to speak them correctly and write them with as much ease and fluency as I do the English. The Portuguese I read without difficulty. And with regard to my proficiency in the Italian, I have only to say that all at the hotel where I lodge took me for an Italian, until I told them I was an American.” He settled down to his studies in Germany, his father having written, with foresight then unusual, “I consider the German language and literature much more important than the Italian.” He did not, however, have any sense of actual transplantation, as is the case with some young students, for although he writes to his sister (March 28, 1829), “My poetic career is finished. Since I left America I have hardly put two lines together,” yet he sends to Carey & Lea, the Philadelphia publishers, to propose a series of sketches and tales of New England life. These sketches, as given in his note-book, are as follows: —

  “1. New England Scenery: description of Sebago Pond; rafting logs; tavern scene; a tale connected with the ‘Images.’

  “2. A New England Village: country squire; the parson; the little deacon; the farm-house kitchen.

  “3. Husking Frolic: song and tales; fellow who plays the fife for the dance; tale of the Quoddy Indians; description of Sacobezon, their chief.

  “5. Thanksgiving Day: its merry-making, and tales (also of the Indians).

  “7. Description of the White Mountains: tale of the Bloody Hand.

  “10. Reception of Lafayette in a country village.

  “13. Down East: the missionary of Acadie.”

  A few days after, he wrote from Göttingen to his father, “I shall never again be in Europe.” We thus see his mind at work on American themes in Germany, as later on German themes in America, unconsciously predicting that mingling of the two influences which gave him his fame. His earlier books gave to studious Americans, as I can well recall, their first imaginative glimpses of Europe, while the poet’s homeward-looking thoughts from Europe had shown the instinct which was to identify his later fame with purely American themes. It is to be noticed that whatever was artificial and foreign in Longfellow’s work appeared before he went to Europe; and was the same sort of thing which appeared in all boyish American work at that period. It was then that in describing the Indian hunter he made the dance go round by the greenwood tree. He did not lay this aside at once after his return from Europe, and Margaret Fuller said of him, “He borrows incessantly and mixes what he borrows.” Criticising the very prelude to “Voices of the Night,” she pointed out the phrases “pentecost” and “bishop’s-caps” as indications that he was not merely “musing upon many things,” but on many books which described them. But the habit steadily diminished. His very gift at translation, in which he probably exceeded on the whole any other modern poet, led him, nevertheless, always to reproduce old forms rather than create new ones, thus aiding immensely his popularity with the mass of simple readers, while coming short of the full demands of the more critical. To construct his most difficult poems was thus mainly a serene pleasure, and something as far as possible from that conflict which kept Hawthorne all winter, by his wife’s testimony, with “a knot in his forehead” while he was writing “The Scarlet Letter.”

  It is always to be borne in mind that, as Mr. Scudder has pointed out in his admirable paper on “Longfellow and his Art,” the young poet was really preparing himself in Europe for his literary work as well as for his professional work, and half consciously. This is singularly confirmed by his lifelong friend, Professor George W. Greene, who, in dedicating his “The Life of Nathanael Greene” to his friend, thus recalls an evening spent together at Naples in 1828: —

  “We wanted,” he says, “to be alone, and yet to feel that there was life all around us. We went up to the flat roof of the house where, as we walked, we could look down into the crowded street, and out upon the wonderful bay, and across the bay to Ischia and Capri and Sorrento, and over the house-tops and villas and vineyards to Vesuvius. The ominous pillar of smoke hung suspended above the fatal mountain, reminding us of Pliny, its first and noblest victim. A golden vapor crowned the bold promontory of Sorrento, and we thought of Tasso. Capri was calmly sleeping, like a sea-bird upon the waters; and we seemed to hear the voice of Tacitus from across the gulf of eighteen centuries, telling us that the historian’s pen is still powerful to absolve or to condemn long after the imperial sceptre has fallen from the withered hand. There, too, lay the native island of him whose daring mind conceived the fearful vengeance of the Sicilian Vespers. We did not yet know Niccolini; but his grand verses had already begun their work of regeneration in the Italian heart. Virgil’s tomb was not far off. The spot consecrated by Sannazaro’s ashes was near us. And over all, with a thrill like that of solemn music, fell the splendor of the Italian sunset.”

  As an illustration of this obvious fact that Longfellow, during this first European visit, while nominally training himself for purely educational work, was fitting himself also for a literary career, we find from his letter to his father, May 15, 1829, that while hearing lectures in German and studying faithfully that language, he was, as he says, “writing a book, a kind of Sketch-Book of scenes in France, Spain, and Italy.” We shall presently encounter this book under the name of “Outre-Mer.” He connects his two aims by saying in the same letter, “One must write and write correctly, in order to teach.” Again he adds, “The further I advance, the more I see to be done. The more, too, I am persuaded of the charlatanism of literary men. For the rest, my fervent wish is to return home.” His brother tells us that among his note-books of that period, we find a favorite passage from Locke which reappears many years after in one of his letters and in his impromptu address to the children of Cambridge, in 1880: “Thus the ideas as well as the children of our youth often die before us, and our minds represent to us those tombs to which we are approaching; where, though the brass and marble remain, yet the inscriptions are effaced by time, and the imagery moulders away.” He also included a quotation from John Lyly’s “Endymion,” which ten years later furnished the opening of his own “Hyperion.” “Dost thou know what a poet is? Why, fool, a poet is as much as one should say — a poet.” When we consider what he had just before written to his sister, it only furnishes another illustration of the fact, which needs no demonstration, that young authors do not always know themselves.

  He reached home from Europe, after three years of absence, on August 11, 1829, looking toward Bowdoin College as his abode, and a professorship of modern languages as his future position. Up to this time, to be sure, the economical college had offered him only an instructorship. But he had shown at this point that quiet decision and firmness which marked him in all practical affairs, and which was not always quite approved by his more anxious father. In this case he carried his point, and he received on the 6th of September this simple record of proceedings from the college: —

  “In the Board of Trustees of Bowdoin College, Sept. 1st, 1829: Mr. Henry W. Longfellow having declined to accept the office of instructor in modern languages.

  “Voted, that we now proceed to the choice of a professor of modern languages.

  “And Mr. H. W. Longfellow was chosen.”

  Thus briefly was the matter settled, and he was launched upon his life’s career at the age of twenty-two. O
f those who made up his circle of friends in later years, Holmes had just graduated from Harvard, Sumner was a Senior there, and Lowell was a schoolboy in Cambridge. Few American colleges had at that time special professors of modern languages, though George Ticknor had set a standard for them all. Longfellow had to prepare his own text-books — to translate “L’Homond’s Grammar,” to edit an excellent little volume of French “Proverbes Dramatiques,” and a small Spanish Reader, “Novelas Españolas.” He was also enlisted in a few matters outside, and drew up the outline of a prospectus for a girls’ high school in Portland, such high schools being then almost as rare as professorships of modern languages. He was also librarian. He gave a course of lectures on French, Spanish, and Italian literature, but there seems to have been no reference to German, which had not then come forward into the place in American education which it now occupies. As to literature, he wrote to his friend, George W. Greene, “Since my return I have written one piece of poetry, but have not published a line. You need not be alarmed on that score. I am all prudence now, since I can form a more accurate judgment of the merit of poetry. If I ever publish a volume, it will be many years first.” It was actually nine years. For the “North American Review” he wrote in April, 1831, an essay on “The Origin and Progress of the French Language.” He afterwards sent similar papers to the same periodical upon the Italian and Spanish languages and literatures, each of these containing also original translations. Thus he entered on his career as a teacher, but another change in life also awaited him.

  CHAPTER VI. MARRIAGE AND LIFE AT BRUNSWICK

  It has been a source of regret to many that the memoirs of Longfellow, even when prepared by his brother, have given, perhaps necessarily, so little space to his early love and first marriage, facts which are apt to be, for a poet, the turning-points in his career. We know that this period in Lowell’s life, for instance, brought what seemed almost a transformation of his nature, making an earnest reformer and patriot of a youth who had hitherto been little more than a brilliant and somewhat reckless boy. In Longfellow’s serener nature there was no room for a change so marked, yet it is important to recognize that it brought with it a revival of that poetic tendency which had singularly subsided for a time after its early manifestation. He had written to his friend, George W. Greene, on June 27, 1830, that he had long ceased to attach any value to his early poems or even to think of them at all. Yet after about a year of married life, he began (December 1, 1832) the introduction to his Phi Beta Kappa poem, and during the following year published a volume of poetical translations from the Spanish; thus imitating Bryant, then in some ways his model, who had derived so much of his inspiration from the Spanish muse. It is not unreasonable to recognize something of his young wife’s influence in this rekindling of poetic impulse, and it is pleasant, in examining the manuscript lectures delivered by him at Bowdoin College and still preserved there, to find them accompanied by pages of extracts, here and there, in her handwriting. It will therefore be interesting to make her acquaintance a little farther.

  Mary Storer Potter was the second daughter of the Hon. Barrett Potter and Anne (Storer) Potter of Portland, neighbors and friends of the Longfellow family. She had been for a time a schoolmate of Henry Longfellow at the private school of Bezaleel Cushman in Portland; and it is the family tradition that on the young professor’s returning to his native city after his three years’ absence in Europe he saw her at church and was so struck with her appearance as to follow her home afterwards without venturing to accost her. On reaching his own house, however, he begged his sister to call with him at once at the Potter residence, and all the rest followed as in a novel. They were married September 14, 1831, she being then nineteen years of age, having been born on May 12, 1812, and he being twenty-four.

  It was a period when Portland was somewhat celebrated for the beauty of its women; and indeed feminine beauty, at least in regard to coloring, seems somewhat developed, like the tints of garden flowers, by the neighborhood of the sea. An oil painting of Mrs. Longfellow is in my possession, taken in a costume said to have been selected by the young poet from one of the highly illustrated annuals so much in vogue at that day. She had dark hair and deep blue eyes, the latter still represented in some of her nieces, although she left no children. Something of her love of study and of her qualities of mind and heart are also thus represented in this younger generation. She had never learned Latin or Greek, her father disapproving of those studies for girls, but he had encouraged her in the love of mathematics, and there is among her papers a calculation of an eclipse.

  She had been mainly educated at the school, then celebrated, of Miss Gushing in Hingham. “My first impression of her,” wrote in later years the venerable professor, Alpheus Packard, — who was professor of Latin and Greek at Bowdoin at the time of her marriage,— “is of an attractive person, blooming in health and beauty, the graceful bride of a very attractive and elegant young man.” Some books from her girlish library now lie before me, dingy and time-worn, with her name in varying handwriting from the early “Mary S. Potter” to the later “Mary S. P. Longfellow.” They show many marked passages and here and there a quotation. The collection begins with Miss Edgeworth’s “Harry and Lucy;” then follow somewhat abruptly “Sabbath Recreations,” by Miss Emily Taylor, and “The Wreath, a selection of elegant poems from the best authors,” — these poems including the classics of that day, Beattie’s “Minstrel,” Blair’s “Grave,” Gray’s “Elegy,” Goldsmith’s “Traveller,” and some lighter measures from Campbell, Moore, and Burns. The sombre muse undoubtedly predominated, but on the whole the book was not so bad an elementary preparation for the training of a poet’s wife. It is a touching accidental coincidence that one of the poems most emphatically marked is one of the few American poems in these volumes, Bryant’s “Death of the Flowers,” especially the last verse, which describes a woman who died in her youthful beauty. To these are added books of maturer counsel, as Miss Bowdler’s “Poems and Essays,” then reprinted from the sixteenth English edition, but now forgotten, and Mrs. Barbauld’s “Legacy for Young Ladies,” discussing beauty, fashion, botany, the uses of history, and especially including a somewhat elaborate essay on “female studies,” on which, perhaps, Judge Potter founded his prohibition of the classics. Mrs. Barbauld lays down the rule that “the learned languages, the Greek especially, require a great deal more time than a young woman can conveniently spare. To the Latin,” she adds, “there is not an equal objection ... and it will not,” she thinks, “in the present state of things, excite either a smile or a stare in fashionable company.” But she afterwards says, “French you are not only permitted to learn, but you are laid under the same necessity of acquiring it as your brother is of acquiring the Latin.” Mrs. Barbauld’s demands, however, are not extravagant, as she thinks that “a young person who reads French with ease, who is so well grounded as to write it grammatically, and has what I should call a good English pronunciation will by a short residence in France gain fluency and the accent.” This “good English pronunciation” of French is still not unfamiliar to those acquainted with Anglicized or Americanized regions of Paris.

  Among the maturer books of Mary Potter was Worcester’s “Elements of History,” then and now a clear and useful manual of its kind, and a little book called “The Literary Gem” (1827), which was an excellent companion or antidote for Worcester’s History, as it included translations from the German imaginative writers just beginning to be known, Goethe, Richter, and Körner, together with examples of that American literary school which grew up partly in imitation of the German, and of which the “Legend of Peter Rugg,” by William Austin, is the only specimen now remembered. With this as a concluding volume, it will be seen that Mary Potter’s mind had some fitting preparation for her husband’s companionship, and that the influence of Bryant in poetry, and of Austin, the precursor of Hawthorne, in prose, may well have lodged in her mind the ambition, which was always making itself visible in her hus
band, towards the new work of creating an American literature. It is in this point of view that the young wife’s mental training assumed a real importance in studying the atmosphere of Longfellow’s early days. For the rest, she was described by her next-door neighbor in Brunswick, Miss Emeline Weld, as “a lovely woman in character and appearance, gentle, refined, and graceful, with an attractive manner that won all hearts.”