Produced by David Widger
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES—The White Mr. Longfellow
by William Dean Howells
We had expected to stay in Boston only until we could find a house in OldCambridge. This was not so simple a matter as it might seem; for theancient town had not yet quickened its scholarly pace to the modern step.Indeed, in the spring of 1866 the impulse of expansion was not yetvisibly felt anywhere; the enormous material growth that followed thecivil war had not yet begun. In Cambridge the houses to be let were few,and such as there were fell either below our pride or rose above ourpurse. I wish I might tell how at last we bought a house; we had nomoney, but we were rich in friends, who are still alive to shrink fromthe story of their constant faith in a financial future which wesometimes doubted, and who backed their credulity with their credit. Itis sufficient for the present record, which professes to be strictlyliterary, to notify the fact that on the first day of May, 1866, we wentout to Cambridge and began to live in a house which we owned in fee ifnot in deed, and which was none the less valuable for being covered withmortgages. Physically, it was a carpenter's box, of a sort which isreadily imagined by the Anglo-American genius for ugliness, but which itis not so easy to impart a just conception of. A trim hedge ofarbor-vita; tried to hide it from the world in front, and a tall boardfence behind; the little lot was well planted (perhaps too well planted)with pears, grapes, and currants, and there was a small open space whichI lost no time in digging up for a kitchen-garden. On one side of uswere the open fields; on the other a brief line of neighbor-houses;across the street before us was a grove of stately oaks, which I nevercould persuade Aldrich had painted leaves on them in the fall. We werereally in a poor suburb of a suburb; but such is the fascination ofownership, even the ownership of a fully mortgaged property, that wecalculated the latitude and longitude of the whole earth from the spot wecalled ours. In our walks about Cambridge we saw other places where wemight have been willing to live; only, we said, they were too far off: Weeven prized the architecture of our little box, though we had but solately lived in a Gothic palace on the Grand Canal in Venice, and werenot uncritical of beauty in the possessions of others. Positive beautywe could not have honestly said we thought our cottage had as a whole,though we might have held out for something of the kind in the bracketsof turned wood under its eaves. But we were richly content with it; andwith life in Cambridge, as it began to open itself to us, we wereinfinitely more than content. This life, so refined, so intelligent, sogracefully simple, I do not suppose has anywhere else had its parallel.
It was the moment before the old American customs had been changed byEuropean influences among people of easier circumstances; and inCambridge society kept what was best of its village traditions, and choseto keep them in the full knowledge of different things. Nearly every onehad been abroad; and nearly every one had acquired the taste for oliveswithout losing a relish for native sauces; through the intellectual lifethere was an entire democracy, and I do not believe that since thecapitalistic era began there was ever a community in which money countedfor less. There was little show of what money could buy; I remember butone private carriage (naturally, a publisher's); and there was not onelivery, except a livery in the larger sense kept by the stableman Pike,who made us pay now a quarter and now a half dollar