his effect was of an entire democracy. He was
always the most unassuming person in any company,
and at some large public dinners where I saw him I
found him patient of the greater attention that more
public men paid themselves and one another. He
was not a speaker, and I never saw him on his feet
at dinner, except once, when he read a poem for Whittier,
who was absent. He disliked after-dinner speaking,
and made conditions for his own exemption from it.
Once your friend, Longfellow was always your friend;
he would not think evil of you, and if he knew evil
of you, he would be the last of all that knew it to
judge you for it. This may have been from the
impersonal habit of his mind, but I believe it was
also the effect of principle, for he would do what
he could to arrest the delivery of judgment from others,
and would soften the sentences passed in his presence.
Naturally this brought him under some condemnation
with those of a severer cast; and I have heard him
criticised for his benevolence towards all, and his
constancy to some who were not quite so true to themselves,
perhaps. But this leniency of Longfellow’s
was what constituted him great as well as good, for
it is not our wisdom that censures others. As
for his goodness, I never saw a fault in him.
I do not mean to say that he had no faults, or that
there were no better men, but only to give the witness
of my knowledge concerning him. I claim in no
wise to have been his intimate; such a thing was not
possible in my case for quite apparent reasons; and
I doubt if Longfellow was capable of intimacy in the
sense we mostly attach to the word. Something
more of egotism than I ever found in him must go to
the making of any intimacy which did not come from
the tenderest affections of his heart. But as
a man shows himself to those often with him, and in
his noted relations with other men, he showed himself
without blame. All men that I have known, besides,
have had some foible (it often endeared them the more),
or some meanness, or pettiness, or bitterness; but
Longfellow had none, nor the suggestion of any.
No breath of evil ever touched his name; he went in
and out among his fellow-men without the reproach
that follows wrong; the worst thing I ever heard said
of him was that he had ‘gene’, and this
was said by one of those difficult Cambridge men who
would have found ‘gene’ in a celestial
angel. Something that Bjornstjerne Bjornson wrote
to me when he was leaving America after a winter in
Cambridge, comes nearer suggesting Longfellow than
all my talk. The Norsemen, in the days of their
stormy and reluctant conversion, used always to speak
of Christ as the White Christ, and Bjornson said in
his letter, “Give my love to the White Mr. Longfellow.”
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