File:Frances (Appleton) Longfellow to Emmeline (Austin) Wadsworth, 2 July 1847 (4f02ba62-a448-4c2b-916f-4fd767572443).jpg

Manuscript letter

Archives Number: 1011/002.001-017#016

Craigie House. July 2d 1847.
Dearest Emmeline,
I am looking fondly for a letter from Geneseo – what has befallen it? & by the way, now that I come to my second to you I seem to have resumed last winter’s measured miseries, & your visit here has so shadowy a shape in my memory that I almost doubt the reality of it. I knew I must have a ‘crook in my lot’ somewhere, so much of it being straight, & this is it – that you are destined to be separated from em so far & so long that our intercourse will be most disjointed & unsatisfactory, for what are letters after the steady flow of daily, or, at the most, weekly sympathy? They are but stagnant cisterns beside fresh inexhaustible fountains. But I have no right to sigh after the beaux jours of the past, but only to be grateful for them, & trust some are yet to come. I still hope you may be persuaded enabled rather to join us at Martin’s Point this summer, & if that is not practicable, next winter I shall at least secure you.
Mrs John Bryant has an etherial baby, another girl, which is the latest & best news I believe unless it be the unwelcome arrival of the President, who was as famously douched [p. 2] as Tyler, the favorite compliment of our sky to unpopular presidents. As he drove up Beacon St bare headed, Mr Quincy holding an umbrella over him, he snapped at every frigid bow as a dog at a bone, & bestowed many upon Mr Prescott’s blooming balcony of damsels, none of whom returned them! Tom thinks cutting a President in this way is the greatest thing he has seen since his return. His reception was barely a civil one, the office claiming what the man could not, but it is said he thinks it so cordial [crossed out: a one] he means to bestow himself longer upon us on his return from the East!
The latest arrival upon our book-table is Prescotts Peru which we shall reserve for our villeggiatusa, having only glanced at the Preface & the account of his blindness. Henry is busy with his Examinations, one of which went off yesterday & he today to Portland to secure our rooms, but will soon be free to enjoy life & the season. The country was never in greater perfection & we seized a lovely afternoon last week to visit Mrs John L Gardiner’s fine place. The view from her verandah is one of the very prettiest of Boston possible, Stephen Perkins’ brown cottage makes such a happy foreground, which is more than can be said of Mr Sargents very ugly mansion. Her garden was in exquisite order & beauty – no insects ravage this year’s production s apparently – a prophetic omen of a [p. 4] such a thing, but, unlike Goethe, he did not answer it. Hillard sailed yesterday, & I trust will enjoy richly his banquet. Father has gone to Pittsfield today, I believe, so I hope soon to have Tom here, & I shall try to secure Cheny at once now I am at leisure. Mary Greenleaf has returned, & I am rejoiced to hear that the Professor intends to come back to Cambridge so that I shall see more of her during her short visits. I sent into town for your cuffs & regret to say they will not have any for some weeks. I will try again before I go East. Hillard says the Ticknors are thinking themselves happy in a hot little farm-house at Milton. Mr T. working away in a close den of a room upon his never-to-be-completed “great work.” The Inglises are all breaking up to remove to Philadelphia I believe, partly on Jane M’Clerd’s account, who is, however, fast declining with consumption. Marion Shaw has a lover – an ardent Mr. Indian law-student, but her mother says has no present intentions of marriage to any one. A young painter named Frankenstein! has left here a bundle of sketches, in oil, of Niagara, which are very true to Nature & recall it all so perfectly, unsketchable as it is. I am almost heroic enough to urge Henry to go & see it before we leave for Portland & yet It would be a lame way of enjoying it, for I know not when I can undertake such a journey with children. I suppose I can now tell you that he is correcting the proofs of a long poem called Evangeline written in hexameter describing the fortunes & misfortunes of an Acadian damsel driven to this country from Canada by the British in the olden time. It is a very beautiful touching poem I think & the [p. 1] measure gains upon the ear wonderfully. It enables greater richness of expression than any other, & is sonorous like the sea which is ever sounding in Evangeline’s ears. I hope you will like it. It will not come out till the Autumn.
Good bye dearest – with kindest love to William & Lizzie
ever thy faithful
Fanny.

• Keywords: correspondence; long archives; frances e. a. longfellow papers (long 20257); frances elizabeth (appleton) longfellow; people; document; social life; evangeline; longfellow works; Correspondence (1011/002); (LONG-SeriesName); Letters from Frances Longfellow (1011/002.001); (LONG-SubseriesName); 1847 (1011/002.001-017); (LONG-FileUnitName)