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LONGFELLOW
Papers Presented at the Longfellow Commemorative Conference April 1-3, 1982 |
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LONGFELLOW, EMERSON, AND EMERSON'S "GOSSIPS": ALCOTT, CHANNING, AND THOREAU
By Frederick Wagner
In addition to publishing articles on Bronson Alcott and Thoreau, Dr. Wagner is the author of several books, including biographies of Robert Morris and John Hancock. He is Professor of English and Chairperson at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York.
On January 19, 1832, Ralph Waldo Emerson, at twenty-six still pastor of the Second Church in Boston, wrote to his brother Charles that "Mr Longfellow the poet" had called the previous day when he was not at home. Although Emerson did not know what business had brought the twenty-four-year-old professor of modern languages at Bowdoin to his door, [1] he remarked that "we hungerers for sympathy" welcomed the occasion.
In their youths the two men were opposites in temperament and, once Emerson took to poetry, in technique; Longfellow sought virtuosity in meter and perfection in form, whereas Emerson looked for meter-making arguments and strove to break the bonds of form. In religion and politics Longfellow was more conservative than liberal; the young Emerson strove to be radical. In 1835 Emerson settled in Concord, a village that sometimes seemed farther west of Boston than it actually was; in 1836 Longfellow began his life-long residence in Cambridge, a village that already had assumed the guise of urbanity. Emerson, although he journeyed abroad three times, kept his face toward the American West. Longfellow, although he once traveled through the wilds of New York State to Niagara Falls, kept his face toward Europe; he seemed reluctant to travel even as far west as Concord. Yet the two men were drawn together, in part because by middle age both had become public monuments, but more importantly because of Emerson's hunger for sympathy of the sort Longfellow was so adept at giving. The three men that Emerson called his Concord "gossips"—Bronson Alcott, Ellery Channing, and Henry David Thoreau—he often found lacking; and, despite his occasionally expressed irritation with Longfellow, he kept turning to him for companionship and welcoming his responsive criticism.
When the two men first met we do not know, but Frank Sanborn tells us that, as Longfellow was preparing to leave for Europe in April 1835, Emerson greeted him aboard the steamer that brought him from Portland to Boston with a letter of introduction to Thomas Carlyle,[2] a report that seems to be confirmed by a June letter from Carlyle remarking that he had seen Longfellow several times "with great pleasure; as one sees worthy souls from a far country, who cannot abide with you, who throw you a kind of greeting as they pass." [3] After Longfellow's return from Europe, Emerson attempted to enlist his influence in publicizing Carlyle's History of the French Revolution. [4]
In the late 1830's Longfellow began to attend Emerson's lectures frequently, a practice he continued throughout his life. He thought that Emerson on Transcendentalism was "sufficiently obscure" [5] and noted that his lecture on "Holiness" proved "a great bugbear to many pious, feeble souls. Not exactly comprehending it (and who does?) they seem to be sitting in the shadow of some awful atheism or other." [6] But he pronounced that both the essay on Milton in the North American Review and the lecture on the "Affections" were "good," adding to his comment on the latter that Emerson "mistakes his power somewhat, and at times speaks in oracles, darkly. He is vastly more of a poet than a philosopher. He has a brilliant mind, and develops and expands an idea very beautifully, and with abundant similitudes and illustrations." [7] He advised his friend Sam Ward in New York not to fail to hear Emerson's lectures: "The difference between him and most lecturers is this: From Emerson you go away and remember nothing, save that you have been much delighted; you have had a pleasant dream in which angelic voices spoke. From most other lecturers you go away and remember nothing, save that you have been lamentably bored, you have had the nightmare, and have heard her colt neigh." [8] To George W. Greene in Rome he commended Emerson as "one of the finest lecturers I ever heard, with magnificent passages of true prose-poetry. But it is all dreamery, after all." [9] When the first series of Emerson's Essays appeared, Longfellow found it striking in its combination of "sublime prose-poetry, magnificent absurdities, and simple truths" but confessed to being unable to see any connection in the ideas. [10]
Soon after the Divinity School Address in July 1838 Longfellow, writing to a friend of the stir Emerson continued to make, reported Dean Palfrey's comment that "what in it was not folly was impiety!"; Longfellow defended the talk as "a stout humanitarian discourse." When the Address was published, he promised his father to send a copy and reported Andrew Norton's denunciation of it in the Boston Daily Advertiser. In December, when Norton sent Longfellow his rebuttal to George Ripley's defense of Emerson, the poet was guarded in his response, praising Norton not for his substance, but for his style, which had "all your customary strength, clearness, and directness." [11] Longfellow's position as a Unitarian seemed to be midway between the extremes taken by Norton and Ripley, but in late 1840 he assured Sam Ward that the Divinity School was free of Transcendentalists: "the infected class is gone." [12] Fanny Appleton Longfellow found "the Transcendental strata" cause for laughter; she noted that "Miss Fuller and Emerson sat like the old philosophers in the groves, each with a swarm of disciples as a halo." [13]
Both Fanny and Henry had mixed responses to the Dial. Fanny praised the first issue for testing the spirit of the times and for "the astonishing concentration of thought . . . for so few pages," but she found a later issue to be "'beyond beyond' for absurdity: some verses by Emerson on the Sphinx which you would think could only have been written in Bedlam." [14] Henry found the first two issues "strange" in their combination of affectation and beauty, folly and wisdom. [15]
When Longfellow heard of the proposals to establish Brook Farm, he regarded it as being another of the "sundry novelties" among the day's moral reforms, combining, as most of them did, the serious and the comic. He had been told that Emerson and Alcott were to join George Ripley and Margaret Fuller in "this land of Promise" and feared that Alcott would prove "an unprofitable farmer," for he had heard that the author of "Orphic Sayings" refused to use manure because it overstimulated the earth. Despite his reservations, Longfellow recognized the sincerity and good intentions of the reformers. [16]
Late in 1845 when Emerson was preparing his series of lectures on "Representative Men," he borrowed from Longfellow nine publications of the Shakespeare Society. On sending the volumes, Longfellow invited Emerson to take tea and spend the night at Craigie House. Emerson accepted the invitation to tea, but declined to stay overnight: "I am a restless lodger when I go abroad . . . ." [17]
Longfellow had varying reactions to the lectures. The introductory lecture on "Great Men" had "striking and brilliant passages," but lacked Emerson's usual "sweet rhetoricke"; many passages would "shock the sensitive ear and heart." A full theater greeted the lecture on "Plato," a curious audience, "bald heads and flowing transcendental locks, matrons and maidens, misanthropists and lovers,—listening to the reveries of the poet-philosopher." On January 22, 1845, Longfellow walked to Boston, despite a fierce, cold wind, had tea with Charles Sumner, and then attended the lecture on "Goethe," which he found "not so pre-eminent as some," but noted Emerson's "great charm . . . the Chrysostum and Sir Thomas Browne of the day." On February 4 Emerson took tea at Craigie House with the Longfellows and James Russell Lowell before the lecture on "Napoleon." The Longfellows found him "rather shy . . . but pleasant and friendly." "We like Emerson," Henry asserted, for "his beautiful voice, deep thought, and mild melody of language." The lecture was "very good and well spoken, to the evident delight of the audience." [18]
Emerson came to tea again on December 16, 1846, before his lecture on "Eloquence" at the Lyceum, which was "good, but not of his richest and rarest . . . . By turns he was grave and jocose, and had some striking views and passages." Longfellow observed that Emerson lets "a thousand new lights—side-lights and cross-lights—into every subject." [19] But perhaps Longfellow's most enthusiastic response to an Emerson lecture occurred somewhat more than two years later!
Another of Emerson's wonderful lectures. The subject, 'Inspiration;' the lecture itself an illustration of the theme. Emerson is like a beautiful portico, in a lovely scene of nature. We stand expectant, waiting for the High-Priest to come forth; and lo, there comes a gentle wind from the portal, swelling and subsiding; and the blossoms and the vine-leaves shake, and far away down the green fields the grasses bend and wave; and we ask, "When will the High-Priest come forth and reveal to us the truth?" and the disciples say, "He has already gone forth, and is yonder in the meadows." "And the truth he was to reveal? "It is Nature; nothing more." [20]
Two days before Christmas 1846 Emerson, writing to Longfellow, said that he was seeking someone to give "two friendly lines in the critical column" of the Boston Courier to the new volume of poems by his unpredictable Concord neighbor Ellery Channing. [21] The next day Longfellow received a copy of the book and noted in his journal that the new poems were much like those in Channing's first volume, "written in a low tone, to use a painter's phrase,—and sometimes in the lowest tone. There is a good deal of poetic perception in them, but the expression of it is not very fortunate." [22] He wrote to Emerson, "I am not blind to its many beauties but it does not command the spontaneous admiration which I like so much to feel. Still I see in it much to awaken sympathy . . . ." [23] He did not take Emerson's hint of writing a notice for the Courier.
The day after Christmas Longfellow received Emerson's Poems, which Fanny read to him all evening and until late in the night. It was a "rare volume" with "exquisite poems" that gave them both "the keenest pleasure." Many of the pieces were "Sphinx-like," to "offer a very bold front and challenge your answer." He singled out "Monadnoc," "Threnody," and "The Humble-bee," as containing much of the quintessence of poetry." [24] To Emerson he wrote that the volume was "a signal triumph" and added, "The only bad thing about it is, that I shall never get my wife to read any more of my poems, you have fascinated her so with yours!" [25] Fanny Longfellow reported to her brother that "the solemn Alcott," having read the letter, was going about asserting that Mrs. Longfellow no longer read her husband's poetry. She also noted that Emerson, "with his falling voice and shoulders," had grown "more communicative than usual" as a result of Longfellow's praise.
Emerson, writing in his journal during this period, was not so generous in estimating Longfellow's worth as Longfellow had been in estimating his. After condemning Byron, Scott, and Cowper, and praising Homer, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Herrick, Herbert, and Wordsworth, he concluded, "But how shall I find my heavenly bread in Tennyson? . . . in Lowell, or in Longfellow?" On another occasion he complained that Tennyson and Longfellow were content to amuse and admonished himself, "Let your poetry taste the world & report of it . . . ." And a journal entry in 1853 may help to explain his shyness and uneasiness in the company of the Longfellows: "If Socrates were here, we could go & talk with him; but Longfellow, we cannot go & talk with; there is a palace, & servants, & a row of bottles of different coloured wines, & wine glasses, & fine coats." [27]
In November 1848 Emerson, after returning from his second visit to England, attempted to bring Longfellow closer to Concord and his circle. Fanny Longfellow made clear her attitude toward the rural crowd when she wrote to her brother that "Emerson is among his pines in Concord, with his usual familiars about him, like the grotesque forms on a German illustrated poem." [28] On November 8 Emerson called at Craigie House, "quite changed . . . by his foreign, social life—much more lively and talkative and like a man of the world," reported Fanny Longfellow. [29] Apparently he beguiled Longfellow into accepting an invitation to spend a day in Concord. Longfellow, having pondered the prospect, wrote to Emerson five days later to say that, because of the onslaught of winter, he had changed his plans and would leave Cambridge on the two o'clock train and return from Concord on the five o'clock train. [30] Emerson responded that cutting him down to two hours was "a cruel privation"; he would forego his intention of showing Longfellow Concord, but because he had "bidden my gossips to dine with you, I shall not dine till 3 o'clock. There's for you." [31] Emerson's "gossips," as Longfellow noted, were "his meek philosophers, Alcott, Thoreau, and Channing." [32] According to Fanny Longfellow, her husband regretted having gone so late because he had no time for a satisfactory talk with Emerson before the others arrived. Longfellow regarded them as "quiet impressive people, but he had little chance to hear them roar." [33]
Ellery Channing so impressed Longfellow with his desire to see Nathaniel Hawthorne again that Longfellow agreed to attempt to lure Hawthorne from Salem for a dinner at Craigie House the following Thursday, November 23. When Longfellow wrote to Hawthorne, he referred to Channing as "your fellow-boatman," no doubt recalling to Hawthorne's mind the night of July 9, 1845, when he and Channing, in the rowboat Hawthorne had bought from Thoreau, recovered the body of Martha Hunt, who had drowned herself in the Concord River. [34] Hawthorne replied that he would like to bring with him Thoreau, who would be lecturing in Salem on Wednesday night on "Student Life in New England, Its Economy," later incorporated in Walden. Hawthorne apparently was unaware that Longfellow had dined with Thoreau on November 16 and that Thoreau had been Longfellow's student during Longfellow's first two terms at Harvard; he described Thoreau as someone Longfellow would find "well worth knowing; he is a man of thought and originality; with a certain iron-poker-ishness, an uncompromising stiffness in his mental character . . . ." [35] Longfellow, in his journal entry for the 16th, devoted more space to the third birthday of his son Ernest than to the dinner. [36] He apparently failed to catch either Emerson's or Hawthorne's enthusiasm for his former student and seems never to have read Walden, although in mid-1849 he noted in his journal that Thoreau's account of his one night in Concord jail was "extremely good." [37]
Scarcely two months after the dinner at Emerson's, Alcott called at Craigie House and passed the evening. Longfellow described him as dilating in praise of Thoreau and Emerson, of whom he exclaimed, "This man is Pan—more than Pan! His writings are a dialogue between Pan and Apollo." [38] Alcott yearned for a club of literary men and literary women so that he might have more opportunity to see writers such as Longfellow and James Russell Lowell; as he confessed in his journal, "I, for instance, should never meet some of these gentlemen, never see them in private, perhaps," but in the small circle of a club "intercourse would be quite possible, and often very stimulating." [39] Alcott's attempt to strike up an acquaintance with Longfellow proved futile. Longfellow regarded him as "a prose Wordsworth," [40] and Fanny Longfellow claimed to have given him the nickname "Plato-Skimpole." [41] She recognized Alcott's longing for "academic groves and tractable pupils," but ridiculed his attempt to gain a livelihood through his Conversations: "As if people could be made to talk as water-pipes, when the stop is removed, to flow!" She regarded him as one of the "weak, watery reflections" surrounding Emerson, "a sorry set of bores." [42]
Twenty-four years would elapse before Alcott again entered Craigie House. In March 1873 the poet's brother Samuel took Alcott to Cambridge to dine, and after dinner they found Longfellow in his study; the conversation was largely about Emerson and Hawthorne. [43] The conversation also was largely about Emerson in December 1878 when Alcott passed the forenoon and lunched with Longfellow. Alcott was happy to tell all he knew about his friend, but was pleased that Longfellow showed some interest in his own endeavors. [44] Alcott's view of Longfellow's poetry was idiosyncratic: he regretted that Longfellow, like Thoreau, had celebrated "the wild, the Indian, the beast, the bird, the forest and the savage, instead of the tame and tender, the genial sentiments and dear humanity of private life." [45]
However little Longfellow may have cared for Alcott's company, he had more compassion than many for Alcott's financial plight. Emerson, while soliciting funds for the support of the Alcott family, told James Russell Lowell that, in a conversation between him and Longfellow about Alcott's genius and poverty, Longfellow suggested that those who knew Alcott should each give the proceeds of a day's work: Longfellow would give a poem, or fifty dollars; Emerson should contribute the value of a lecture, and so on. [46] Emerson's records indicate that Longfellow fulfilled his pledge of $50; among the few other contributors Emerson gave $100 and Thoreau one dollar. [47]
Emerson wrote Longfellow two generally complimentary letters on his work in 1849. Although disappointed by the "temperate conclusion" to Kavanagh, he found the book as a whole persuasive; it induced "the serene mood it required." More importantly, he regarded it as "the best sketch we have seen in the direction of the American novel. For here is our native speech and manners, treated with sympathy, taste, and judgment." He also suggested that "we are so charmed with elegance in an American book that . . . you win our gratitude too easily . . . ." [48] Emerson thought that the poems in The Seaside and the Fireside (of which he had received a pre-publication copy) "like their predecessors, receive the best compliment of being at once read through by all experimenters." In the same letter he spoke of the need of a club, which "seems to offer me the only chance I dare trust of coming near enough to you to talk, one of these days, of poetry, of which when I read your verses, I think I have something to say to you." [49]
Less than two months later Mrs. Longfellow noted that Emerson was "really hungering for society, but knows not how to get it . . . ." To her brother, Tom Appleton, she wrote, "I wish you were here to help him to some kind of sociable, agreeable club." [50] In a few years such a club—The Saturday Club—would appear.
In 1849, when Fanny had finished reading to her husband Emerson's essay on "War," written some years earlier, she remarked to a friend, "I wish he would write something as useful now and not absorb in clouds what should be fertilizing the earth and feeding his hungry brethern. Where has his humanity gone, I wonder . . . ." She acknowledged that he had written opposing slavery, but complained that he always seemed ghost-like, regarding human beings as "merely singular phenomena, not brothers," never caring from his heart for anyone. [51] Yet when Longfellow heard Emerson speak against the Fugitive Slave Law at Cambridge City Hall on May 14, 1851, although he thought that the first part and the conclusion were "grand," he did not care much for Emerson's treatment of Daniel Webster, and he added, "It is rather painful to see Emerson in the arena of politics, hissed and hooted at by young law-students." [52]
During the early 1850's the two men were brought together by their concern with an international copyright law; Longfellow, Emerson, Holmes, and Hawthorne were among those signing a petition that the works of British authors should be protected in the United States just as the works of American authors were already protected in Great Britain. [53]
Longfellow and Emerson also were drawn together by social affairs. On November 20, 1852, Emerson gave a dinner at the Tremont House in honor of Arthur Hugh Clough, the British poet and scholar who had come to New England in search of a livelihood that would enable him to marry. Among the guests were Longfellow, Lowell, Hawthorne, Ellery Channing, Charles Sumner, and Theodore Parker. Clough wrote to his fiancee that it was "a very swell dinner, I assure you." [54] On June 14, 1853, Longfellow provided at Craigie House what he described as "a very pleasant farewell dinner for Hawthorne, who sails for his Liverpool consulate in a few weeks." Emerson declared that the day should be marked with a white stone; he found the affair "very agreeable." Clough and Lowell were among the guests. [55]
In late April 1854 Moncure Daniel Conway, then a student at the Divinity School, borrowed a friend's room (his own was not elegant enough) to entertain the Longfellows, Lowell, John Sullivan Dwight, and a few others; the entertainment was provided by Emerson, who read his new essay on "Poetry." "When Emerson finished," Conway recalled, "there was deep silence"; presently one member of the group "moved to the piano and performed several of Mendelssohn's 'Songs Without Words.' These were the only words possible." [56] Longfellow revealed the reason for his silence; the essay "was full of brilliant and odd things; but not very satisfactory on a first hearing, hope to read it one day, and perhaps understand it better." [57]
When Hiawatha was published in 1855, Emerson's response was equivocal. He said that in Longfellow's skillful hands he always felt safe, especially when reading Hiawatha, which was "sweet and wholesome . . . very proper and pertinent for us to read, and showing a kind of manly sense of duty . . . ." But, Emerson complained, real Indians are "savage, have poor, small, sterile heads,—no thoughts . . . ." He criticized Longfellow's "tenderness . . . in accepting a legend or a song, when they had so little to give. I should hold you to your creative function on such occasions." Although he praised the "costume and machinery" as being "sweet and melancholy" and agreeing "with the American landscape," he "found in the last cantos a pure gleam or two of blue sky, and learned thence to tax the rest of the poem as too abstemious." [58]
The Saturday Club probably afforded more occasion than any other for Longfellow and Emerson to meet regularly during the last twenty-five years of their lives. Although Longfellow, Emerson, and Lowell had agreed in 1850 to form a club that would meet for dinner once a month, [59] not until late in 1855 did such a group draw together; Emerson was a member from the start, but Longfellow did not join until the spring of 1857. [60] The club, which met on the last Saturday in each month at Parker's, generally dined from three o'clock until nine; during the first few years it consisted of about fourteen members, including—in addition to Longfellow and Emerson—Louis Agassiz, John Lothrop Motley, John Sullivan Dwight, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. [61]
According to Holmes, Longfellow—florid, soft-voiced, benignant—invariably sat at the foot of the table with his back to the windows and Agassiz—robust, jovial, animated—at the head. Emerson, smoking a cigar and talking in low tones or merely listening and recording, sat near Longfellow. [62] Emerson once noted in his journal, "Longfellow avoids greed smokers. A cigar lasts one hour: but is not allowed to lose fire." [63] Although the gatherings generally were not marred by speeches or fussing with by-laws, Longfellow complained about "the heat of the room taking away all life and animation. It is impossible to boil and talk at the same time." [64]
Thoreau, although invited to meetings of the Saturday Club, refused to attend. He claimed that he had difficulty seeing through the cigar smoke at the Parker House, where "men were deposited about in chairs over the marble floor, as thick as legs of bacon in a smoke-house." His acquaintances, he said, had formed a club, "the handle of which is in the Parker House at Boston, and with this they beat me from time to time, expecting to make me tender or minced meat, so fit for a club to dine off." [65] Ellery Channing, who wept delightedly whenever invited, reproached Thoreau for not going. [66] Bronson Alcott, who attended a few meetings in 1857 and 1858, always remarked upon Longfellow's presence among the "quite literary and select" group. At the meeting in January 1858 he met Oliver Wendell Holmes for the first time and noted that the conversation was "spirited, turning chiefly on Personal Identities; the distinctions, physical and metaphysical, between man and beast. I would have discriminated more fully and finely between the threefold forces of brute, human, and divine, . . . but the company were unused to such analysis, and talked to the senses . . . ." [67]
In August 1858 the painter and traveler William J. Stillman organized an expedition of members of the club to Follansbee Pond near Saranac in the Adirondacks. Lowell, Agassiz, and Emerson agreed to go, and Stillman urged Longfellow to join the group Longfellow asked whether the rumor that Emerson would carry a gun was true. When Stillman replied that it was, Longfellow exclaimed, "'Then somebody will be shot!' and would talk no more of going." [68] Longfellow recorded in his journal:
Agassiz, Lowell, Emerson, and some others have gone to the Adirondack country, to camp out and do many wonders. Agassiz is to weigh the brains of trout which the others are to catch. [Emerson] has bought himself a double-barrelled shotgun for the occasion; on hearing which, I respectfully declined joining the party! They have been out ten days, and so far we have not heard of anybody's being shot. [69]
Longfellow's opinion of Emerson as outdoorsman is further implied in a letter to a friend the following year: "Emerson is on crutches, Monadnock having 'trundled him down its stones.'" [70]
Stillman, in his autobiography, set forth a lengthy comparison of the two men. Longfellow, Stillman said, was unselfish and considerate, a man with "the most . . . gentle nature I have ever known,—one to which a brutal or inconsiderate act was positive pain, and any on the least creature, cause of intense indignation." Stillman conjectured that Emerson most liked men who gave him problems to solve, and Longfellow offered no problems; he was "transparent, limpid as a clear spring reflecting the sky and showing all that was in its depths." [71] Longfellow possessed "an invincible tranquillity; with no sympathy for mystery or obscurity; supremely above the general and the commonplace by the exquisite refinement to which he carried the expression of what the general and commonplace world felt and thought; remote from roughness in the form or the substance of his thought . . . ." Although Emerson was "too serene ever to be discourteous, and was capable of . . . the most intense indignation without quickening his speech or raising his tone," he had a way of "grasping and exhausting with imaginative activity whatever object furnished him with matter for thought, and throwing to the rubbish heap whatever was superficial; indifferent to form or polish if only he could find a diamond; reveling in mystery, and with eyes that penetrated like the x-ray through all obscurities . . .; he brushed away contemptuously the beauties on which Longfellow spent the tenderness of his character, and threw aside like an empty nutshell the form to which an artist might have given the devotion of his best art, for art's sake." [72] Stillman reported that Longfellow once claimed that "Emerson used his friends like lemons,—squeezing them till they were dry, and then throwing them away." [73]
One of the most acerbic accounts of a meeting of the Saturday Club was that left by Henry James, Sr., who—so Longfellow noted in his journal—was present as a guest in January 1861, as was Ellery Channing, "our Concord poet," accompanying Emerson and Hawthorne. [74] Seated next to Frederick Henry Hedge, James reported that he "felt at one time very much like sending down to Parker to have him removed as maliciously putting his little artificial person between me and a profitable object of study." The object of study was Hawthorne, who had "the look all the time . . . of a rogue who suddenly finds himself in the company of detectives." James felt sorry for Emerson's future son-in-law, John Forbes, a "contented, sprawling Concord owl . . . brought blindfold into the brilliant daylight, and expected to wink and be lively like any little dapper Tommy Titmouse or Jenny Wren." Confiding all these remarks in a letter to Emerson, James praised him for keeping up the balance at his end of the table and asserted that "the good, inoffensive, comforting Longfellow, . . . seemed much nearer the human being than any one at that end of the table—much nearer." [75]
Illness kept Longfellow absent from several meetings late in 1863, and on February 24, 1864 Emerson wrote to him, "When will you come back to the Saturdays, which want their ancient lustre? . . . I have often in these solitudes questions to ask you; but, at such distant meetings, they have no answers." He also reflected, "What a rusty place is the country to live in, where a man loses his manners,—or never attains to them! What a fat and sleepy air is this . . . ." [76]
Three months later Longfellow would feel the sleepy air of Concord for the first time since his visit in 1848. On May 24 the sun shone on the blossoming apple orchards of Concord, the one bright day in a week of rain, as the coffin of Nathaniel Hawthorne was borne from the Unitarian Church to the pine-shadowed hillside in Sleepy Hollow. Among the pallbearers were Longfellow, Emerson, and Alcott, with Ellery Channing following. [77] Emerson noted, "All was so bright and quiet that pain or mourning was hardly suggested, and Holmes said to me that it looked like a happy meeting." [78] Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, writing to Longfellow, remarked that she could not see his face, "but only the form and the white hair waving in the wind." The day, she said, was made to seem to her, "a festival of life." [79] Longfellow told Charles Sumner, "You cannot imagine anything at once more sad and beautiful." [80]
On December 31, 1870 Longfellow concluded his annual journal with the comment, "The year ends with a Club dinner. Agassiz is not well enough to be there. But Emerson and Holmes of the older set were; and so I was not quite alone." [81] The 1870's proved a twilight decade for the two poets, but they continued to meet at the Saturday Club or at an occasional dinner given by James and Annie Fields. Despite Emerson's increasing problems with aphasia, Longfellow attended his lectures with as enthusiastic a response as ever; when Emerson talked on "The Natural History of the Intellect," Longfellow wrote to Charles Sumner that "these lectures would be a cordial to you." [82] Longfellow was among the guests of honor when Emerson read an address at the centenary celebration for Sir Walter Scott sponsored by the Massachusetts Historical Society. [83] In June 1876 Longfellow was host to Dom Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil, whom he described as "the modern Haroun-al-Raschid . . . wandering about to see the great world we live in, as simple traveler, not as king." Dom Pedro requested that Emerson and Holmes be invited to the dinner, which Longfellow termed "very jovial and pleasant." [84]
But the most notorious occasion on which Longfellow and Emerson were brought together in the 1870's was the dinner given by the Atlantic Monthly at the Brunswick Hotel on December 17, 1877, to celebrate John Greenleaf Whittier's seventieth birthday. Emerson recited Whittier's "Ichabod," and Holmes read a poetic tribute. Among the other after-dinner speakers was Samuel Clemens, who, as he rose to talk, was distinctly aware of the "Olympian trinity" seated at the table and facing him: "Mr. Emerson, supernaturally grave, unsmiling; . . . Mr. Longfellow, with his silken-white hair and his benignant face; Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, flashing smiles and affection and all good-fellowship everywhere . . . ." [85] To Clemens, the upstart humorist from the West, the once-radical Emerson now seemed indistinguishable from Longfellow and Holmes as members of the literary establishment. Clemens began to deliver a burlesque, which began, "Standing here on the shore of the Atlantic and contemplating certain of its largest literary billows . . . ." [86] In the story that followed, Mark Twain knocked at the door of a lonely log cabin in the Sierras and was greeted by a melancholy miner who claimed that Twain was the fourth "littery man" to visit in twenty-four hours, the others being Emerson, "a seedy little bit of a chap, red-haired"; Holmes, "fat as a balloon," with "double chins all the way down to his stomach"; and Longfellow, "built like a prize fighter . . . . His nose lay straight down his face, like a finger with the end joint tilted up." [87] All three, having guzzled his whisky, then sat down to play cards. Emerson, complaining about the hand dealt to him, exclaimed:
They reckon ill who leave me out;
They know not well the subtle ways I keep.
I pass, and deal again! [88]
The following morning Longfellow, as he was about to leave wearing the miner's boots and carrying his own under his arm, said,
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime;
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.
When Twain told the miner that the three had been imposters, "not the gracious singers to whom we and the world pay loving reverence and homage," the miner then accused Twain of being an imposter. [89]
Clemens, as he continued, worried by what he perceived as a scarcity of laughter, imagined that his words were being greeted with disapproval and dismay. He thought the audience wore "the sort of expression their faces would have worn if I had been making these remarks about the Deity and the rest of the Trinity . . . ." [90] William Dean Howells, the toastmaster, "was aware of Longfellow sitting upright, and regarding the humorist with an air of pensive puzzle, of Holmes busily writing on his menu, with a well-feigned effect of pre-occupation, and of Emerson, holding his elbows, and listening with a sort of Jovian oblivion of this nether world . . . ." [91]
A number of newspapers complained of Clemens's bad taste, and after Christmas he sent apologies to the three poets. Longfellow responded that the newspaper reports gave "what was meant in jest . . . a serious aspect. I do not believe that anybody was much hurt. Certainly I was not . . . ." Holmes, although admitting that some questioned the taste of associating the names of the authors with Western rogues, claimed that "it never occurred to me for a moment to take offense, or to feel wounded by your playful use of my name." Emerson's daughter Ellen replying for her father, addressed her remarks to Mrs. Clemens: "The night of the dinner, my father says, he did not hear Mr. Clemens's speech. He was too far off, and my mother says that when she read it to him the next day it amused him . . . . To my father it is as if it had not been; he never quite heard, never quite understood it, and he forgets easily and entirely." But Ellen confessed that she herself found the speech "a real disappointment . . . . it didn't seem good or funny . . . ." [92]
On March 24, 1882, Bronson Alcott wrote in his journal, "The evening papers announce the death of the poet Longfellow, the pride of New England and singer for all countries." [93] Ellen Emerson took her father to the funeral in Cambridge. Oliver Wendell Holmes reported, "I was sitting opposite to him when he rose, and going to the side of the coffin, looked intently upon the face of the dead poet. A few minutes later he rose again and looked once more on the familiar features, not apparently remembering that he had just done so." [94] As Emerson returned to where Ellen sat, he asked, "Where are we? What house? And who is the sleeper?" When Ellen explained, he was shocked and crossed a third time to look at the face. That evening he had to be reminded again of his friend's death, but the next day he recalled everything. [95]
Shortly after the funeral Ellen reported, "Father says he wanted [Longfellow] should live at least as long as he himself should; he was very sorry to have him die first." [96] Emerson did not have long to wait. On April 16 he caught cold while attending church and died from pneumonia on April 27, a month and three days after the death of his fellow poet.
An entry in Longfellow's journal a few years earlier provides an appropriate benediction: "Last night I dreamed of Emerson. He said: 'The spring will come again; but shall we see it, or only the eternal spring up there?' lifting both his hands on high.—" [97]
NOTES
1Ralph L. Rusk, ed., Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), I, p. 344, hereafter cited as RWE Letters.
2Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1901), p. 83.
3Joseph Slater, ed., The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), p. 136.
5Andrew Hilen, ed., The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966-1982), II, p. 9, hereafter cited as HWL Letters.
6Samuel Longfellow, ed., Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Boston: Ticknor and Co., 1886), I, p. 282, hereafter cited as Life.
7Ibid., I, p. 277; HWL Letters, II, p. 92.
8Lawrance Thompson, Young Longfellow (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1938), p. 292.
11Ibid., II, pp. 87, 100, 190.
13Edward Wagenknecht, ed., Mrs. Longfellow: Selected Letters and Journals of Fanny Appleton Longfellow (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1956), p. 81, hereafter cited as Mrs. Longfellow.
21RWE Letters, III, pp. 363-64
27William H. Gilman et al, eds., The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960-1978), IX, pp. 376-77, XI, p. 386, XIII, p. 38, hereafter cited as JMN.
29Life, II, p. 127; Ibid., p. 146.
34HWL Letters, III, p. 187; James R. Mellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Time (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1980), pp. 251-52.
35Walter Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), pp. 34-35; Samuel Longfellow, ed., Final Memorials of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Boston: Ticknor and Co., 1887), p. 29, hereafter cited as Memorials.
39Odell Shepard, ed., The Journals of Bronson Alcott (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1938), pp. 227-28, hereafter cited as ABA Journals.
46RWE Letters, IV, p. 514, V, pp. 22, 159.
47JMN, XIII, p. 513, XIV, p. 443.
51Life, II, pp. 142-43; Ibid., pp. 151-52.
53HWL Letters, III, pp. 345-46; RWE Letters, IV, pp. 292-93.
54Life, II, p. 228; RWE Letters, IV, p. 323; Frederick L. Mulhauser, ed., The Correspondence of Arthur Hugh Clough (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957, II, p. 333.
55Life, II, p. 234; RWE Letters, IV, pp. 362, 366.
56Autobiography: Memories and Experiences of Moncure Daniel Conway (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.), I, pp. 167-68.
61Edward Waldo Emerson, The Early Years of the Saturday Club (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1918), p. 19, hereafter cited as Saturday Club.
62Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1884), pp. 222-23.
64Saturday Club, p. 24; Life, II, p. 306.
65Walter Harding and Carl Bode, eds., The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau (New York: New York University Press, 1958), pp. 536-37.
68William James Stillman, The Autobiography of a Journalist (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1901), I, p. 240.
71The Autobiography of a Journalist, I, pp. 233-34.
78Edward W. Emerson, ed., Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1909-14), X, p. 39.
85Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1912), I, p. 604; Mark Twain's Speeches (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1910), p. 10.
86Mark Twain's Speeches, p. 1.
91Henry Nash Smith, Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer (New York: Atheneum, 1957), p. 98.
92Paine, Mark Twain, I, pp. 607-08.
94Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 346.
95Gay Wilson Allen, Waldo Emerson (New York: The Viking Press, 1981), p. 668.
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