The White Mr. Longfellow | Page 5

that when L. came to know their fate from
me, I answered, confidently, "I think they are rather more adapted to
music." He calmly asked, "Why?" and as this was an exigency which
Longfellow had not forecast for me, I was caught in it without hope of
escape. I really do not know what I said, but I know that I did not take
the poems, such was my literary conscience in those days; I am afraid I
should be weaker now.

IV.
The suppers of the Dante Club were a relaxation from the severity of
their toils on criticism, and I will not pretend that their table-talk was of
that seriousness which duller wits might have given themselves up to.
The passing stranger, especially if a light or jovial person, was always
welcome, and I never knew of the enforcement of the rule I heard of,
that if you came in without question on the Club nights, you were a
guest; but if you rang or knocked, you could not get in.
Any sort of diversion was hailed, and once Appleton proposed that
Longfellow should show us his wine-cellar. He took up the candle
burning on the table for the cigars, and led the way into the basement of
the beautiful old Colonial mansion, doubly memorable as Washington's
headquarters while he was in Cambridge, and as the home of
Longfellow for so many years. The taper cast just the right gleams on
the darkness, bringing into relief the massive piers of brick, and the
solid walls of stone, which gave the cellar the effect of a casemate in
some fortress, and leaving the corners and distances to a romantic
gloom. This basement was a work of the days when men built more
heavily if not more substantially than now, but I forget, if I ever knew,
what date the wine- cellar was of. It was well stored with precious
vintages, aptly cobwebbed and dusty; but I could not find that it had
any more charm than the shelves of a library: it is the inside of bottles
and of books that makes its appeal. The whole place witnessed a

bygone state and luxury, which otherwise lingered in a dim legend or
two. Longfellow once spoke of certain old love-letters which dropped
down on the basement stairs from some place overhead; and there was
the fable or the fact of a subterranean passage under the street from
Craigie House to the old Batchelder House, which I relate to these
letters with no authority I can allege. But in Craigie House dwelt the
proud fair lady who was buried in the Cambridge church-yard with a
slave at her head and a slave at her feet.
"Dust is in her beautiful eyes,"
and whether it was they that smiled or wept in their time over those
love-letters, I will leave the reader to say. The fortunes of her Tory
family fell with those of their party, and the last Vassal ended his days
a prisoner from his creditors in his own house, with a weekly
enlargement on Sundays, when the law could not reach him. It is
known how the place took Longfellow's fancy when he first came to be
professor in Harvard, and how he was a lodger of the last Mistress
Craigie there, long before he became its owner. The house is square,
with Longfellow's study where he read and wrote on the right of the
door, and a statelier library behind it; on the left is the drawing-room,
with the dining-room in its rear; from its square hall climbs a beautiful
stairway with twisted banisters, and a tall clock in their angle.
The study where the Dante Club met, and where I mostly saw
Longfellow, was a plain, pleasant room, with broad panelling in white
painted pine; in the centre before the fireplace stood his round table,
laden with books, papers, and proofs; in the farthest corner by the
window was a high desk which he sometimes stood at to write. In this
room Washington held his councils and transacted his business with all
comers; in the chamber overhead he slept. I do not think Longfellow
associated the place much with him, and I never heard him speak of
Washington in relation to it except once, when he told me with peculiar
relish what he called the true version of a pious story concerning the
aide-de-camp who blundered in upon him while he knelt in prayer. The
father of his country rose and rebuked the young man severely, and
then resumed his devotions. "He rebuked him," said Longfellow, lifting

his brows and making rings round the pupils of his eyes, "by throwing
his scabbard at his head."
All the front windows of Craigie House look, out over the open fields