"Cross of Snow," Nicholas Basbanes

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Burrowing into Books

“Cross of Snow,” Nicholas Basbanes

August 1, 2020

 

“But to me, a dreamer of dreams.

To whom what is said and what seems

Are often one and the same, – “

                                                                                    “The Bells of San Blas,” March 12, 1882

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as Nicholas Basbanes writes in the introduction, has gone out of favor – “widely revered in one century, methodically excommunicated from the ranks of the worthy in the next.” A poet of gentility, tradition and respectability is incongruous when lyrics to popular songs and the language of late-night TV hosts would make blush a Vietnam War combat veteran or a Salomon Brothers trader. Yet, this is a man worth knowing – a brilliant linguist, a popular professor and the most renowned poet of his time. When first picking up the book, I wrote a note to myself: “I am embarking on an adventure to know a remarkable man, his life and times.” And that is what Mr. Basbanes has done in this very personal biography of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

 

The “Cross of Snow” in the title comes from a poem Longfellow wrote in 1879 as a tribute to his late wife Fanny who had died eighteen years earlier. The poem was inspired by the landscape artist Thomas Moran’s painting “Mountain of the Holy Cross,” a peak in the northern Sawatch Range of the Colorado Rockies

 

“There is a mountain in the distant West

That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines

Displays a cross of snow upon its side.

Such is the cross I wear upon my breast

These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes

And seasons, changeless since the day she died.”

 

Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine in 1807. After graduation from Bowdoin College in 1825 (in a class with Franklin Pierce and Nathaniel Hawthorne), he spent three years in Europe to better his knowledge of modern languages, which he would teach at Bowdoin. “Your tour is one for improvement rather than pleasure,” his brother Stephen wrote. He became fluent in German, Swedish, French, Italian and Spanish. When he died, his library contained over 11,000 books, in fifteen languages, all of which he could read. Returning to Bowdoin, he took up teaching duties. Six years later, he married Mary Potter. Four years later, he was offered the Smith Professorship of Modern Languages at Harvard. He was again asked to travel to Europe to brush up on languages and to purchase books for the college. Mary went with him, only to die of complications from a miscarriage on November 29, 1835 in Rotterdam. She was twenty-three. Her last words: “Henry, don’t forget me.” He was deeply saddened. In his diary he wrote. “…at night I cry myself to sleep like a child.” He later admitted that bringing her was the biggest mistake he had made. He did not forget her. Four years later, he completed Footsteps of an Angel, which includes this stanza:

 

“And she sits and gazes at me

With those deep and tender eyes,

Like the stars, so still and saint-like,

Looking downward from the skies.”

 

Several months later, on that same trip, in July 1836, Longfellow met nineteen-year-old Fanny Appleton in Switzerland. She was traveling in Europe for a year with her father and siblings, her mother having died the previous year. Fanny was an observant and intelligent young woman. On a trip to Pompeii, she wrote in her journal: “The awe of the Past never came so strongly upon me as here, frail matter doomed to revisit the glimpses of the moon…Matter can be embalmed but the free soul was not cased in, by even the bondage of a million years.” Longfellow was smitten, but it took seven years of courtship before they married. In the interim, he wrote Hyperion, an unflattering semi-autobiographical piece – his second worst decision according to Mr. Basbanes. Hyperion speaks to Longfellow’s long pursuit of Fanny. She wrote to her friend Emmeline Austin about the story: “There are really some exquisite things in this book, tho it is desultory, objectless, a thing of shreds and patches, like the author’s mind.” Nevertheless, teaching duties occupied him and he continued to write – in 1839 The Wreck of the Hesperus and The Village Blacksmith, and three years later Poems on Slavery, a mildly pro-abolitionist collection.

 

It was during their eighteen-year marriage Longfellow was most productive, especially after retiring from his teaching duties in 1854. During those years he published Evangeline (1847), The Song of Hiawatha (1855) and The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858). He and Fanny hosted scores of America’s and England’s literati, as well as artists and musicians, at their home on Brattle Street in Cambridge, a house that had once been George Washington’s headquarters and is now called the Vassall-Cragie-Longfellow house. Among those entertained: Prince Edward (later Edward VII), Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William Ellery Channing, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, Louis Agassiz, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Edwin Booth, Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt and Jenny Lind. Fanny bore six children, five of whom survived into adulthood. Sadly, she died in a tragic accident at age forty-three on July 10, 1861.

 

Dante had been a favorite of Fanny’s; so, with her gone and with his eldest son in the Union Army, Longfellow translated Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. “In the months following Fanny’s death, Henry found comfort in Dante’s exploration of the heavenly spheres, with the idealized Beatrice at his side.” His effort, which took six years to complete, is still considered one of the best English translations. In 1868-69, he took a final trip to Europe, traveling with his three living daughters, his son Ernest and his wife, his brother Samuel and brother-in-law Tom Appleton. He dined with Charles Dickens and was received by Queen Victoria, who afterwards told Sir Theodore Martin, then working on a biography of her late husband, “I noticed an unusual interest among the attendants and servants…I am surprised and pleased to find that many of his poems are familiar to them.” His popularity in Britain was such, Basbanes writes, “that he was outselling Robert Browning and Alfred Lord Tennyson on their own turf.”

 

Longfellow is best remembered for sentimental poems like The Village Blacksmith, Paul Revere’s Ride and The Song of Hiawatha, whose lines we recall: “By the shores of Gitche Gumee/By the shining Big-Sea-Water.” It was poetry that people my age once memorized, but which does not fit today’s more cynical age. In this intimate biography, Nicholas Basbanes writes of his poetic achievements, his professorships at Bowdoin and Harvard and his translations. Longfellow condemned slavery, but not with the adamancy of some of his friends, perhaps because his father-in-law’s mills depended on southern cotton. However, people knew where he stood. One of his best friends was Senator Charles Sumner, a staunch abolitionist, once caned into unconsciousness on the Senate floor by South Carolina Democrat Preston Brooks in 1856.

 

 Longfellow continued to translate, write poetry and welcome guests at Craigie House, as he “…resumed his agreeable pace.” He did so until his death on March 24, 1882. His home on Brattle Street in Cambridge is now a museum. During his lifetime it was the most visited home in the United States, second only to Mount Vernon. In 1875, he attended his 50^th reunion at Bowdoin at which he read an ode written for the occasion, Morituri Salutamus, which includes these two lines:

 

“So many memories crowd upon my brain

So many ghosts are in the wooded plain,”

 

An evening in his company, Anthony Trollope reflected, was memorable: “…the stranger is apt to drop the poet in the gentleman, the distinguished man of letters to the uncommonly pleasant fellow whom he has encountered.” In her comments to Sir Theodore Martin, Queen Victoria added, “No other distinguished person has come here that has excited so peculiar an interest. Such poets wear a crown that is imperishable.” The writer William Winter (1836-1917), who regarded Longfellow as a mentor, is quoted: “…a perfect image of continence, wisdom, dignity, sweetness and grace.” Many years after his death, his son Ernest wrote of his father: “He was not a rushing river, boiling and tumbling over rocks, but the placid stream flowing through quiet meadows.”

 

This biography, by a sensitive and diligent author, is a delightful tribute to a poet whose soothing and bucolic voice deserves to be heard and to be read once more, especially in these turbulent times.