icidal intent,
and Longfellow went off at once to protest against the barbarity, not
at all indignant at the personal danger, if he thought of any.

His adoration of his wife was fully justified, for rarely have I seen
a woman in whom a Juno-like dignity and serenity were so wedded to
personal beauty and to the fine culture of brain and heart, which
commanded reverence from the most ordinary acquaintance, as in her. No
one who had seen her at home could ever forget the splendid vision,
and the last time I ever saw her, so far as I remember, was in summer
time, when she and her two daughters, all in white muslin, like
creatures of another world, evanescent, translucent, stood in the
doorway to say good-by to me. In the same costume, a little later, she
met death. She was making impressions in sealing-wax, to amuse her
daughters, when a flaming drop fell on the inflammable stuff, and in
an instant she was in flames, burned to death before help could come.
It was then that they found that Longfellow was not the cold man they
had generally believed him. He never recovered from the bereavement,
and shortly after he became a Spiritualist, and, until he in his glad
turn passed the gates of death, he lived in what he knew to be the
light of her presence. And certainly if such a thing as communion
across that grim threshold can be, this was the occasion which made it
possible. There was something angelic about them both, even in this
life,--a natural innocence and large beneficence and equanimity which,
in the chance and contradiction of life, could rarely be found in
wedded state.

One of the most notable personages of that little world, whom I knew
in connection with Longfellow, was his brother-in-law,--Thomas G.
Appleton,--a most distinguished amateur of art; a subtle, if sometimes
vagarious, critic, poet, and thinker: the wit to whom most of the
clever things said in Boston came naturally in time to be attributed.
The famous saying that "Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris,"
is generally supposed to be his, though Oliver Wendell Holmes told me
one day that he himself was really the author of it; but, if a keen
witticism was floating about fatherless in the Boston circles it
drifted to Tom Appleton as putative parent. His, too, was a kindly
nature, and many a rising artist found his way to a larger recognition
by Appleton's unobtrusive aid. He, like Longfellow, was a sincere
Spiritualist. One of the most remarkable o