The White Mr. Longfellow

The White Mr. Longfellow
by William Dean Howells

We had expected to stay in Boston only until we could find a house in
Old Cambridge. This was not so simple a matter as it might seem; for
the ancient town had not yet quickened its scholarly pace to the modern
step. Indeed, in the spring of 1866 the impulse of expansion was not yet
visibly felt anywhere; the enormous material growth that followed the
civil war had not yet begun. In Cambridge the houses to be let were few,
and such as there were fell either below our pride or rose above our
purse. I wish I might tell how at last we bought a house; we had no
money, but we were rich in friends, who are still alive to shrink from
the story of their constant faith in a financial future which we
sometimes doubted, and who backed their credulity with their credit. It
is sufficient for the present record, which professes to be strictly
literary, to notify the fact that on the first day of May, 1866, we went
out to Cambridge and began to live in a house which we owned in fee
if not in deed, and which was none the less valuable for being covered
with mortgages. Physically, it was a carpenter's box, of a sort which is
readily imagined by the Anglo-American genius for ugliness, but which
it is not so easy to impart a just conception of. A trim hedge of arbor-
vita; tried to hide it from the world in front, and a tall board fence
behind; the little lot was well planted (perhaps too well planted) with
pears, grapes, and currants, and there was a small open space which I
lost no time in digging up for a kitchen-garden. On one side of us were
the open fields; on the other a brief line of neighbor-houses; across the
street before us was a grove of stately oaks, which I never could
persuade Aldrich had painted leaves on them in the fall. We were really
in a poor suburb of a suburb; but such is the fascination of ownership,
even the ownership of a fully mortgaged property, that we calculated

the latitude and longitude of the whole earth from the spot we called
ours. In our walks about Cambridge we saw other places where we
might have been willing to live; only, we said, they were too far off:
We even prized the architecture of our little box, though we had but so
lately lived in a Gothic palace on the Grand Canal in Venice, and were
not uncritical of beauty in the possessions of others. Positive beauty we
could not have honestly said we thought our cottage had as a whole,
though we might have held out for something of the kind in the
brackets of turned wood under its eaves. But we were richly content
with it; and with life in Cambridge, as it began to open itself to us, we
were infinitely more than content. This life, so refined, so intelligent, so
gracefully simple, I do not suppose has anywhere else had its parallel.

I.
It was the moment before the old American customs had been changed
by European influences among people of easier circumstances; and in
Cambridge society kept what was best of its village traditions, and
chose to keep them in the full knowledge of different things. Nearly
every one had been abroad; and nearly every one had acquired the taste
for olives without losing a relish for native sauces; through the
intellectual life there was an entire democracy, and I do not believe that
since the capitalistic era began there was ever a community in which
money counted for less. There was little show of what money could
buy; I remember but one private carriage (naturally, a publisher's); and
there was not one livery, except a livery in the larger sense kept by the
stableman Pike, who made us pay now a quarter and now a half dollar
for a seat in his carriages, according as he lost or gathered courage for
the charge. We thought him extortionate, and we mostly walked
through snow and mud of amazing depth and thickness.
The reader will imagine how acceptable this circumstance was to a
young literary man beginning life with a fully mortgaged house and a
salary of untried elasticity. If there were distinctions made in
Cambridge they were not against literature, and we found ourselves in
the midst of a charming society, indifferent, apparently, to all questions

but those of the higher education which comes so largely by nature.
That is to say, in the Cambridge of that day (and, I dare say, of this) a
mind cultivated in some sort was essential, and after that