The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Volume III The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Volume III: 1844–1856 [Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674598775, 9780674598591

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THE LETTERS OF

Henry Wads worth Longfellow

VOLUME III 1844-18 56

Longfellow, 1854, by Samuel Laurence

THE LETTERS OF

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow EDITED BY Andrew Hilen VOLUME III 1844-1856

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts 1972

© ip72 ky the President and Fellows of Harvard College Allrightsreserved Printed in the United States of America Typography by Burton Jones Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 66-18248 SBN 674-52728-3

Acknowledgments SINCE PUBLICATION OF the first two volumes of this edition, the University of Washington has continued to support my project, both with a sabbatical leave and, through the Graduate School Research Fund, with grants for research assistants. I am very grateful for this help, without which, progress toward these volumes would have been seriously impeded. T h e officers of the Longfellow Trust have continued their support, and I am gratified once again that they have granted me unhindered access to the Longfellow Trust Collection as well as the authority to publish the letters. I am indebted to the following individuals and institutions for permission to make copies of manuscripts in their possession for inclusion in Volumes III and IV: American Antiquarian Society; Clifton Waller Barrett Collection, University of Virginia; Henry W . and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library; Mark Runyon Bittner, Allentown, Pa.; Bodleian Library, Oxford; Boston Athenaeum; Boston Public Library; Bowdoin College Library; British Museum; Brown University Library; University of California Library, Berkeley; University of California Library, Los Angeles; Central Library, Auckland, New Zealand; Porter Ralph Chandler, New York City; City Library Association, Springfield, Mass.; Colby College Library; Colgate University Library; College of the Holy Cross Library; Columbia University Library; Connecticut Historical Society; Cornell Club of New York; Cornell University Library; Grace Dwelley Curry, Arlington, Mass.; Harriot Curtis, Boston; Dartmouth College Library; Davis Library, Phillips Exeter Academy; Edward Laurence Doheny Memorial Library, Camarillo, Cal.; Duke University Library; Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association; Essex Institute; Charles E. Feinberg, Detroit; Forest Lawn Cemetery, Hollywood Hills, Cal.; Franklin and Marshall College Library; Emilia R. Franz, Stockbridge, Mass.; Fruitlands Museum, Harvard, Mass.; Walter Hampden Memorial Library, New York City; Harvard College Library; Harvard University Archives; Haverford College Library; Haverhill Public Library; Parkman D. Howe, Boston; Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery; Hessische Landesbibliothek, Darmstadt; Indiana University Library; University of Iowa Library; Library Company of Philadelphia; Library of Congress; Macalester College Library; John McFarland, Milton, Mass.; Maine Histori-

v

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS cal Society; Elena di Majo, Rome; Maryland Historical Society; Massachusetts Historical Society; Joanna Meader, Edgewood, R.I.; Middlebury College Library; Montana State University Library; Pierpont Morgan Library; Museu Imperial, Petropolis; Museu Imperial, Säo Paulo; Newberry Library, Chicago; New-York Historical Society; N e w York Public Library, Manuscript Division; N e w York State Library; University of North Carolina Library; Norman Holmes Pearson, New Haven; Pennington School, Pennington, N.J.; Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Mrs. Percival O. Perkins, Salt Lake City; Carl H. Pforzheimer Library; Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore; Princeton University Library; Randolph-Macon Woman's College Library; University of Rochester Library; Rosenberg Library, Galveston, Texas; Royal Library, Copenhagen; Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College; Scripps College Library; Smith College Library; Stockbridge Library Association; Katrina Roelker Stokes, Bronx, N.Y.; University of Texas Library; Alice Allegra Thorp and Anne Thorp, Cambridge, Mass.; James M . Tolle, Fullerton, Cal.; Tufts University Library; Thomas H. de Valcourt, Cambridge, Mass.; Valentine Museum, Richmond, Va.; University of Vermont Library; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; University of Washington Library; Wellesley College Library; Wesleyan University Library; State Historical Society of Wisconsin; Historical Manuscripts and University Archives, Yale University; and Yale University Library. Once again I have had to turn for assistance to a large number of librarians, curators, autograph collectors, American and foreign government officials, academic specialists, private individuals, and friends. T w o people in particular stand out among this group: Steven A. Allaback, now of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Howard Leichman of Seattle, both of whom served as my research assistants while completing their doctoral programs at the University of Washington. They solved many difficult problems of annotation and saved me hours of work, for which I sincerely thank them. I am pleased once more to acknowledge my debt to those who have aided me in my continued use of the voluminous files of the Longfellow Trust Collection, preserved in the Longfellow House at 105 Brattle Street, Cambridge, and in the Houghton Library of Harvard University. William H. Bond, Director of the Houghton Library, has cooperated with the project from the beginning and has served as my liaison with the trustees of the Longfellow Estate. Carolyn Jakeman and her assistants at Houghton helped me in ways too numerous to describe. Thomas H. de Valcourt, Curator at the Longfellow House, spent considerable vi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS time searching on my behalf for answers to questions about Longfellow family matters. Scores of officials of other libraries and public institutions deserve thanks for their cooperation. An incomplete list would include: Albany Institute of History and Art; Allegheny College Library; American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Amt der Tiroler Landesregierung; Bank of England; Belgian Embassy, Washington, D.C.; Bethlehem Public Library; Carlisle Public Libraries, England; Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh; Cayuga County Historical and Genealogical Referral Center; Concord Free Public Library; Connecticut State Library; Denver Public Library; Department of State; Dickinson College Library; Fayette County Library, Somerville, Tenn.; Forbes Library, Northampton, Mass.; French Embassy, Washington, D.C.; Genealogical Society of Salt Lake City; General Register Office, Somerset House, London; German Embassy, Washington, D.C.; Glasgow University Library; Lanark County Library, Scotland; Lehigh University Library; McGill University Library; National Archives and Records Service, Washington, D.C.; Newport Historical Society; Oberösterreichisches Landesarchiv, Linz an der Donau; Public Record Office, London; Royal Archives, Windsor Castle; Springfield Library and Museums Association, Springfield, Mass.; Trinity College Library; United States Department of the Navy; United States Military Academy; and Warner Library, The Tarrytowns, N.Y. Several librarians and curators who responded to my requests for information merit special mention. Robert L. Volz, Head of Special Collections in the Bowdoin College Library while these volumes were being assembled, devoted much time to my queries. Others who gave frequent service were: Kimball C. Elkins, Harvard University Archives; James J. Heslin, New-York Historical Society; John Janitz, Maine Historical Society; Pauline King, New England Historic Genealogical Society; Ruth Kirk, University of Washington Library; Frank Paluka, University of Iowa Library; Mrs. Harold C. Pierce, Jr., Stockbridge Library Association; Jean Reed, University of Virginia Library; Stephen T. Riley, Massachusetts Historical Society; Lola L. Szladits, Berg Collection, New York Public Library; and Walter Muir Whitehill, Boston Athenaeum. Many others contributed to this edition by providing historical and genealogical information, by putting me on the track of Longfellow letters in public and private archives, or by rendering various services. I particularly thank: Edith B. Baras, Seattle; Joan Oakey Benjamin, New York City; Dr. F. Blendinger, Archivdirektor, Stadt Augsburg; Sargent Bush, Jr., Washington and Lee University; Herbert Cahoon, Pierpont vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Morgan Library; John Daly, Department of Records, Philadelphia; Rodney G. Dennis, Curator of Manuscripts, Houghton Library; Sheryl Dodd, School of Drama, Yale University; Edward J. Dunn, Town Clerk, Nahant, Mass.; Donald Gallup, Yale University Library; Margaret E. Gilmore, Geneseo, N.Y.; Bernadette G. Gualtieri, University of Washington Library; Owen P. Hawley, Marietta College; John D. Kilbourne, Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Major D. H. C. Gordon Lennox, Regimental Headquarters, Grenadier Guards, London; Carol C. Lind, Seattle Public Library; William L. Lucey, S.J., College of the Holy Cross; Beverly A. McManus, Harvard University Archives; Chesley Mathews, University of California, Santa Barbara; Frank E. Morse, Mount Vernon Ladies Association of the Union; Duncan W . Munro, Superintendent, Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge; Earl M. Proud, Superintendent, Laurel Hill Cemetery, Philadelphia; Dr. O. Puchner, Archivdirektor, Staatsarchiv Nürnberg; Richard D. Rust, University of North Carolina; Cornelia Fitch Prentiss Shrauger, Atlantic, Iowa; Lewis M. Stark, New York Public Library; Neil B. Watson, Superintendent, Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, N.Y.; Magdalen Ames Wolcott, Barnevald, N.Y.; and Wyllis E. Wright, Williams College Library. My colleagues on the faculty of the University of Washington have provided expertise on many matters — linguistic, historical, and literary — for which I am most grateful. Finally, my wife, Frances Gilmore Hilen, became an authority on Longfellow's Portland family and thus contributed to these volumes in other ways than by her continued encouragement of the editor. ANDREW HILEN

University of Washington Seattle

viii

Contents Volume III Introduction

ι

Longfellow as Letter-Writer, 1844-186 ζ

ι

Principal Correspondents, 1844-1865

7

Chronology

13

Genealogies

14

PART NINE

Husband and Father, 1844-1847

19

Letters No. 805-966

PART TEN

Bittersweet Years, 1848-1850

151

Letters No. 967-1150

PART ELEVEN

Last Years at Harvard, 1851-1853

285

Letters No. 1151-1323

PART TWELVE

A Gentleman of Leisure, 1854-1856

405

Letters No. 1324-1565 Short Titles of Works Cited

567

Index of Recipients

569

ix

ILLUSTRATIONS VOLUME I I I

frontispiece Portrait in crayon of Longfellow, 1854, by the English artist Samuel Laurence ( 1 8 1 2 - 1 8 8 4 ) . Longfellow Trust Collection. following page 124 PLATE i.

Portrait in crayon of Longfellow, 1846, by Eastman Johnson ( 1 8 2 4 - 1 9 0 6 ) . Longfellow Trust Collection.

PLATE 11.

Portrait in crayon of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1846, by Eastman Johnson. Longfellow Trust Collection. Portrait in crayon of Charles Sumner, 1846, by Eastman Johnson. Longfellow Trust Collection.

PLATE HI.

Portrait in crayon of Anne Longfellow Pierce, 1846, by Eastman Johnson. Longfellow Trust Collection. Portrait in crayon of Mary Longfellow Greenleaf, 1846, by Eastman Johnson. Longfellow Trust Collection.

PLATE iv.

Daguerreotype of Longfellow, c. 1848, by Southworth and Hawes, Boston. T h e Metropolitan Museum of Art, G i f t of I. N . Phelps Stokes, Edward S. Hawes, Alice Mary Hawes, Marion Augusta Hawes. following page 354

PLATE v.

Group photograph of Thomas Gold Appleton, John Gerard Coster, Julia Ward Howe, Frances Appleton Longfellow, Longfellow, and Horatia Latilla Freeman at Newport, R.I., 1852. Longfellow Trust Collection.

PLATE vi.

Photograph of Frances Appleton Longfellow, c. Longfellow Trust Collection.

PLATE vii.

Photograph of Longfellow, 1855. Longfellow Trust Collection.

xi

1852.

ILLUSTRATIONS PLATE

viii.

Pen-and-ink sketch by Longfellow of Craigie House and grounds. From letter to Stephen Longfellow, April 28, 1844 (Letter No. 814). Longfellow Trust Collection. Pen-and-ink sketch by Longfellow of his birthplace in Portland, Me. From letter to Alexander Wadsworth Longfellow, July 28, 1852 (Letter No. 1243). Longfellow Trust Collection. Pen-and-ink sketch by Longfellow of Oxbow farm, Stockbridge, Mass. From letter to Samuel Longfellow, October 12, 1852 (Letter No. 1255). Longfellow Trust Collection.

xii

INTRODUCTION

Introduction LONGFELLOW ι

AS

LETTER-WRITER

8 4 4 - 1 8 6 5

DURING HIS MIDDLE PERIOD, 1 8 4 4 - 1 8 6 5 , Longfellow became known

both at home and abroad as the poet laureate of America. The slender volumes of his early Harvard years — Voices of the Night ( 1 8 3 9 ) and Ballads and Other Poems ( 1 8 4 1 ) — launched a poetic reputation that gathered momentum with publication of The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems ( 1 8 4 5 ) , Evangeline ( 1 8 4 7 ) , The Seaside and the Fireside ( 1 8 5 0 ) , The Song of Hiawatha ( 1 8 5 5 ) , The Courtship of Miles Standish and Other Poems ( 1 8 5 8 ) , and Tales of a Wayside Inn, Part I ( 1 8 6 3 ) . N o American poet has enjoyed a larger contemporary following. His readers ranged from the mill girls of Lowell and Lawrence to the cultural arbiters of Boston, N e w York, Philadelphia, and London. John Ruskin, writing to his father on December 7, 1 8 5 1 , said of the "Psalm of Life" that it "is now known by heart by nearly all the modern reformers and agitators, good and bad, but does good to all of them. I question whether all Byron's works put together have had so much real influence, with all their popularity, as this single poem, because Byron's influence is for the most part on young and comparatively unformed minds — Longfellow's of a reversed kind and on the strongest minds of the day" (The Works of John Ruskin, ed. Ε. T . Cook and A. D. O. Wedderburn [London, 1 9 0 3 - 1 9 1 2 ] , X X X V I , 1 2 2 - 1 2 3 ) . A hundred years have brought about a complete reversal of Ruskin's judgment. Longfellow's appeal to the "strongest minds" of his day is now difficult to understand, given the fondness of modern critics for complexity and ambiguity in verse. Responding to different demands on his literary talent, Longfellow mined the veins of nostalgia, melancholy, and sentimentality that spread throughout the culture of mid-nineteenth-century America. In an age when disease in manifold forms, the abuse of children in the labor market, and the calamity of the Civil War threatened life expectancy, his philosophy of genteel affirmation offered solace to the weak and dying ι

INTRODUCTION and consolation to their survivors. Although he is unread and unappreciated today, his name still lingers in the vocabulary as a synonym for poet. One measure of Longfellow's popular success as a poet was the proliferation of his correspondence. During the twenty-two years from 1844 to 1865, he wrote about 4,000 known letters to relatives, friends, acquaintances, petitioners, admirers, and strangers. Inasmuch as his letters from this period continue to find their way into the manuscript market, it seems reasonable to assume that he wrote hundreds more, some of which may become available in the future, but many of which are permanently lost. Of this formidable production, 1,500 letters to 425 correspondents appear in Volumes III and IV of this edition. As in the first two volumes, excerpts of less than fifty words from unrecovered letters listed in dealers' catalogues are not included; nor are signed receipts, letters not known to have been written by Longfellow but to which he was one of several signatories, and eleven recovered notes in which he merely responded to requests for autographs from unidentified or undistinguished admirers. Longfellow wrote letters out of a sense of duty, deriving from his belief that a "man of letters" had an obligation to answer the mail. Consequently, he spent hours managing a correspondence that he came increasingly to regard with dread and dislike. His journal is studded with entries expressing the conviction that letter-writing robbed him of time which might have been put to better use. "Ah, these letters! They are always there — looking at me with their eyes wide open — and haunting me, and keeping me from doing other things" (September 27, 1 8 5 1 ) . "Letters — letters — letters; and the whole day consumed with the business of other people. Good people — sweet people! have mercy!" (March 23, 1852). "Decidedly, I do not like letter-writing. And all my unanswered letters hang upon me like an evil conscience, and impede my freedom of thought and action" (May 3, 1854). "I a m plagued to death with letters from all sorts of people, and of course about their own affairs. No hesitation — no reserve — no consideration — or delicacy! what people! And they often leave me to pay the return post" (May 15, 1855). Month by month, year by year, he documented the anguish with which he faced the accumulating mail. One wonders that he did not set some rules for the game, refusing responses, for example, to autograph seekers (from whom he had 410 known requests during 1844-1865), unpublished poets craving criticism of their manuscripts, job seekers, applicants for bail money and "loans," and solicitors of a multiplicity of other favors (like the young man who wanted "a few lines for a young Lady's Album to be written as an Acrostic to read My Dearest One," or

2

LONGFELLOW

AS

LETTER-WRITER

the love-sick girls seeking confirmation of their fantasies, or the ambitious swain who wanted an introduction to Longfellow's daughter with a view toward marriage). But he found it difficult to turn aside any request, however absurd or impertinent, and thus compounded his despair of ever catching up with the correspondence. T h e inelegant metaphor with which he described his predicament to Charles Sumner in a letter of January 30, 1855, was inspired by his own determined resolve to match incoming with outgoing letters: "I have been digging away at a pile of unanswered letters deposited on my desk, as huge and inexhaustible as the guano on the odorous Chinchi Islands. I have just shipped off the last boat-load, and now wash my hands." As Longfellow's correspondence grew and his calligraphy became more rounded and heavy, his epistolary style gradually changed from its earlier informal, discursive quality. In general, the letters of 1844-1865, apart from those to his family and intimate friends, are characterized by brevity, formality, and perfunctoriness. With hundreds instead of dozens of letters to write each year, he had no time to fill in details. Thus, many of the letters in Volumes III and IV are little more than polite responses, conventionally phrased and straightforward in content. Their value lies merely in annotating the poet's biography. Yet even those letters to which Longfellow devoted more time, energy, and thought have only moderate intellectual or narrative interest. Perhaps this is because he remained at home for most of the twenty-two years following his marriage to Frances Appleton. T h e young man who had played a flute on the banks of the Loire, shivered in anticipation of bandits in Spain, fallen in love in Rome, and partaken of the boisterous student life at Göttingen was now middle-aged, influential, and confined for the most part within the horizons of Cambridge, Newport, or Nahant. Instead of traveling overseas, he journeyed to Portland, the Berkshires, Saratoga, or at most to Washington, D.C. In short, there was limited variety in his domestic scene. Furthermore, he had advanced from the challenge of a middle-class background to the elegant security of the upper class. He now moved in a Boston-Cambridge society that esteemed wealth, taste, and respectability. Although he made an adequate living from his professorship and poetry, he and his family enjoyed additional luxuries bought with dividends from Boston banks, railroads, and cotton mills. He had become a member of the establishment, and most of his letters from this period, in their politeness and reserve, reflect this new social status. When he wrote to the various members of his inner circle of family and friends, however, he lowered his guard a little, and these letters 3

INTRODUCTION convey a somewhat different impression. Despite the anxieties caused by an unhappy brother and two wayward nephews, Longfellow's letters reveal him as essentially kind and tolerant toward their weaknesses. The affectionate tone of his brief notes to his sister Anne did not diminish over the years. The few surviving letters to Frances Appleton Longfellow reinforce the evidence of his private journals that he was deeply in love with his wife. Toward his daughters he was the model of an indulgent father, and there is no record that he ever spoke a harsh word to his "blueeyed banditti." To his sons, the impulsive Charles or the more circumspect Ernest, he displayed paternal love and pride, patience and understanding. His family letters show plainly that Longfellow was a good man, not much of a parental moralizer or disciplinarian, but as successful as husband and father as he had earlier been as son and brother. Occasionally his letters reveal that Longfellow participated more actively than is generally suspected in the political dramas of his day. He signed petitions of protest and testimonials of approval, attended a number of antislavery and other rallies, defended his friend Charles Sumner in public and private, and contributed money and holographs to dozens of "causes," most of them in support of the Union during the Civil War. Following Sumner's lead, he supported the forlorn presidential ambitions of the Whig candidate Henry Clay in 1844, the FreeSoilers Martin Van Buren in 1848 and John P. Hale in 1852, and the Republican John C. Fremont in 1856. By the time of Lincoln's election in i860, he had become an enthusiastic member of the Republican party, in which he remained for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, Longfellow did not discuss political matters in his letters with the zeal of a Lowell or Whittier; only when writing to Sumner, in whose outbursts of indignation in the Senate he participated vicariously, did he reveal his liberal attitudes toward the Mexican War and slavery and his hard position on the question of political compromise with the South. Since the bulk of his letters deal with the literary scene, with family matters, or with the social ephemera of Boston and Cambridge, one must conclude that Longfellow's political views were more intellectual than practical, more restrained than compulsive. He voted for what he thought was right, encouraged Sumner in his crusades, reported an occasional political prejudice in his private journal, and then escaped into the comforts of his aristocratic environment. During these twenty-two years Longfellow was intimately involved with literary matters of all kinds. He assembled three anthologies, published a novel and seven new volumes of poetry, and finished the first draft of a translation of the Divine Comedy. Accordingly, one would 4

LONGFELLOW

AS

LETTER-WRITER

expect his letters to be filled with descriptions, analyses, and explications of these projects; yet except for isolated instances, they are not. The letters of 1844-1865, while clearly the work of a literary man, reveal little about Longfellow's critical standards or his theories of poetry, prose, or translation. They give barely a hint that Longfellow's taste was eclectic, cultivated, and scholarly. When responding to requests for critical judgment, he was too polite to be incisive. In only one letter, that of July 24, 1844, to Alexander Smith, did he commit himself to a specific literary attitude: "A national literature is the expression of national character and modes of thought; and as our character and modes of thought do not differ essentially from those of England, our literature cannot." Elsewhere he merely defended his practice (as in the case of The Golden Legend and The Song of Hiawatha, both of which had been attacked by critics), expressed curiosity in a scholarly way (as in his search for the proper terminology for the Dante translation), or remained noncommittal. He let his poetry speak for itself and, in his letters at least, provided little commentary on it. In contrast, the letters of this middle period confirm the earlier impression of Longfellow as a shrewd and practical businessman. He held his American publishers to strict account and skillfully protected his literary property in England without the help of a copyright law. After establishing a relationship in 1846 with the house of Ticknor & Fields, he became somewhat less aggressive in driving bargains, pleased no doubt with the promotional finesse of James T . Fields, who puffed his volumes with enthusiasm and vastly enlarged his audience. Nevertheless, he had earned a reputation for mastery of the commercial aspects of his profession, with the result that he was inundated with requests for advice not only on how to write, but also on how and where to publish. Since many of Longfellow's correspondents were strangers or at most acquaintances, it may have been inevitable that he would reveal no more to them than that he was decent, friendly, polite, and conservative. Yet even if his letters of this period had been far fewer and had been written exclusively to intimates, it is doubtful that they would have provided more than a glimpse of the man behind the mask. By nature and training he was reluctant to express himself openly in letters. Both his sister Anne Pierce and his brother Alexander were more candid about family matters than he; and in his exchange of letters with Charles Sumner, it was Sumner who was the more revelatory. Longfellow's letters barely suggest the anger and hurt he must have felt at critical attacks on his poetry; for example, he preferred to let "Outis" answer the splenetic accusations of Edgar Allan Poe in 1845, and to let Ferdinand Freiligrath and Moncure

5

INTRODUCTION Conway defend him against the charge in 1856 that he had misappropriated the Finnish epic Kalevala for The Song of Hiawatha. Only once, in a letter of August 18, 1861, to his sister-in-law Mary Appleton Mackintosh, did he give way to the devastating anguish that assailed him after his wife's death. T h e reasons for this reticence may be found in his Puritan inheritance, in his knowledge that he was a public figure, and in the mores of the Brahminic society of which he had become a member. As a result, in his letters of 1844-1865 he preserved a solid defense against disclosing the more intimate, emotional, and spiritual events of his life. For this reason it is doubtful that the discovery of more letters from this period will alter the picture of Longfellow that emerges from these volumes. One nevertheless wishes that his part of the exchange with several correspondents were more complete. Thirty-one unrecovered letters to Anne Longfellow Pierce, twenty-five to Charles Sumner, twenty-one to James T . Fields, eighteen to Thomas Gold Appleton, eighteen to Mary Appleton Mackintosh, eleven to his brother Alexander, ten to George Washington Greene, ten to George William Curtis, and six to Hawthorne would certainly add documentation to his life and might provide new insights. Furthermore, Longfellow is known to have written at least sixteen letters to his old friend Sam Ward, only three of which survive. With Ward, in earlier days, he had been most apt to abandon his restraint. Of his dozens of other correspondents, now remembered only for their fleeting relationships with Longfellow, two seem to have made serious demands on his time, purse, and patience: Emmanuel Vitalis Scherb, an immigrant Swiss lecturer and literary critic from whom he received eighty-two letters and to whom he wrote about twenty-six, and William Pembroke Mulchinock, an Irish-born poet of minor talent and major pretensions who sent him thirty-seven letters between 1849 a n d ^ 5 2 and received at least a dozen in return. It is unfortunate that none of Longfellow's letters to them survives, for they might have revealed something of his attitude toward contemporary prose and poetry. One wishes, finally, that six lost letters to Cornelia Fitch could be added to the eight in existence, in order to complete the story of their aborted romance. During 1844-1865, then, Longfellow practiced the art of epistolary respectability. But if his letters fall short as revelatory documents, they nevertheless tell much about the man and the time in which he lived. Without them, the biographer would be deprived of interesting glimpses into both his private and public life, of evidence useful in the delineation of his political, social, and literary attitudes. If Longfellow lacked a flam-

6

PRINCIPAL

CORRESPONDENTS

boyant personality, he possessed the virtues of compassion, firmness, and good humor. He emerges from the letters of his middle years as an engaging man who wore his contemporary fame with dignity. PRINCIPAL ι

CORRESPONDENTS 8 4 4 - 1 8 6 5

As Longfellow's correspondence grew during his middle years, the ratio of letters to members of his immediate family decreased. Threeeighths of the recovered letters of 1 8 1 4 - 1 8 4 3 are family letters, but only one-fifth are family letters during 1844-1865. Stephen Longfellow, who died in 1849, had earlier ceased to be his principal correspondent, and only ten letters to him have survived. Zilpah Longfellow, who outlived her husband by two years, received even fewer letters from her son, five of which have been recovered. As the old family circle of Portland contracted, the new one in Cambridge expanded. Nevertheless, since letters are usually written to correspondents beyond the horizon, Longfellow wrote almost twice as many letters to his Portland as to his Cambridge family. Anne Longfellow Pierce replaced her father as Longfellow's principal family correspondent. During this period, Longfellow addressed at least 145 letters to her, 1 1 4 of which are preserved. Anne Pierce lived for ninety-one years, more than two-thirds of which she spent in widowhood. Except for her brief marriage, from 1832 to 1835, she lived always in the Longfellow mansion on Congress Street, Portland, where she cared for her father, mother, and Aunt Lucia Wadsworth during their last years and where, after 1864, she lived alone. When Stephen Longfellow, Jr., died in 1850, she became the guardian of his third son, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow II, a troubled boy of eleven who caused her much anxiety. He became the subject of a number of her letters to her brother. It is also clear from Longfellow's letters to her that he managed her financial matters to some extent and tried to alleviate her sense of insecurity with monthly gifts out of his own pocket. After the death of Frances Appleton Longfellow in 1861, she sometimes played the role of mother to the three young Longfellow girls, to whom a holiday in the Portland mansion was an anxiously awaited event. In short, Anne Pierce was a favorite sister and a favorite aunt. Her letters to Longfellow are chatty, full of family gossip, and occasionally irascible when the subject is her wayward nephew or his mother, Marianne Preble Longfellow, and his grandfather, Judge William Pitt Preble, both of whom she came to dislike. Longfellow's letters to her are

7

INTRODUCTION more affectionate than informative, and one concludes from them that their relationship remained close despite the distance between Portland and Cambridge. With the death of Stephen Longfellow, Jr. (the recipient of eleven letters during this period), the other family member to whom Longfellow turned most often in letters was Alexander Wadsworth Longfellow. During 1844-1865 he wrote about forty-five letters to Alexander, thirtyfour of which have been recovered. After four years as an engineer with the Joint Boundary Commission, Alexander received an appointment in 1847 in the United States Coast Survey and subsequently divided his time between Highfield (his home near Portland), the archipelagoes of Maine, and the Sea Islands off the South Carolina and Georgia coasts. Consequently, he and Longfellow carried on a correspondence only intermittently during this twenty-two-year period, and few patterns of mutual thought and interest can be traced in their letters. When Longfellow wrote to Alexander, he generally discussed the problems of Stephen Longfellow, Jr., their father's estate, or other less important family matters. An engaging man with a sharp sense of humor, Alexander himself wrote with a sense of style and a keen eye for familiar detail. Unfortunately, he did not always elicit responses in kind from his literary brother. Longfellow's youngest sister and his youngest brother did not become important correspondents during this period, mainly because their frequent presence in Cambridge made letters unnecessary. After her marriage in 1839 to James Greenleaf, Mary Longfellow made her home in Cambridge; and when she accompanied her husband on his long business sojourns in New Orleans, she kept in touch with her family through Anne Longfellow Pierce. Only two of Longfellow's letters to her have survived. Samuel Longfellow lived in the Craigie House while attending the Harvard Divinity School, 1844-1845, and at intervals thereafter when serving as pastor in Fall River and Brooklyn. Longfellow wrote fourteen known letters to Samuel, twelve of which survive. There are 120 recovered letters from the period 1844-1865 to the thirteen correspondents of the Cambridge-Boston family circle: Longfellow's wife, children, and assorted Appleton relatives. Of these, he sent five to Frances Appleton Longfellow, who was almost always at his side until her death; sixty-three to his five children (almost equally distributed) between i860 and 1865; and thirteen to various in-laws. T h e only person to emerge from this group as a principal correspondent was his brother-in-law Thomas Gold Appleton, to whom he wrote at least fortyseven letters, thirty-nine of which survive.

8

PRINCIPAL

CORRESPONDENTS

It is not hard to understand why Longfellow liked, admired, and perhaps even envied "Uncle Tom" Appleton. Possessor of a large inherited fortune, well-educated at the Round Hill School and Harvard College (class of 1 8 3 1 ) , generous, congenial, and unmarried, he devoted his life to the cultivation of his modest talents in art and literature and to the enjoyment of travel. He was as much at home in Paris and London as in Boston; wherever he went, he moved in a world of efficient servants, fine horses, the best clubs, and the most sophisticated people. In a sense, he was what Longfellow might have aspired to become had his wealth been greater, his ambition smaller, and his family obligations nonexistent. Thus, the two men were compatible in ways unexplained by the simple fact that they were brothers-in-law. Their letters to each other suggest the tone of their conversations at a hundred dinner tables in Cambridge, Nahant, and Boston during the forty-five years of their friendship. Longfellow's 357 recovered letters to a triumvirate of friends — Charles Sumner, James T . Fields, and George Washington Greene — constitute a larger epistolary production than all those he wrote during 1844-1865 to the various members of the Longfellow-Appleton family. Sumner, who began his twenty-three-year career in the Senate in 1 8 5 1 , became the correspondent most often in Longfellow's mind when he stood at his upright desk in the Craigie House study. Longfellow sent him at least 238 letters, 2 1 3 of which are collected here. Unfortunately, these letters do not adequately reflect the friends' mutual interests in literature and art, in the languages and culture of Europe, and in the developing antislavery cause. Although Longfellow touched on these matters, he was more apt merely to provide Sumner with family news, local gossip, or petitions from office seekers. Not infrequently, however, he wrote to commend the senator for his actions as a Conscience Whig, Free-Soiler, or Radical Republican — actions that tended to isolate Sumner socially at the same time that they increased his political reputation. Thus, Longfellow's letters served a therapeutic purpose, for Sumner — who frequendy complained to Longfellow of the difficulty and loneliness of his senatorial martyrdom — throve on reassurances from the diminishing circle of his old Boston and Cambridge friends. With James T . Fields, Longfellow carried on a correspondence devoted primarily to literary and peripheral matters. As an aggressive partner in the firm of Ticknor & Fields, Fields oversaw the publication of Longfellow's books after 1846, and a relationship that had begun on a business basis soon developed into a close personal friendship. Fields himself wrote poetry enthusiastically if unsuccessfully, and thus was

9

INTRODUCTION drawn to Longfellow not only because lie recognized his value as an author to the company, but also because he enjoyed the contact with a superior poet. Longfellow, for his part, admired Fields for his professional acumen, his willingness to do favors of various kinds, and his sophisticated literary talk. During this middle period, Longfellow saw him more frequently than he did any of his other friends. In a sense, Longfellow's letters to Fields do little more than annotate their long conversations in the Craigie House or, more often, in the green-curtained office of the Old Corner Bookstore at Washington and School streets in Boston. T h e usually brief letters concern books, minor printing problems, the manuscripts of poetasters who besieged Longfellow in frustratingly large numbers, opera and theater tickets, or copyright matters. Separated only by the Charles River, the two friends might rarely have written to one another had they enjoyed the luxury of the modern telephone. When snow or summer heat made personal contact impractical, they kept in touch by mail. During 1844-1865, Longfellow wrote about 1 1 2 known letters to Fields, 91 of which have been recovered. Longfellow's correspondence with George Washington Greene, which had flourished in the years of their young manhood, ceased almost entirely during the eighteen years of his marriage to Frances Appleton. The reasons are not completely clear. Greene lost his consulship in Rome in 1845, apparently as a result of financial irregularities, and in 1847 he returned to the United States without his wife Maria, of whom Longfellow had been very fond. Greene's subsequent divorce, whatever its justification, offended Longfellow. "What a terrible affair that is!" he wrote to Sumner on July 28, 1849, of the failure of the marriage. "I cannot bring myself to think of it patiendy!" Although no letter exists to document more fully Longfellow's misunderstanding with Greene, there can be no question of its seriousness. "It is not my intention," wrote Greene on December 7, 1 8 5 1 , "to force upon you the renewal of an intercourse which may be disagreeable." Only six letters to Greene have been recovered for the period 1 8 4 4 - 1 8 6 1 . On April 28, 1862, Greene wrote to Longfellow to remind him that he had sent "a line of sympathy" to him on the occasion of Frances Longfellow's death and to outline in more detail his own difficulties and disappointments in life. Longfellow's response of May 1, 1862, renewed their correspondence on a more regular basis. During the next four years Longfellow wrote over fifty letters to Greene, forty-seven of which have been recovered. They deal for the most part with Greene's complaints — which were many and which he elaborated shamelessly — and with ι ο

PRINCIPAL

CORRESPONDENTS

Longfellow's translation of Dante. Whatever his inadequacies, Greene knew Italian well, an asset that Longfellow found useful. By the end of 1865, the two men were firmly reestablished in their old relationship, which largely through Longfellow's financial generosity and his patience with Greene's querulousness survived for the rest of their lives. Longfellow wrote 656 or almost half the recovered letters of 18441865 to the various members of his family and to his three particular friends. The rest he divided among scores of correspondents, writing but a single letter to 290 different addressees. For the most part, these correspondents served merely to attest to his contemporary fame. A few recipients, however, deserve special mention: Ferdinand Freiligrath, living out his exile in England; Hawthorne; Emerson; Francis Lieber, immigrant professor of political economy, history, and law; Edward Everett; Jared Sparks; James Russell Lowell; George William Curtis, author and orator; Charles Eliot Norton; Richard Henry Dana, Jr.; William Davis Ticknor of Ticknor & Fields; and Frances Farrer, the beautiful English admirer whom he never met. Few letter-writers have had more interesting or varied correspondents than these. Longfellow addressed them usually with pleasure and always with care. In the voluminous correspondence of these years, they played small but important supporting roles.

ι χ

CHRONOLOGY 1844

1845

1846 1847

1848

1849

1850

1851

1852

1853 1854 1855

1856

Longfellow begins alteration and improvement of Craigie House, April. Birth of Charles Appleton Longfellow, June 9. Publication of The Waif (Cambridge: John Owen), December. Publication of The Poets and Poetry of Europe (Philadelphia: Carey & Hart), June; Poems (Philadelphia: Carey & Hart), November; The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems (Cambridge: John Owen), December. Birth of Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow, November 23. Summers with family in Pordand and Pittsfield. Publication of The Estray (Boston: William D. Ticknor & Co.), December. Birth of Fanny Longfellow, April 7. Summers with family at Oak Grove, Maine. Publication of Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie (Boston: William D. Ticknor & Co.), November 1. Undergoes operation for varicose veins, January. Samuel Longfellow installed in Fall River pastorate, February 16. Summers with family in Pittsfield. Death of his daughter Fanny, September 1 1 . Publication of Kavanagh (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, & Fields), May; The Seaside and the Fireside (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, & Fields), December. In Pordand, July 10-August 25. Death of his father, August 3. Spends first of many summers with family at Nahant. Death of his brother Stephen, September 19. Birth of Alice Mary Longfellow, September 22. Given deed to Oxbow Farm near Stockbridge by Nathan Appleton, October. Death of his mother, March 12. Charles Sumner elected to Senate, April 24. Marriage of his brother Alexander and Elizabeth Clapp Porter, August 8. Publication of The Golden Legend (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, & Fields), November. Summers with family in "Hotel Rambouillet," Newport, with Thomas Gold Appleton, Julia Ward Howe, George William Curtis, and others. Forms friendship with Arthur Hugh Clough, November. Birth of Edith Longfellow, October 22. Delivers final college lecture, April 19, and officially resigns Harvard professorship, August 23. Begins Song of Hiawatha, June. Summers with family in Newport. Birth of Anne Allegra Longfellow, November 8. Publication of The Song of Hiawatha (London: David Bogue; Boston: Ticknor & Fields), November. Charles Sumner attacked by Preston S. Brooks in Senate, May 22. Longfellow contemplates a European sojourn but abandons plan because of a knee injury in June.

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