The White Mr. Longfellow | Page 7

poets he
knew by heart (preferably Giusti), and syllabled their verse with an
exquisite Roman accent and a bewitching Florentine rhythm. Now and
then at these times he brought out a faded Italian anecdote, faintly

smelling of civet, and threadbare in its ancient texture. He liked to
speak of Goldoni and of Nota, of Niccolini and Manzoni, of Monti and
Leopardi; and if you came to America, of the Revolution and his
grandfather, the Quaker General Nathaniel Greene, whose life he wrote
(and I read) in three volumes: He worshipped Longfellow, and their
friendship continued while they lived, but towards the last of his visits
at Craigie House it had a pathos for the witness which I should grieve
to wrong. Greene was then a quivering paralytic, and he clung
tremulously to Longfellow's arm in going out to dinner, where even the
modern Italian poets were silent upon his lips. When we rose from
table, Longfellow lifted him out of his chair, and took him upon his
arm again for their return to the study.
He was of lighter metal than most other members of the Dante Club,
and he was not of their immediate intimacy, living away from
Cambridge, as he did, and I shared his silence in their presence with
full sympathy. I was by far the youngest of their number, and I cannot
yet quite make out why I was of it at all. But at every moment I was as
sensible of my good fortune as of my ill desert. They were the men
whom of all men living I most honored, and it seemed to be impossible
that I at my age should be so perfectly fulfilling the dream of my life in
their company. Often, the nights were very cold, and as I returned home
from Craigie House to the carpenter's box on Sacramento Street, a mile
or two away, I was as if soul-borne through the air by my pride and joy,
while the frozen blocks of snow clinked and tinkled before my feet
stumbling along the middle of the road. I still think that was the richest
moment of my life, and I look back at it as the moment, in a life not
unblessed by chance, which I would most like to live over again--if I
must live any. The next winter the sessions of the Dante Club were
transferred to the house of Mr. Norton, who was then completing his
version of the 'Vita Nuova'. This has always seemed to me a work of
not less graceful art than Longfellow's translation of the 'Commedia'. In
fact, it joins the effect of a sympathy almost mounting to divination
with a patient scholarship and a delicate skill unknown to me elsewhere
in such work. I do not know whether Mr. Norton has satisfied himself
better in his prose version of the 'Commedia' than in this of the 'Vita
Nuova', but I do not believe he could have satisfied Dante better, unless

he had rhymed his sonnets and canzonets. I am sure he might have
done this if he had chosen. He has always pretended that it was
impossible, but miracles are never impossible in the right hands.

V.
After three or four years we sold the carpenter's box on Sacramento
Street, and removed to a larger house near Harvard Square, and in the
immediate neighborhood of Longfellow. He gave me an easement
across that old garden behind his house, through an opening in the high
board fence which enclosed it, and I saw him oftener than ever, though
the meetings of the Dante Club had come to an end. At the last of them,
Lowell had asked him, with fond regret in his jest, "Longfellow, why
don't you do that Indian poem in forty thousand verses?" The demand
but feebly expressed the reluctance in us all, though I suspect the Indian
poem existed only by the challenger's invention. Before I leave my
faint and unworthy record of these great times I am tempted to mention
an incident poignant with tragical associations. The first night after
Christmas the holly and the pine wreathed about the chandelier above
the supper-table took fire from the gas, just as we came out from the
reading, and Longfellow ran forward and caught the burning garlands
down and bore them out. No one could speak for thinking what he must
be thinking of when the ineffable calamity of his home befell it. Curtis
once told me that a little while before Mrs. Longfellow's death he was
driving by Craigie House with Holmes, who said be trembled to look at
it, for those who lived there had their happiness so perfect that no
change, of all the changes which must come to them, could fail to be
for the worse.