except in my fancy. He may always have had
that look of one who had experienced the utmost harm that fate can do,
and henceforth could possess himself of what was left of life in peace.
He could never have been a man of the flowing ease that makes all comers
at home; some people complained of a certain 'gene' in him; and he had a
reserve with strangers, which never quite lost itself in the abandon of
friendship, as Lowell's did. He was the most perfectly modest man I ever
saw, ever imagined, but he had a gentle dignity which I do not believe
any one, the coarsest, the obtusest, could trespass upon. In the years
when I began to know him, his long hair and the beautiful beard which
mixed with it were of one iron-gray, which I saw blanch to a perfect
silver, while that pearly tone of his complexion, which Appleton so
admired, lost itself in the wanness of age and pain. When he walked, he
had a kind of spring in his gait, as if now and again a buoyant thought
lifted him from the ground. It was fine to meet him coming down a
Cambridge street; you felt that the encounter made you a part of literary
history, and set you apart with him for the moment from the poor and
mean. When he appeared in Harvard Square, he beatified if not beautified
the ugliest and vulgarest looking spot on the planet outside of New York.
You could meet him sometimes at the market, if you were of the same
provision-man as he; and Longfellow remained as constant to his
tradespeople as to any other friends. He rather liked to bring his
proofs back to the printer's himself, and we often found ourselves
together at the University Press, where the Atlantic Monthly used to be
printed. But outside of his own house Longfellow seemed to want a fit
atmosphere, and I love best to think of him in his study, where he
wrought at his lovely art with a serenity expressed in his smooth,
regular, and scrupulously perfect handwriting. It was quite vertical,
and rounded, with a slope neither to the right nor left, and at the time
I knew him first, he was fond of using a soft pencil on printing paper,
though commonly he wrote with a quill. Each letter was distinct in
shape, and between the verses was always the exact space of half an inch.
I have a good many of his poems written in this fashion, but whether they
were the first drafts or not I cannot say; very likely not. Towards the
last he no longer sent his poems to the magazines in his own hand; but
they were always signed