seemed to me a work of not less graceful art than Longfellow's
translation of the 'Commedia'. In fact, it joins the effect of a
sympathy almost mounting to divination with a patient scholarship and a
delicate skill unknown to me elsewhere in such work. I do not know
whether Mr. Norton has satisfied himself better in his prose version of
the 'Commedia' than in this of the 'Vita Nuova', but I do not believe he
could have satisfied Dante better, unless he had rhymed his sonnets and
canzonets. I am sure he might have done this if he had chosen. He has
always pretended that it was impossible, but miracles are never
impossible in the right hands.

V.

After three or four years we sold the carpenter's box on Sacramento
Street, and removed to a larger house near Harvard Square, and in the
immediate neighborhood of Longfellow. He gave me an easement across that
old garden behind his house, through an opening in the high board fence
which enclosed it, and I saw him oftener than ever, though the meetings
of the Dante Club had come to an end. At the last of them, Lowell had
asked him, with fond regret in his jest, "Longfellow, why don't you do
that Indian poem in forty thousand verses?" The demand but feebly
expressed the reluctance in us all, though I suspect the Indian poem
existed only by the challenger's invention. Before I leave my faint and
unworthy record of these great times I am tempted to mention an incident
poignant with tragical associations. The first night after Christmas the
holly and the pine wreathed about the chandelier above the supper-table
took fire from the gas, just as we came out from the reading, and
Longfellow ran forward and caught the burning garlands down and bore them
out. No one could speak for thinking what he must be thinking of when
the ineffable calamity of his home befell it. Curtis once told me that a
little while before Mrs. Longfellow's death he was driving by Craigie
House with Holmes, who said be trembled to look at it, for those who
lived there had their happiness so perfect that no change, of all the
changes which must come to them, could fail to be for the worse. I did
not know Longfellow before that fatal time, and I shall not say that his
presence bore record of it except in my fancy. He may always have had
that look of one who had experienced the utmost harm that fate can do,
and henceforth could possess himself of what was left of life in peace.
He could never have been a man