The young Dante seldom spoke unless questioned, so said the legends. A particularly pleasing contemplation would preclude attention to anything outside his own thoughts. Dante once found a rare volume in an apothecary’s shop in Siena and spent the whole day reading on a bench outside without ever noticing the street festival going on directly in front of him, unconscious of the musicians and the dancing women.
When he had settled in the study with a bowl of oatmeal and milk, a meal he would be content to repeat for dinner most days, Longfellow could not help thinking of Patrolman Rey’s note. He imagined a million different possibilities and a dozen languages for the scribbled writing before abandoning the hieroglyphic—as Lowell had branded it—to its place in the back of the drawer. From the same drawer he brought out proof sheets of Cantos Sixteen and Seventeen of Inferno, annotated neatly with the suggestions from the latest Dante seance. His desk had remained empty of original poems for some time now. Fields had issued a new “Household Edition” of Longfellow’s most famous poems and convinced him to complete Tales of a Way-’de Inn, hoping to spur new poems. But it seemed to Longfellow that he would never write anything original again, nor did he care to try. Translating Dante had once been an interlude to his own poetry, his Minnehahas, his Priscillas, his Evangelines. The practice had begun twenty-five years ago. Now, over the last four years, Dante had become his morning prayer and his day’s work.
As Longfellow poured his second and final cup of coffee, he thought of the report Francis Child had been rumored to have made to friends in England: “Longfellow and his coterie are so infected with the Tuscan malady that they dare classify Milton as a second-rate genius in comparison to Dante.” Milton was the gold standard of religious poets for English and American scholars. But Milton wrote of Hell and Heaven from above and below, respectively, not from the inside: safer vantages. Fields, diplomatic as long as nobody was hurt, had laughed when Arthur Hugh Clough had relayed Child’s comment in the Authors’ Room at the Corner, but it had irked Longfellow quite a bit to hear of the exchange.
Longfellow soaked his quill pen. Of his three finely decorative inkwells, this one he prized most, having once belonged to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and then to Lord Tennyson, who had sent it to Longfellow as a gift to wish him well on the Dante translation. The reclusive Tennyson was one of too small a contingent in that country that truly understood Dante and held him in high esteem, and had known more of the Comedy than a few episodes of the Inferno. Spain had shown an early appreciation for Dante until strangled by official dogma and bludgeoned by the reign of the Inquisition. Voltaire had initiated the French animosity toward Dante’s “barbarity” that continued still. Even in Italy, where Dante was most widely known, the poet had been drafted into the service of various factions fighting for control. Longfellow often thought of the two things Dante must have yearned for the most as he wrote the Divine Comedy while sitting in exile from his beloved Florence: The first was to win a return to his homeland, which he would never succeed in doing; the second was to see his Beatrice again, which the Poet never could.
Dante wandered about homeless as he composed, almost having to borrow the ink in which he wrote. When he approached a strange city’s gates, surely he could not but be reminded that he would never again enter the gates of Florence. When he beheld the towers of the feudal castles cresting the distant hills, he felt how arrogant are the strong, how much abused the weak. Every brook and river reminded him of the Arno; every voice he heard told him by its strange accent that he was an exile. Dante’s poem was no less than his search for home.
Longfellow was methodical about mastering his time and set aside the early hours for his writing and the late morning for his personal business, refusing to admit any visitors until after twelve o’clock—except, of course, his children.
The poet sifted through his piles of unanswered letters, pulling close to him his box of autographs written on small squares of paper. Since the publication of Evangeline years earlier had broadened his popularity, Longfellow regularly received mail from strangers, most of whom requested a signature. A young woman from Virginia included her own carte de visile portrait, on the back of which was written: “What fault can be found with this?” with her address below it. Longfellow raised an eyebrow and sent her a standard autograph without comment. “The fault of too great youth,” he considered replying. After sealing some two dozen envelopes, Longfellow wrote a gracious rebuff of another lady. He did not like to be discourteous, but this particular solicitant requested fifty autographs, explaining that she wanted to offer them as place settings for her guests at a dinner party. He was delighted, on the other hand, by a woman relating the story of her daughter running into the parlor after finding a daddy longlegs on her pillow. When asked the matter, the girl announced: “Mr. Longfellow is in my room!”
Longfellow was pleased to find in his pile of new mail a note from Mary Frere, a young lady from Auburn, New York, with whom Longfellow had recently become acquainted when summering at Nahant, where they walked many evenings, after the girls fell asleep, along the rocky shore, talking of new poetry or music. Longfellow wrote her a long letter, relating to her how the three girls ask often after her doings; the girls also beg him to find out where Miss Frere will be spending the next summer.
He was lured away from his letters by the ever-present temptation of the window in front of his writing desk. The poet always expected a revival of creative power with the onset of autumn. His fireless grate was heaped with autumnal leaves that imitated a flame. He noticed that the warm, bright day had waned more quickly than it seemed from inside the brown walls of his study. The window overlooked the open meadows, several acres of which Longfellow had recently purchased, stretching all the way to the gleaming waters of the Charles River. He found it amusing to think of the popular superstition that he made the purchase with a view to a rise in property value, while in fact all he wanted to secure was the view.
On the trees were no longer only leaves but brown fruits, on the bushes no longer blossoms but clusters of red berries. And the wind had a rough manliness in its voice—the tone not of a lover but of a husband.
Longfellow’s day settled into just the right pace. Supper over, he dismissed the help and resolved to catch up on his newspaper reading. But after lighting the lamp in his study, he spent only a few minutes with the paper. The late edition of the Transcript carried Ednah Healey’s startling announcement. The article contained details of the murder of Artemus Healey, which had until then been suppressed by the widow “on the counsel of the office of the Chief of Police and other official persons.” Longfellow could read no further, though certain details from the article, he would realize in the next eventful hours, had burrowed into his mind uninvited; it was not the pain of the chief justice that ended Longfellow’s tolerance for the story for now so much as that of the widow.
July 1861. The Longfellows should have been at Nahant. There was a cool sea breeze that caressed Nahant, but for reasons nobody remembered the Longfellows had not yet left the fervent sunshine and heat of Cambridge.
A tormenting scream burrowing into the study from the adjoining library. Two little girls shouting in terror. Fanny Longfellow had been sitting with little Edith, who was then eight, and Alice, eleven, sealing packages of the girls’ freshly cut curls as mementos; little Annie Allegra slept soundly upstairs. Fanny had opened a window in the unlikely hope for a puff of air. The best conjecture in the days that followed—for nobody had seen precisely what happened, nobody could ever truly see something so brief and so arbitrary—was that a flake of hot sealing wax drifted onto her light summer dress. In a single moment, she was burning.