All houses wherein men have lived and died/Are haunted houses/Through the open doors/The harmless phantoms on their errands glide/With feet that make no sound upon the floors

There are more guests at the table than the hosts invited. Friends and family are gathered and the chatter this evening is about the Civil War..., the only war fought on American soil by Americans. The host, a professor of Linguistics at Harvard has just published The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, asking Americans to fight the war with courage. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is America’s first professional poet; having introduced comparative literature of other countries to his students, he is shaping the beginnings of a new United States.

The professor loves books dearly as he loves entertaining men of letters. Even the elegant dining room with dark walnut carved furniture has two bookcases lined with Longfellow’s favourite authors — Shakespeare and Goethe. Dazzling charm is the giant chandelier supporting delicate glass chimneys which cast a multicoloured arc of rainbow dust. Fanny, his wife of 18 years is ministering to their five children, weaving in and out of guests. On the wall in the middle, hangs a portrait of hers painted when she was 18. She’s a handsome woman.

A rebel with a cause — Fanny is the first in America to use ether in childbirth, happily inviting the clergy to curse and Henry to marvel at her recusancy. She’s bold, he says in admiration of his wife.

Returning the compliment, Fanny writes: “I specially love to have his beautiful spirit occupied in subjects which must better humanity and freshen men’s memories ... which are so mildewed by prejudice and the bad customs of nations ... I long to have him always inspired by the responsibility of his holy mission — of poet.”

Time waltzes on, in the same dining room, Fanny is sitting one day, filling an envelope with her children’s locks she must secure with wax. Outside the windows birds are at play. Her eyes for a second rest on the seductive roses pressing against the panes demanding to be let in. She smiles, unwary of the fire about to swallow her. The candle that served to seal the envelope suddenly turns on her. Screaming with flames gathering heat, she runs to the study where her husband is writing a poem. Longfellow folds her in a carpet and swiftly carries her charred frame upstairs to their bedroom. His hands are burnt fighting the fire.

The next morning Fanny dies, leaving forever a man who once wrote of his wife: “She never came into a room where I was without my heart beating quicker, nor went out without my feeling that something of the light went with her. I loved her so entirely.”

The year is 1861. And the mansion, with its mistress gone, is never the same again. Longfellow mourns deeply. His beard grows bushy accumulating inches on its descent. Unable to shave, the hands like his heart, take long to heal. Shutting himself in the study, for two years he never once picks up his pen to write.

Meanwhile, the seasons swirl around the home where laughter hung out once. Fanny’s garden blooms again ... honeysuckle hangs its heavy scent sending stealthy whiffs inside the sad rooms ... to freshen the spirit of the man bereaved.

Longfellow’s loneliness stays. He finds company in his children and Dante’s Divine Comedy; never remarrying. Chimes from the old clock on the stairs pelt his privacy as do his children: a sudden rush from the stairway/a sudden raid from the hall/by three doors left unguarded/they enter my castle wall.

In time, he gently opens the door to let in the American literary renaissance and its proponents. Nathanial Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson are welcomed back and sit at the carved black mahogany table with a floral lamp with hues of colour talking literature. The floor to ceiling book cases lend them their learned company.

There are in all 10,000 books confined behind glass book cases sitting solemn in all corners of the house. Objects of beauty that his family picks up during their many travels abroad are everywhere: the big Japanese screen in their bedroom; oil paintings and watercolours from Italy in the salon and sculptures of himself and Fanny pedestalled in various family rooms.

‘A house can hold a world,’ indeed.

On a wintry morning, when the trees shed their leaves, and the sky turned crystal, solitary he stood at the French window that opened before him the Charles River glide in silence along the city of Cambridge where he dwelt. Boston lay farther in the distance.

Turning to look at their bed where his beloved Fanny died, his feelings, iron cast and locked within, unfixed and snapped free. Longfellow let the grief flow like a stream of tears that cried out to be heard:

In the long sleepless watches of the night/A gentle face — the face of one long dead/Looks at me from the wall, where round its head/The night lamp casts a halo of pale light/Here in this room she died; and soul more white/Never through martyrdom of fire was led/To its repose; nor can in books be read/The legend of a life more benedict/There is a mountain in the distant West/That sun-defying, in its deep ravines/Displays a cross of snow upon its sides/Such is the cross I wear upon my breast/These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes/And seasons, changeless since the day she died.

When the Civil War ends in 1865, the poet is 58. The house that Fanny brought in her trousseau is a house with a history. Sixty-six years before Longfellow family made it their home, it was the headquarters of General Washington, who planned the siege of Boston at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War.

Martha, who later became the first lady, lived in the private family rooms upstairs with her husband George Washington, the C-in-C of the newly formed continental army. Fanny Longfellow never changed the room that came to be known as “Lady Washington’s drawing room” because it was here that George and Martha celebrated their 17th wedding anniversary. Each year on Twelfth Night ghosts of the first couple haunt the house where they once lived.

Charles Dickens came calling and stayed on for breakfast. While Lincoln, the president, didn’t come here, his spirit must hang around Henry Longfellow’s house for he admired him tremendously.

“Longfellow’s work,” wrote Walt Whitman, when he heard of his death “brings nothing offensive or new, does not deal hard blows ... he comes as the poet of melancholy, courtesy, deference — poet of all sympathetic gentleness — and universal poet of women and young people. I should have to think long if I were asked to name the man who has done more and in more valuable directions, for America.” A month after his 75th birthday, when the honeysuckle was heavy with scent and the birds were singing the Psalm of Life,

Longfellow’s journey came to an end — he died in the same bed his Fanny had left 21 years before.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow/Is our destined end or way/But to act, that each tomorrow/Find us farther than today/In the world’s broad field of battle/In the bivouac of life/Be not like dumb, driven cattle/Be a hero in the strife.

Stepping out on the pavement laid in blocks of vintage slate after a tour of Longfellow’s home, I walk back 45 years to the day when our literature teacher in Lahore first read out loud: “Life is real. Life is earnest. And the grave is not its goal; dust thou art, to dust returnest, was not spoken of the soul.” His words always stirred something beautiful within as my years turned to decades; but today was an epiphany — how else to put it?