The White Mr. Longfellow | Page 6

across the Charles, which is now the Longfellow Memorial Garden.
The poet used to be amused with the popular superstition that he was
holding this vacant ground with a view to a rise in the price of lots,
while all he wanted was to keep a feature of his beloved landscape
unchanged. Lofty elms drooped at the corners of the house; on the lawn
billowed clumps of the lilac, which formed a thick hedge along the
fence. There was a terrace part way down this lawn, and when a
white-painted balustrade was set some fifteen years ago upon its brink,
it seemed always to have been there. Long verandas stretched on either
side of the mansion; and behind was an old-fashioned garden with beds
primly edged with box after a design of the poet's own. Longfellow had
a ghost story of this quaint plaisance, which he used to tell with an
artful reserve of the catastrophe. He was coming home one winter night,
and as he crossed the garden he was startled by a white figure swaying
before him. But he knew that the only way was to advance upon it. He
pushed boldly forward, and was suddenly caught under the throat-by
the clothes-line with a long night-gown on it.
Perhaps it was at the end of a long night of the Dante Club that I heard
him tell this story. The evenings were sometimes mornings before the
reluctant break-up came, but they were never half long enough for me.
I have given no idea of the high reasoning of vital things which I must
often have heard at that table, and that I have forgotten it is no proof
that I did not hear it. The memory will not be ruled as to what it shall
bind and what it shall loose, and I should entreat mine in vain for
record of those meetings other than what I have given. Perhaps it would
be well, in the interest of some popular conceptions of what the social
intercourse of great wits must be, for me to invent some ennobling and
elevating passages of conversation at Longfellow's; perhaps I ought to
do it for the sake of my own repute as a serious and adequate witness.
But I am rather helpless in the matter; I must set down what I
remember, and surely if I can remember no phrase from Holmes that a
reader could live or die by, it is something to recall how, when a certain

potent cheese was passing, he leaned over to gaze at it, and asked:
"Does it kick? Does it kick?" No strain of high poetic thinking remains
to me from Lowell, but he made me laugh unforgettably with his
passive adventure one night going home late, when a man suddenly
leaped from the top of a high fence upon the sidewalk at his feet, and
after giving him the worst fright of his life, disappeared peaceably into
the darkness. To be sure, there was one most memorable supper, when
he read the "Bigelow Paper" he had finished that day, and enriched the
meaning of his verse with the beauty of his voice. There lingers yet in
my sense his very tone in giving the last line of the passage lamenting
the waste of the heroic lives which in those dark hours of Johnson's
time seemed to have been
"Butchered to make a blind man's holiday."
The hush that followed upon his ceasing was of that finest quality
which spoken praise always lacks; and I suppose that I could not give a
just notion of these Dante Club evenings without imparting the effect
of such silences. This I could not hopefully undertake to do; but I am
tempted to some effort of the kind by my remembrance of Longfellow's
old friend George Washington Greene, who often came up from his
home in Rhode Island, to be at those sessions, and who was a most
interesting and amiable fact of those delicate silences. A full half of his
earlier life had been passed in Italy, where he and Longfellow met and
loved each other in their youth with an affection which the poet was
constant to in his age, after many vicissitudes, with the beautiful
fidelity of his nature. Greene was like an old Italian house-priest in
manner, gentle, suave, very suave, smooth as creamy curds, cultivated
in the elegancies of literary taste, and with a certain meek abeyance. I
think I never heard him speak, in all those evenings, except when
Longfellow addressed him, though he must have had the Dante
scholarship for an occasional criticism. It was at more recent dinners,
where I met him with the Longfellow family alone, that he broke now
and then into a quotation from some of the modern Italian