The White Mr. Longfellow | Page 4

Doctor Holmes's talking of the physician as the true
seer, whose awful gift it was to behold with the fatal second sight of
science the shroud gathering to the throat of many a doomed man
apparently in perfect health, and happy in the promise of unnumbered
days. The thought may have been suggested by some of the toys of
superstition which intellectual people like to play with.
I never could be quite sure at first that Longfellow's brother-in-law,
Appleton, was seriously a spiritualist, even when he disputed the most
strenuously with the unbelieving Autocrat. But he really was in earnest
about it, though he relished a joke at the expense of his doctrine, like
some clerics when they are in the safe company of other clerics. He
told me once of having recounted to Agassiz the facts of a very
remarkable seance, where the souls of the departed outdid themselves
in the athletics and acrobatics they seem so fond of over there, throwing
large stones across the room, moving pianos, and lifting dinner-tables
and setting them a-twirl under the chandelier. "And now," he demanded,
"what do you say to that?" "Well, Mr. Appleton," Agassiz answered, to
Appleton's infinite delight, "I say that it did not happen."
One night they began to speak at the Dante supper of the unhappy man
whose crime is a red stain in the Cambridge annals, and one and
another recalled their impressions of Professor Webster. It was possibly
with a retroactive sense that they had all felt something uncanny in him,
but, apropos of the deep salad-bowl in the centre of the table,
Longfellow remembered a supper Webster was at, where he lighted
some chemical in such a dish and held his head over it, with a
handkerchief noosed about his throat and lifted above it with one hand,
while his face, in the pale light, took on the livid ghastliness of that of a
man hanged by the neck.
Another night the talk wandered to the visit which an English author
(now with God) paid America at the height of a popularity long since
toppled to the ground, with many another. He was in very good humor
with our whole continent, and at Longfellow's table he found the

champagne even surprisingly fine. "But," he said to his host, who now
told the story, "it cawn't be genuine, you know!"
Many years afterwards this author revisited our shores, and I dined with
him at Longfellow's, where he was anxious to constitute himself a guest
during his sojourn in our neighborhood. Longfellow was equally
anxious that he should not do so, and he took a harmless pleasure in
out- manoeuvring him. He seized a chance to speak with me alone, and
plotted to deliver him over to me without apparent unkindness, when
the latest horse-car should be going in to Boston, and begged me to
walk him to Harvard Square and put him aboard. "Put him aboard, and
don't leave him till the car starts, and then watch that he doesn't get
off."
These instructions he accompanied with a lifting of the eyebrows, and a
pursing of the mouth, in an anxiety not altogether burlesque. He knew
himself the prey of any one who chose to batten on him, and his
hospitality was subject to frightful abuse. Perhaps Mr. Norton has
somewhere told how, when he asked if a certain person who had been
outstaying his time was not a dreadful bore, Longfellow answered, with
angelic patience, "Yes; but then you know I have been bored so often!"
There was one fatal Englishman whom I shared with him during the
great part of a season: a poor soul, not without gifts, but always ready
for more, especially if they took the form of meat and drink. He had
brought letters from one of the best English men alive, who withdrew
them too late to save his American friends from the sad consequences
of welcoming him. So he established himself impregnably in a Boston
club, and came out every day to dine with Longfellow in Cambridge,
beginning with his return from Nahant in October and continuing far
into December. That was the year of the great horse-distemper, when
the plague disabled the transportation in Boston, and cut off all
intercourse between the suburb and the city on the street railways. "I
did think," Longfellow pathetically lamented, "that when the horse-cars
stopped running, I should have a little respite from L., but he walks
out."
In the midst of his own suffering he was willing to advise with me

concerning some poems L. had offered to the Atlantic Monthly, and
after we had desperately read them together he said, with inspiration, "I
think these things are more adapted to music than the magazine," and
this seemed so good a notion