Longfellow

by Charles C. Calhoun

  Fortunately for Longfellow, this did not prevent English publishers from showing an interest in Outre-Mer. The editor of The Family Library, for example, offered to publish it in his series. When Longfellow told him he expected at least one hundred pounds sterling, “he opened his great goggle eyes in apparent astonishment, and said ‘Oh, no! impossible! Why in three weeks I can get it for nothing’.” Obadiah Rich in Madrid had sent a copy to the well-known publisher Richard Bentley; Longfellow, fearing his work would be pirated if he did not act at once, quickly reached terms with him in 1835. Bentley promised he would “have it out in a week.” They would divide the profits (as it turned out, there were none). The title page said that Outre-Mer was “By an American.” One English reviewer guessed at the author—a Mr. Longbody.

  The month in England had passed quickly, and Longfellow was determined to savor his final moments of “London the magnificent.” On the deck of the steam packet William Joliffe, on June 9, the eve of their departure for Hamburg, Longfellow watched the sun set over the Thames.

  Lamps gleaming along the shore—and on the bridges—a full moon rising over the borough of Southwark, and silvering the scene with a ghostly light. . . . Barges and wherries move to and fro; and heavy-laden luggers are sweeping up stream with the rising tide, swinging sideways, with loose-flapping sails. Either side of the river is crowded with various sea-craft, whose black hulks lie in shadow, and whose tapering and mingling spars rise up into the moon-light like the leafless branches of a grove in winter. The distant sound of music floats on the air—a harp and a flute and a horn—It has an unearthly sound; and lo! like a shooting-star a light comes gliding on. It’s the signal-lamp at the mast-head of a steam-vessel, that flits by like a spectre; unseen, save as a cloud, above which glides a silver star;—unheard, save by the beating paddles, and the fairy music on its deck. And from all this scene goes up a sound of human voices, curses, laughter and singing—mingled with the monotonous roar of the city—as its living tides ebb at evening through their paved channels—slowly settling like the ocean-currents to their bed.

  Gradually all sound and motion cease; the river tide is silent at its flood; and from the slumbering city comes only now and then a voice—a feeble murmur.

  He listens as the church bells strike the hours—first from some distant suburb, then closer, then “a heavy, solemn sound” from St. Paul’s, answered by the cathedral across the river in Southwark, picked up by a more distant church—“and then all around you the various and intermingling clang, like a chime of bells—the clocks from thirty towers strike the hour—One—two! One—two!”

  The moon is already sinking.—large and fiery through the vapors of the morning. It is just in the range of the chimneys and house-tops, and seems to follow us with great speed, as we float down the river. Day is dawning in the east—not with a pale streak in the horizon—but with a faint silver light spread through the eastern-sky almost to the zenith. It is the mingling of moonlight and daylight. The water is tinged with a green hue melting into purple and gold, like the brilliant scales of a fish. The air grows cool. It comes fresh from the eastern sea, towards which we are swiftly gliding.

  By June 12 they had reached the mouth of the Elbe, and that evening they settled into the Hotel de Russie in Hamburg.

  What little Longfellow knew of Sweden had come from the young poet Karl August Nicander, a lively and attractive figure in the circle of Swedish artists and writers whom he had met in Rome in 1828. Nicander had portrayed Stockholm as an Athens of the North, and Longfellow was eager to immerse himself for the summer in what for him would be virtually a new world of Nordic history and literature. The three young women could amuse themselves, as they easily had done in London, while he made the rounds of the bookshops, libraries, universities, museums, and literary salons. The first hint that the summer might turn out differently came as the travelers approached Denmark. They had ridden on the notoriously bad road from Hamburg to Lübeck and the next day had sailed out of Travemunde on a not very clean-smelling steamer for their first glimpse of Scandinavia. Copenhagen proved an immediate disappointment. The grass growing between the paving stones of the harbor produced in Longfellow “a feeling of gloom and loneliness.” To Clara, “it looked like a city of the dead.” Even the fruit-and-wine soup they tried at their hotel proved too much like New England sago porridge and stuck to the roof of their mouths. They had not prepared themselves for the fact that they had left the wealth and energy of London behind and were now in one of the quietest corners of Europe.

  After some perfunctory sightseeing, they boarded the steamer Prinds Carl for Sweden—only to run into a storm in the Kattegat so threatening that the boat had to take shelter off Elsinore. As a result they reached Gothenburg an hour after the connecting steamer to Stockholm had left—and there would not be another for two weeks. Gothenburg seemed pleasant enough, but not worth that long a delay. So Longfellow bought a Russian-made carriage—big, heavy, comfortable—and hired the Danish servant boy who had accompanied them to help drive it. (“He is a most good-natured fellow and nearly prostrates himself before you when you speak to him,” noted Clara.) Longfellow was alert to every new sight—and smell. The Swedes strewed their tavern floors with little sprigs of pine (“a sweet flavor” but “a singular look”), for example, while their coach, he soon discovered, had “a classical smell—an odor of Ancient Grease.“ In the crowded innyards, he found “the sounds of an unknown tongue ringing in my ears, which at times so much resembles English, that I am in doubt whether an English sentence has not been imperfectly spoken.” He saw the St. John’s Day festivities at Trollhättan, where the villagers were dancing in the wet grass around the Maypole, and one of the skeppssättningar at Munksten—the medieval stone cenotaphs laid out in the shape of a Viking ship. But what truly astonished him was the far-northern summer light. “There is no night. I stood in the public square at midnight [in Lidköping], and read with perfect ease a written paper.” Sweden in 1835 was a poorer country than Longfellow had expected, but he found “the peasantry exceedingly civil. Nearly all take off their hats as we pass.” Clara amused herself on the road “watching the half-naked children run to open the gates for us.” They would catch a penny if you threw it to them, she added, but never asked for one. On the other hand, the inns were primitive, and often it was raining, and the horses had great trouble on the muddy hills. It had taken them five days to travel three hundred miles. They were relieved to be in the capital at last and settled in at the Hotel Garni, but the four of them felt travel-worn.

  The visit did not begin auspiciously. Longfellow had not written ahead to his friend, the writer Nicander, innocently assuming that the Swedish “season” took place, like the London one, in summer. On the contrary, the frugal Swedish nobility and professional classes spent their summers living cheaply in the country. Nicander had just left for his patron’s distant estate. Longfellow had counted on the poet’s help in meeting the Stockholm literati, who could guide his reading and brief him on their country’s culture. Nicander’s absence was a heavy blow. Longfellow did have a letter of introduction from Parker Cleaveland at Bowdoin to Jons Jakob Berzelius, the country’s most famous chemist. He called, was cordially received, and learned that his host was leaving for Paris in two days. “So, here are two persons gone from town, upon whom I most relied for information and entertainment here. The town seems empty.” In a cold drizzle, they changed lodgings to 22 Drottninggatan, which they immediately disliked, but could find nothing better. “So we go on,” wrote a depressed Longfellow, “always disappointed—and still hoping; searching and never finding, and yet not tired with searching.” Mary was still suffering from “the ague,” and her companions from pangs of homesickness.

  Longfellow was later to complain that his summer in Sweden had been a great mistake, but in fact he accomplished more there than perhaps he realized. Once again, in a remarkably short time, he learned enough of a new language to be able to read it with facility, and he be
gan a lifelong exploration of Swedish literature, the high point of which was his discovery of the work of Bishop Tegnér, the country’s leading poet and a writer whose work Longfellow was to introduce in translation to American readers. He also began to study Finnish, an interest that was to influence the way in which he would compose The Song of Hiawatha a decade later. He was struck by the similarities of the Swedish landscape and that of Maine—“wild scenery of rocks and pines”—and by the fact that a visitor was so quickly in the woods: “The moment you leave the northern gate of Stockholm the scene changes as if by magic.—There is not a house in sight. Nothing but pine forest. You would imagine yourself hundreds of miles from the capital.”

  His female companions were quickly bored with the city, but their social life did improve as Longfellow ventured into the diplomatic community and met several Swedish notables who had lived in America. The artist Maria Christina Rohl drew their portraits. They did what sightseeing they could, given the wet, cold weather. At Uppsala, Longfellow explored the university library, and they saw the Viking funeral mounds mentioned in Beowulf. The summer palace at Drottningholm pleased them. Just outside of the city, they walked through the woods of Count Horn’s estate, Hufvudsta, the scene of the conspiracy that led to the assassination of Gustavus III. (Many years later, Longfellow—a passionate opera-goer—heard Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera, which was based on this incident but, to evade French censorship, relocated to colonial Boston, Massachusetts!) They missed seeing in person the contemporary Swedish monarch, the former Napoleonic general Bernadotte, but caught a glimpse of the queen, the famous Desirée, as her carriage passed on the street. They indulged in the romantic fascination with caverns and mines and were bold enough to descend in a large bucket the famous Dannemora Grufvor. Mary Longfellow refused to go with them, remaining above, “leaning over the railing [Crowninshield reports] with her veil drawn over her face, looking the picture of distress.” Longfellow himself looked pale and nervous as the bucket slowly lurched downward into the depths of the pit where the previous winter’s ice and snow had not yet melted, and the air smelled of gunpowder. They got out, walked through the chilly tunnels, and collected some ore for Professor Cleaveland back in Brunswick.

  Daily life, in other words, had its diversions. Tongue possibly in cheek, Longfellow described to George Washington Greene his amazement at the amount the Swedes drank. “Everybody takes a dram [of rum] before sitting down to dinner; and again after dinner. The clergy frequent confectioners shops—drink punch in public coffee rooms—play cards on Sunday—and smoke cigars in the street . . . quite scandalous.” The Swedes, he added, were free-and-easy and politically liberal, but “in everything else, they are a century behind most parts of Christendom. They are all half-asleep.” The lower classes in particular he found “dull and lumpish.” As he noted in his journal, “Among the peasantry ‘la stupidite est d’uniforme.’ It is a national costume.” He admitted to himself that he was peevish and discontented.

  I shall beware in future how I establish myself near a stable yard. Horns blowing—hammers klinking—stable boys swearing—dogs barking—in a word the very devil to pay. Now, here is a great lazy raskal amusing himself just beneath my window, with cracking a long, heavy coach-whip.

  Even the clergy were noisy. At the cathedral, Longfellow heard “a preacher who screamed in one long scream a sermon of no inconsiderable length.”

  There was one moment of unexpected excitement. Lightning struck the steeple of the Riddarholmskyrkan, the most historic church in Stockholm, and set it afire. The flames moved slowly enough through the rafters for its treasures—historic battle flags and the like—to be saved, and to provide Longfellow the occasion for the best piece of reportage he ever wrote. In a long journal passage, he described the steeple “blazing from its open mouth, like the chimney of a Manchester factory” and the moment when the copper sheath of the roof “parted below, and slid downward, like the skin of a ripe fig.” As alarm bells rang throughout the city, the church burned for two days, the flames at times disappearing only to burst forth elsewhere. Fortunately, the vaulting of the roof protected the tombs of the Swedish kings below.

  In the last week of August they left Stockholm, taking the steamer Amiral von Platen on a leisurely—and this time smooth—trip through scenic lakes and canals, with their seventy-two locks, back to Gothenburg. At some point in July or August, Mary Longfellow had announced that she was pregnant. The shivering and feverishness that she had experienced in June, which she had assumed was “the ague,” may have been early signs of her condition, suggesting that the child had been conceived during the month-long Atlantic crossing. After four years of marriage and at least one miscarriage, Mary was not uninformed about such things, but Clara and the other Mary were probably of no help, and it is possible that the Longfellows were ignorant of the pregnancy until they reached Stockholm. It is difficult to believe that they would have made the rough overland journey by carriage, rather than waiting patiently for the boat at Gothenburg, had Henry known of his wife’s condition. Once confirmed, this news added enormously to the complexities of the whole European trip. A nurse would have to be hired, an English-speaking one if possible, adding to the expense. There surely would have to be changes of itinerary and all the unexpected delays associated with traveling with an infant. Never an enthusiastic traveler, Mary would now be even less company for the two young women. Longfellow had much to consider during those slow days of travel south.

  They reached Gothenburg comfortably in six days, only to discover that cabins on the steamer back to Denmark were fully booked (because of the ladies, Longfellow refused to travel overnight on deck) and that they would have to wait a week for the next boat. In other circumstances, he wrote, he would not have minded the wait: “If I were not in such a hurry to get to the Rhine, I should not care a fig. But as it is, every hour is precious.” Biographers have taken this as evidence of concern for his wife’s fragile health. A more practical explanation is that he had promised to show his ladies the poetic spectacle of the grape harvest on the Rhine and was fretting that it would be over before they—and he—could enjoy it. When they finally did return to Copenhagen on September 10, the place had an unexpected charm. As Longfellow noted, “How different this city looks on coming from Sweden, than it did when we came from England!”

  Settling into the Hotel Royal, he began improving his Danish. “This language has an unpleasant sound to my ear,” he confided in his journal. “For softness and beauty it cannot be compared with the beautiful Swedish. The Danes speak with a burr in their throats.” At the local athenaeum, he was pleased to read “a long and loud puff” for the British edition of Outre-Mer in the London Atlas. His immersion in medieval Nordic culture deepened as he began studying Icelandic (“a harsh, sharp and disagreeable sound”) and saw the Viking artifacts in the new Museum of Northern Antiquities: “Funeral urns, with mouldering bones therein—swords—bracelets—gold and silver ornaments from days, when iron was as yet unknown—altar-pieces and church reliques from the early days of Christianity in the North—and shields and swords and helmets from the age of chivalry.” Some of this would reappear in “The Skeleton in Armor” in 1841. But news from America had already broken this idyll.

  Clara Crowninshield’s diary tells the story best. Letters from home were rare and much treasured, and it was the custom among the three young women to read and reread them aloud to each other. Clara did so, innocently enough, on September 12. A mutual friend had written that Mary Goddard’s brother, who was supposed to meet her in Germany, had suddenly returned to Boston.

  I began to read it aloud and stopped, of course, when I found there was something unpleasant for Mary to hear. She insisted upon my continuing. I read it aloud so far and then continued to myself. “His father was taken sick suddenly and died yesterday of apoplexy.” Mary saw by my countenance that there was something more. She insisted on my telling her what it was. I was agitated and could hardly believe my own eyes a
s I read the words. I told her I could not read it and asked her to call Mary Longfellow. She obeyed me without knowing what she did. Mary Longfellow turned pale and read aloud till I told her to stop. Mary Goddard grew impatient and said, “I will see it, girls.” I thought it could do no good to keep it from her and I gave her the letter. She burst into an agony of grief and called Henry immediately. . ..

  Plans were quickly made to send Mary Goddard to London, where she could find passage back to Boston; a young American diplomat, John James Appleton, who had befriended them in Stockholm, agreed to escort her as far as England. Her departure would be a financial blow to Longfellow, who had counted on her family’s contribution as part of his European budget.

  Amid this shock and disruption of plans, Longfellow made as much as he could of his two weeks in Denmark, where he had been welcomed at once into a circle of scholars and bibliophiles of the sort he had failed to find in Sweden. His original plan had been to spend the winter in Berlin, whose university was rapidly becoming the most highly regarded in Europe. He decided instead to travel by water up the Rhine, perhaps seeking winter quarters in one of the smaller university towns, such as Bonn or Heidelberg. Living expenses would be less there, he learned, than in Berlin, and his pregnant wife would be spared the travail of a long overland journey in a jostling coach. On September 25, the three remaining travelers boarded the Frederik den Siette for Kiel and Hamburg, whence they would sail for Holland and the Rhine, in the hopes of being settled for the winter by the first of October.