Fortunate Birth and Environment 47 poet. His prose is remarkably vigorous, direct, and yet affluent; and his verse has a particular charm of melody, an atmosphere of true poetry about it, which is very winning. The harshness of his criticisms I have never attributed to anything but the irritation of a sensitive nature chafed by some indefinite sense of wrong. XVII Few men have had the opportunities of birth and environment that came to Longfellow. His grandfather was a judge, his father a lawyer and congressman, his mother a lineal descendant of the Priscilla who married John Alden. His father was not wealthy, but he was able to give him a college education and an equally long period of travel in Europe, with letters of introduction that opened to him every desirable social opportunity in all the cities he visited. He received the degree of LL.D. at 21, and was a professor at 22. At Harvard he succeeded to the chair of George Ticknor, and gave it up to James Russell Lowell. The best men of both hemispheres were proud to be his friends, and every distinguished traveller that came to Boston called on him. Ole Bull, Jenny Lind, even the Fox sisters sought him out. Whoever was at the time famous thought it a privilege to meet him. Who can measure the uplifting influence of three friends who have left such an impression as this? THREE FRIENDS OF MINE When I remember them, those friends of mine, Who half my life were more than friends to me, And whose discourse was like a generous wine, I most of all remember the divine His First Wife 49 Something, that shone in them, and made us see XIX In his family life he was equally blessed. His first wife was his but for four years. She died at Rotterdam in 1835. His memory of her appeared in his first published volume, in what he called his third Psalm of Life, under the title "Footsteps of Angels". FOOTSTEPS OF ANGELS When the hours of Day are numbered, Wake the better soul, that slumbered, Ere the evening lamps are lighted, Then the forms of the departed He, the young and strong, who cherished By the roadside fell and perished, They, the wholly ones and weakly, Who the cross of suffering bore, And she sits and gazes at me With those deep and tender eyes, Is the spirit's voiceless prayer, O, though oft depressed and lonely, If I but remember only Such as these have lived and died! XX How happy must have been his relations with a being of whom it is a pleasure to think that she is sitting in spirit in the His Second Wife 51 vacant chair at his side, her hand on his, her When his daughter Fanny died he says in his journal: eyes fixed on him. For a long time I sat by her alone in the darkened library. The twilight fell softly on her placid face, and the white flowers which she held in her little hands. In the deep silence the bird sang from the hall, a sad strain, a melancholy requiem. It touched and soothed me. When summoned home by news of his mother's sudden death he says: I sat all that night alone with her, but without terror, almost without sorrow, so tranquil had been her death. A sense of peace came over me, as if therein had been no shock nor jar in nature, but a harmonious close to a long life. Only a good husband, a good father, a good son could feel like this in the presence of the dead. XXI In his "Hyperion" he had described under a thin veil his meeting and journeying in Switzerland with Frances Elizabeth Appleton, then 19 years old, and he married her in 1843. His union with her was as perfect as that of the Brownings, and his life with her was one constant joy. The repeated |