Page:Notes by the Way.djvu/305

 NOTES BY THE WAY.

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��' Wapentake to Alfred Tennyson,' in which he does homage to the mastery in English song of the " sweet historian of the heart " :

Therefore to thee the laurel leaves belong, To thee our love and our allegiance, For thy allegiance to the poet's art.

Tennyson in reply wrote that the Christmas greeting was " a very perfect flower from your own spacious garden."

After a stay on the Continent Longfellow returned for a few His return days to London, then went to Oxford to receive the degree of Home. D.C.L., and thence to Scotland. After a crowded eighteen months of travel he reached his home again at Craigie House on the 1st of September, 1869, as the sun was setting, " and found Cambridge in all its beauty ; not a leaf faded." " How glad I am to be at home ! " he writes the same night to his lifelong friend Greene.

" There is not a drop of ink in my inkstand, and no bottle can be found. Still, I must write you one word to say we are all safe again at home. How strange and how familiar it all seems ! and how> thankful I am to have brought my little flock back to the fold ! The young voices and little feet are musical overhead ; and the year of travel floats away, and dissolves like a Fata Morgana."

In the interesting biography of Longfellow by his brother Samuel, to which I have previously referred, and which has greatly aided me in these notes, we are told that Longfellow's life after his return soon resumed its quiet and even tenor. The shades of evening seem to have been already gathering. His intimate friends Felton and Hawthorne were gone ; Agassiz, who was breaking in health, one day came in saying, " I cannot work," put his face in his hands, and wept, and in a year he too was gone ; Sumner in 1874 suddenly died, and an unshadowed intercourse of forty years was ended ; Lowell went abroad, and was seen no more by his friend and neighbour. " So the loneliness grew deeper in the study of Craigie House." Yet there were some choice friends still remaining : Greene, his earliest friend ; Emerson, Wendell Holmes, Norton, and the cordial, genial Fields. Many visitors also came, and received a hospitable welcome. In his journals may be found the names of Froude, Kingsley, William Black, Plumptre, Dean Stanley, Salvini, Titiens, and Christine Nilsson. The entries concerning many he knew are so thoroughly character- istic that I feel tempted to give a few extracts taken at random.

Washington Irving, then forty years of age, was in 1827 at Washington Madrid, engaged on his life of Columbus. Longfellow thus refers Irving. to him :

" I found the author repeated in the man : The same playful humor, the same touches of sentiment, the same poetic atmosphere, and what I admired still more, the entire absence of literary jealousy."

��Numerous deaths of friends.

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