Aside from Sam Ward, the two had at least one other thing in common: Longfellow had corresponded with Wilde’s mother, Lady Wilde, herself a poet of repute back in Dublin. For her son, the Craigie House breakfast was a relatively quiet interlude in the social frenzy of his American tour. He was to be the last in a chain of distinguished British visitors who had enjoyed the legendary hospitality of the Craigie House since the 1840s. On his part, Longfellow surely remembered the kindness of the literary men who had welcomed him in 1826, when, at about Wilde’s age, he had first set foot in Europe.
We do not really know much of what they talked about over that breakfast—Wilde’s later anecdotes of the trip are not entirely to be trusted—but it would be fun to think that the subject of Salome had come up (Longfellow had depicted her in a religious drama of his own in 1872). Afterwards, Wilde was to repeat with glee his host’s account of an audience with Queen Victoria at Windsor in 1869: When he had modestly expressed surprise at his own fame in England, Her Majesty had replied, “O, I assure you, Mr. Longfellow, you are very well known. All my servants read you.”
“Sometimes,” Longfellow confessed to Wilde, “I will wake up in the night and wonder if it was a deliberate slight.” Wilde was certain it was “the rebuke of Majesty to the vanity of the poet.” But was it? The late Prince Albert would not have thought so. A poet who could bring down from Parnassus uplifting words that even the working classes would cherish and memorize—now there was a Victorian.
And that was just the problem. To Wilde this high-mindedness was not poetry. To Longfellow, nothing else would do. But they seemed to have enjoyed their breakfast. Wilde—still twelve years away from the scandal that would destroy him—was genuinely touched by the old man: “Longfellow was himself a beautiful poem, more beautiful than anything he ever wrote.” Longfellow—aware that his own fame was dimming—was far more tolerant of Wilde’s performance than had been the sexually panicked young Henry James a week earlier in New York.
The wit who sought to provoke said good-bye to the poet who tried very hard to please. Meanwhile, the snow had turned into howling rain.
THE CITY BY THE SEA
Portland, in the District of Maine
ANOTHER HOUSE, a more distant place. The original settlement of Portland had been strung across a three-mile-long peninsula. Longfellow grew up in the house his grandfather had built along the ridge of that peninsula, roughly halfway between its fortified eastern tip at Mountjoy’s Hill and steep, wooded Bramhall’s Hill to the west. From the windows of the third story, where Henry and his older brother Stephen and their maiden aunt Lucia had their chambers, you could look south and east to the wharf-lined Fore River and Casco Bay, and out beyond to Portland Head Light, Cape Elizabeth, and the cold Atlantic; to the north and west, across the mussel beds of the Back Cove, were the meadows of Gorham, home of many of the Longfellows, and the distant hills that sheltered Hiram, where the Wadsworths had their farm. When the weather was clear in this land of frequent fog and damp, you could see Mount Washington, seventy miles away in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The doubleness of this view—the running back and forth from one window to another to encompass it all—was to color the younger boy’s poetry and his life. On the one side, the new American republic; on the other, the passage to Europe. Portland was a small place, and at night, when the wind had died down, you could hear the swift, incoming tide slapping at the harbor pilings, down one slope of the hill, and the gentler rhythm of the waves stroking the shoals in the broad cove out back.
Longfellow had not been born in this house. On February 27, 1807, the day of his birth, his parents, Stephen and Zilpah, were living with Stephen’s sister, at the corner of Fore and Hancock streets, in a three-story frame house in the Federal style, separated by a small beach from the harbor. It was an easterly part of town, so distant that people called it “Jaffa,” although a century earlier this had been the “court end” of Portland, full of large dwellings, and almost a century before that, it had been the site of the first European settlement on the Neck. The house belonged to Captain Samuel Stephenson, who had asked the young couple to keep his wife Abigail company during the winter while he was at sea. Like many coastal New Englanders who depended on maritime trade, Stephenson would, by the end of that year, find his livelihood threatened by Jefferson’s embargo—indeed, he would face bankruptcy. About eight months after Henry was born, rather than return to their own house on Temple Street, the Longfellows moved to Zilpah’s father’s house, on Congress Street, a two-story red-brick Georgian house built in 1785–86 with a large store attached. It was at the heart of the town, a few steps from the marketplace, the First Parish Church, and the courthouse, where Stephen practiced as an attorney.
Zilpah’s father, General Peleg Wadsworth, was one of those men who had done well in the Revolution. He had set himself up as a country squire by purchasing from a grateful commonwealth, at the good rate of 12.5¢ per acre, some 7,800 acres of land in the western hills, between the Ossipee and Saco Rivers, where he established the town of Hiram and built Wadsworth Hall. Although today only an hour’s drive from Portland, Wadsworth Hall—still inhabited by his descendants—seems defended by its hilly fastness, very much the property of someone who wants to protect himself from a surprise raid from the sea. This rather martial air is even more pronounced when you enter the front door. The exterior looks very much like other big, white-clapboard farmhouses of Federal New England, but the floor plan is almost medieval: rooms open off a huge central hall, whose unpainted pine has darkened over two centuries to a rich tobacco hue. It served for militia drills, church services, family gatherings, country dances. There is nothing else quite like it in Maine.
But Wadsworth was shrewd enough to know that money came more quickly in a flourishing port than in rural Hiram; at the same time, he established himself as a merchant in town. In 1784, in what was then still a rural neighborhood, he built a barn and store on the well-traveled route leading to the town’s hay scales. By January 1785, he had opened for business, advertising in the Falmouth Gazette “an assortment of goods” available on credit, in exchange for lumber, or for public securities of every kind. That was one vocation the Revolution had affirmed for New England: a gentleman lost no face by engaging in trade. Wadsworth was soon shipping pigs as well as flour and firewood to his Portland neighbors from the Hiram farm. In fact, his letters to his son Charles from Washington, while attending Congress, have less to do with politics than with advice on sending hogs into the woods for acorns and beechnuts, or luring pigeons with corn, or pickling beef, or which beans to plant. The general was closer to Jefferson’s ideal agrarian republican than to a Yankee trader. Yet, as a staunch Federalist, there was no one he distrusted more than Jefferson, unless it was the French.
Our first glimpse of Henry is on his grandfather’s knee. Writing to her husband in town while visiting her parents in Hiram, Zilpah reports that the seven-month-old boy “is very fond of Grandpa’s singing and trotting on the knee.” For a poet who would be known for his musicality and his galloping rhythms, it was an auspicious start.
The boy would also become a storyteller (and reteller) of mythic potency, and one of the best stories he ever heard concerned his own grandfather.
Peleg Wadsworth, born of Pilgrim ancestry in Duxbury, Massachusetts, had come of age in the years leading up to the American Revolution. A Harvard graduate of the class of 1769, with military tastes, he saw action at the Siege of Boston and played a central role in the ill-fated Penobscot Expedition of 1779, a debacle of such magnitude that it is scarcely mentioned in American history texts. The colonials’ effort to dislodge the British from Bagaduce (modern Castine), at the mouth of the Penobscot River in Maine, and thereby reduce the threat to Massachusetts from the east, had led instead to the destruction of the American fleet, largely as a result of its commanders’ incompetence. Thanks to his coolheadedness in the retreat, Wadsworth was, in the words of one historian, “the only American officer to eme
rge from the Penobscot disaster with an enhanced reputation.” Paul Revere, among the other commanders, was disgraced and had to face a pro forma court martial.
A year later, the General Court (as the Massachusetts legislature was called) put the thirty-two-year-old Wadsworth in command of the District of Maine, to use the term applied until 1820 to the three easternmost counties of Massachusetts. Finding he had only some five hundred troops spread along a lengthy coastline in a region verging on civil war, Wadsworth resorted to a heavy-handed imposition of martial law and felt obligated to hang one feeble-minded man who had unwittingly guided a party of Loyalist raiders.
With the Royal Navy across the Gulf of Maine at Halifax, the British army firmly in control of the Penobscot valley, much of the population wavering in its loyalties, and Boston unable to supply or pay his forces, Wadsworth was about to resign his command, when, on a February night in 1781, a party of twenty-five British regulars, alerted by a Tory sympathizer, surrounded the house at Thomaston in which the Wadsworth family was sleeping. Easily chasing away the sentry, the raiding party shot its way into the house, where it met spirited resistance from the young general, wielding a pair of pistols, a blunderbuss, and a fusee. But a British bullet tore into Wadsworth’s left arm, and he had to surrender. To the horror of his family, the raiders marched the severely wounded general away in the snow, and imprisoned him at Fort George (the site of which can still be seen at modern Castine).
What followed reads like an adventure story. His arm slowly healed, and he received from his captors the gentlemanly treatment accorded to prisoners of rank in the eighteenth century—even lending him books, inviting him to the officers’ mess, and allowing his wife to visit. He was heartened to learn that his young son Charles, who had not been seen amid the confusion and violence and was feared dead, had slept through the entire raid. But it soon became clear to Wadsworth that he was not going to be ransomed or exchanged, but rather shipped to Halifax and possibly to London for the duration of the war. In 1781, it was far from clear that the Americans would win their independence, and the general himself might very well have been hanged as a rebel. In any event, he feared a long separation from his family and the deprivations of a prison ship.
He and a fellow prisoner determined that they would escape, whatever the risk. They knew they had little time. They had carefully studied the plan of Fort George, the movements of the sentries, and the construction of the attic of the building in which they had been locked up. Borrowing a gimlet from an unsuspecting servant, they painstakingly sawed, night after night, through a section of plank in the ceiling of their chamber. To disguise their efforts, they filled the holes with chewed up bread, which happened to be the same color as the wood. One night, a heavy thunderstorm gave them the opportunity they thought might never again come. Protected by the noise of the pelting rain and the darkness, they climbed into the attic—Wadsworth with great difficulty, because of his injured arm—and crawled along the rafters, unnoticed by their guards in the room below. They were stealthy enough not even to alarm the chickens roosting in the rafters. They dropped through an opening in the ceiling, slipped out the door of their prison, scaled a slippery embankment, negotiated the dangerously sharp pickets and chevaux-de-frise of the fortifications, and crossed the mud flats to at least temporary safety. Wadsworth had become separated from his companion in the dark, but they found each other in the forest and, after several close calls and a slow and difficult journey overland, they reappeared before their astonished friends at Thomaston. The general’s family meanwhile had returned to the safety of Plymouth.
The story, with all its subplots and digressions, must have been told again and again, as the family epic, in the “great room” of Wadsworth Hall, to the general’s own ten children and eventually to a small army of grandchildren, nephews, nieces, and cousins. The most complete version that has come down to us is told by the Reverend Timothy Dwight in the second volume of his widely read Travels in New-England and New York (1821). He heard the story from John Abbot, the librarian of Bowdoin College, who had heard it from Zilpah Longfellow, the general’s daughter. Dwight retells it in cinematic detail—with some dramatic small touches, such as the near-betrayal of their escape by the chickens roosting under the eaves and by the melting of the butter in the chewed bread—and he turns their adventure into a Federalist parable. (An orthodox Congregationalist and president of Yale, Dwight also does not fail to point out that one of the locals who betrayed the general was a Methodist preacher.) However fictive some of the details may have been, Wadsworth emerges in Dwight’s account not only as a man of physical daring and Yankee inventiveness but as a fervent republican, willing to risk his life rather than submit to a tyrannical power that tears him from his bed in the middle of the night and terrorizes his family. And Dwight does not fail to say a word for the ladies—Henry’s grandmother and her companion, Miss Fenno—and for heroic republican motherhood. He describes the blood-soaked house the raiders left behind:
To add to the sufferings of these unfortunate ladies, a number of the neighboring inhabitants, having heard of the disaster, flocked in, and filled the house. Here they did nothing but gaze about with an idle curiosity, or make useless, numerous, and very troublesome, inquiries. Scarcely any thing could be more wearisome, or more provoking. At length the ladies assumed resolution enough to reprove them with some severity; and thus restored them from the stupor, produced by these novel and disastrous events, to thought, feeling, and exertion. And as soon as they had fairly recovered themselves, they very cordially, and kindly, united their efforts to render the best offices in their power. The next morning they repaired the doors and windows; cleansed the floors; dressed [a] wounded man in the best manner in their power; and placed the family in as comfortable circumstances, as the case would admit.
The general’s grandson was to go through much of his life not as Henry Longfellow but as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and his name encapsulates another exemplary tale for any young man growing up in the new republic. Henry Wadsworth, Zilpah’s favorite brother, went to sea in 1804, at age nineteen, as a midshipman with the fleet commanded by their Portland neighbor, Commodore Edward Preble. After years of humiliation at sea by the British and the French in the Napoleonic Wars, the United States government sought to establish its navy’s prestige by curbing the Barbary pirates of North Africa, whose demands for tribute from American merchants sailing the Mediterranean were a hindrance to commerce. Attempting to set fire to the pirate fleet that had taken refuge in Tripoli harbor, in what is now Libya, Preble sent in a small vessel, the Intrepid, under cover of darkness with a crew of volunteers, including Lieutenant Wadsworth. Since the pirates could not be lured into open sea, the plan was to sail the Intrepid, laden with gunpowder, close enough to the enemy fleet for the tide to carry it into the inner harbor, where it would explode. The crew of ten, led by young Wadsworth and another officer, would escape in a small boat. There is no reliable account of exactly what went wrong. Possibly the Americans met unexpected resistance, or underestimated the strength of the current, or miscalculated the timing of the fuse. Their mangled bodies washed ashore the next day. The official version was that the heroic young Wadsworth and the other Americans had sacrificed themselves—or, in the words of the family memorialist sixty-two years later: “‘Preferring death to slavery,’ he had voluntarily perished, with his companions, in the fire-ship Intrepid, which was blown up before Tripoli in the night of Sept. 4, 1804, to save it from falling into the enemy’s hands.”
Zilpah’s desire to perpetuate her beloved brother’s memory in her own second son reflects more than the family’s sense of patriotic mission. She knew that she would probably never be called upon to duplicate the heroism her mother had shown on that snowy night in 1781—“the windows dashed, the Doors broken, the House torn to pieces and Blood and Slaughter all around,” in Dwight’s words. Yet she had a sense of republican motherhood that went beyond merely being a general’s daughter. The most signi
ficant moment of her girlhood, for example, occurred on June 25, 1799, when a very nervous Zilpah stood at the door of the Congress Street house and presented to a possibly equally nervous young ensign at the head of the First Company of Federal Volunteers a silk banner, representing the arms of the United States joined with those of the Commonwealth, with the motto “Defend the Laws.” It was the work of “the Young Ladies of Portland,” or at least those genteel enough to be invited into General Wadsworth’s house. “My dress was simple white muslin, white kid gloves, blue kid slippers, a high white muslin turban with white feathers,” she wrote her cousin. “Plain as possible. Ensign Wiggins delivered an address of thanks to the ‘Daughters of Columbia.’” Zilpah was mortified to find her name in the newspapers but enjoyed the ball that evening.
She was a gifted observer of the world immediately around her; her girlhood letters and journals are still a delight to read. She caught the sense of wonder at how one generation “passes” to another in a domestic idyll which she recorded in a letter from the parlor of the Portland house in 1797 to a friend:
It is now evening. There sits Mama on her lolling chair by the fire. Betsy is playing on the Piano “Ye Tribes of Adam join.” John and Lucia are singing at the back of her chair. George Alexander and Sam are singing in different parts of the room. Little Peleg is stepping about the floor surveying one and another. Charles is sitting at the table with me he was writing his pen dropt from his fingers, and he listens to the music. Harry is reading beside me, you know he is always self collected. I fancy however that he does not understand much what he reads. You know how my ladyship is employed. Excuse my being thus particular in describing the family, I have been singing while I wrote and could not write any thing that required reflection. Ten children! what a circle! I should like to know what are mamas thoughts as she looks around on us.
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