Holmes tapped his fork against his glass. “I hereby arraign Lowell as a murderer, for he completely killed the Life.”

They all laughed.

“Oh, it died a-borning, Judge Holmes,” replied the defendant, “and I but hammered the nails into its coffin!”

“Say,” Greene tried to sound casual in returning to his preferred topic. “Has anyone noted a Dantesque character to the days and dates of this year?”

“They correspond exactly with those of the Dantesque 1300,” said Longfellow, nodding. “So in both years, Good Friday fell on the twenty-fifth of March.”

“Glory!” said Lowell. “Five hundred and sixty-five years ago this year, Dante descended into the citta dolente, the dolorous city. Won’t this be the year of Dante! Is it a good omen for a translation,” Lowell asked with a boyish smile, “or an ill one?” His comment reminded him of the persistence of the Harvard Corporation, however, and his large smile wilted.

Longfellow said, “Tomorrow, with our latest cantos of the Inferno in hand, I shall descend among the printer’s devils—the Malebranche of the Riverside Press—and we shall creep closer to completion. I have promised to send a private edition of Inferno to the Florentine Committee by the end of the year, to be made a part, however humbly, of Dante’s six-hundredth-birthday commemoration.”

“You know, my dear friends,” Lowell said, frowning. “Those damned fools at Harvard are still in a white heat trying to close down my Dante course.”

“And after Augustus Manning warned me about the consequences of publishing the translation,” Fields put in, drumming the table in frustration.

“Why should they go to such lengths?” Greene asked with alarm.

“One way or another, they seek to gain as much distance from Dante as possible,” explained Longfellow gently. “They fear its influence, that it’s foreign—that it’s Catholic, my dear Greene.”

Holmes said, projecting offhanded sympathy, “I suppose it could be partially understood when it comes to some of Dante. How many fathers went to Mount Auburn Cemetery to visit their sons last June instead of to the meetinghouse for commencement? For many, I think we need no other Hell than what we have just come out of.”

Lowell was pouring himself a third or fourth glass of red Falernian. Across the table, Fields tried unsuccessfully to calm him with a placating glance. But Lowell said, “Once they start throwing books in the fire, they shall put us all into an inferno we won’t soon escape, my dear Holmes!”

“Oh, do not think I like the idea of trying to waterproof the American mind against questions that Heaven rains down upon it, my dear Lowell. But perhaps…” Holmes hesitated. Here was his opportunity. He turned to Longfellow. “Perhaps we should consider a less ambitious publication schedule, my dear Longfellow—a private issue of a few dozen books first, so that our friends and fellow scholars can appreciate it, can learn its strengths, before we spread it to the masses.”

Lowell nearly jumped from his seat. “Did Dr. Manning talk to you? Did Manning send someone to scare you into that, Holmes?”

“Lowell, please.” Fields smiled diplomatically. “Manning wouldn’t approach Holmes about this.”

“What?” Dr. Holmes pretended not to register this. Lowell was still waiting for an answer. “Of course not, Lowell. Manning is just one of those fungi that always grow upon older universities. But it seems to me that we do not want to court unnecessary conflict. It would only distract from what we cherish about Dante. It would become about the fight, not about the poetry. Too many doctors use medicine by cramming as much of it as possible down their patients’ throats. We should be judicious in our most well-meaning cures, and cautious in our literary advancements.”

“The more allies, the better,” Fields said to the table.

“We cannot tiptoe around tyrants!” Lowell said.

“Nor do we wish to be an army of five against the world,” Holmes added. He was thrilled that Fields was already warming to his idea of stalling: He would complete his novel before the nation even heard of Dante.

“I would be burned at the stake,” Lowell cried. “Nay, I would agree to be shut up alone for an hour with the entire Harvard Corporation before I would push back the translation’s publication.”

“Of course, we shan’t change publication plans at all,” Fields said. The wind came out of Holmes’s sails. “But Holmes is right about us carrying this out alone,” Fields continued. “We can certainly try to recruit support. I could call on old Professor Ticknor to use whatever influence is left in him. And perhaps Mr. Emerson, who read Dante years ago. No one on earth knows whether a book will sell five thousand copies or not when published. But if five thousand copies are sold, nothing is more certain than that twenty-five thousand copies can be.”

“Could they try to take away your teaching post, Mr. Lowell?” Greene interrupted, still preoccupied by the Harvard Corporation.

“Jamey is far too famous a poet for that,” insisted Fields.

“I don’t care a fig what they do to me, in any respect! I shall not hand Dante to the Philistines.”

“Nor shall any of us!” Holmes was quick to say. To his own surprise, he was not defeated; rather, all the more determined—not only that he was right, but that he could save his friends from Dante and save Dante from the ardor of his friends. The encouraging volume of his exclamation took in the table. “Hear, hear” and “That’s it! That’s it!” were shouted, Lowell’s voice the loudest.

Greene, seeing a remnant of tomato farcie lodged on his clinking fork, bent down to share the wealth with Trap. From under the table, Greene noticed Longfellow rise to his feet.

Though they were just five friends around Longfellow’s dining room in the infinite privacy of Craigie House, the sheer rarity of Longfellow standing to speak for a toast produced a complete stillness.

“To the health of the table.”

That was all he said. But they hurrahed as though it were another Emancipation Proclamation. Then there was cherry cobbler and ice cream, and cognac with flaming cubes of sugar, and unwrapped cigars lit on the candles at the center of the table.

Before the night came to an end, Longfellow was persuaded by Fields to tell the table of the cigars’ history. In coaxing Longfellow to speak of himself in any capacity, one was required to cloak interest in a neutral topic, such as cigars.

“I had called on the Corner on business,” Longfellow began, while Fields laughed in advance, “when Mr. Fields persuaded me to accompany him to a nearby tobacconist’s to procure some gifts. The tobacconist brought over a box of a certain brand of cigars I swear I had never before heard of. And he said, with all the earnestness in the world, ‘These, sir, are the kind Longfellow prefers to smoke.’ “

“What was your reply?” Greene asked over the gleeful din.

“I glanced at the man, looked down at the cigars, and said, ‘Well then, I must try them.’ And paid him to send a box over.”

“So what do you think now, my dear Longfellow?” Lowell’s dessert caught in his throat from laughing.

Longfellow exhaled. “Oh, I believe the man was quite right. I do find them good.”

“ ‘Therefore it is good that I should arm myself with foresight, so, if I am driven from the place most dear to me, I will…’ “ the student hummed with frustration, rubbing his finger back and forth under the Italian.

For several years now, Lowell’s study in Elmwood had doubled as a classroom for his course on Dante. In his first term as Smith Professor, he had requested a room and received a bleak space in the basement of University Hall, with long wooden boards instead of desks and a pulpit for the professor that had to have descended from the Puritans. The course was not sufficiently well attended, Lowell was told, to merit one of the more desirable classrooms. It was just as well. Holding court at Elmwood provided him the comfort of a pipe and the warmth of a wood fire, and was another reason not to have to leave home.