I make a little haste to
say that in all the meetings of the Club, during a whole winter of
Wednesday evenings, I myself, though I faithfully followed in an Italian
Dante with the rest, ventured upon one suggestion only. This was kindly,
even seriously, considered by the poet, and gently rejected. He could
not do anything otherwise than gently, and I was not suffered to feel
that I had done a presumptuous thing. I can see him now, as he looked up
from the proof-sheets on the round table before him, and over at me,
growing consciously smaller and smaller, like something through a
reversed opera-glass. He had a shaded drop-light in front of him, and in
its glow his beautiful and benignly noble head had a dignity peculiar to
him.
All the portraits of Longfellow are likenesses more or less bad and good,
for there was something as simple in the physiognomy as in the nature of
the man. His head, after he allowed his beard to grow and wore his hair
long in the manner of elderly men, was leonine, but mildly leonine, as
the old painters conceived the lion of St. Mark. Once Sophocles, the
ex-monk of Mount Athos, so long a Greek professor at Harvard, came in for
supper, after the reading was over, and he was leonine too, but of a
fierceness that contrasted finely with Longfellow's mildness. I remember
the poet's asking him something about the punishment of impaling, in
Turkey, and his answering, with an ironical gleam of his fiery eyes,
"Unhappily, it is obsolete.
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