Word: longfellow
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...LONGFELLOW (255 pp.)-Edited by Edward Wagenknecht-Longmans, Green...
...poet, young Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had an eye for beauty. As a man. he had a hankering for beauties. He had married one (Mary Storer Potter) in 1831, but she died four years later while they were traveling in Holland. Only months had passed when, in Switzerland, he met statuesque Fanny Appleton. a proper Bostonian of 19 whose wealth and social position matched her looks and charm. His grief notwithstanding, the young (29) widower wasted little time. They talked and walked by the Rhine, Longfellow reading poetry aloud as he plodded along behind her. He was not yet the gentle...
...Longfellow, a selection from her letters and journals, gives a few clues to Fanny's dim view of Longfellow's suit. For one thing, she already had a more interesting mind than his. She was well read and neither life nor people fooled her. At 19 she could look back uneasily on "childhood, innocence and ignorance, before the down is rubbed off and the skeleton in all things revealed, and that fiend Doubt become our fireside companion." A bit morbid, perhaps, but still more acute than anything young Henry had yet written. She could also be cattily tart...
...volume of verses out . . . the cream of thought being somewhat thinner than that of the binding." But when, in 1843, Fanny finally said yes. she loyally ended her role as one of Henry's sharpest critics. Her letters show that their happiness was nearly total, for whatever Longfellow was as a poet, he was a dedicated husband...
...Longfellow is pre-eminently a woman's book, and the picture that slowly emerges of a thoroughly charming and civilized lady is one that most contemporary women might well envy. Life with Henry was not exciting, but it had its compensations. ''The Prof read and wrote and taught, and as his fame grew the Longfellows entertained most of the famous writers in flowering New England-Hawthorne, Lowell, Emerson. Fanny always saw them plain, just as she had once seen Henry. Emerson's fame could not keep her from writing: "Where has his humanity gone, I wonder...