and wounded heart is hard to
be persuaded. We do not wish to have our sorrow lessened. There are
wounds, which are never entirely healed. A thousand associations
call up the past, with all its gloom and shadow. Often a mere look
or sound--a voice--the odor of a flower--the merest trifle is enough
to awaken within me deep and unutterable emotions. Hardly a day
passes, that some face, or familiar object, or some passage in the
book I am reading does not call up the image of my beloved wife so
vividly, that I pause and burst into tears,--and sometimes cannot
rally again for hours.

And yet, my dear Eliza, in a few days, and we shall all be gone, and
others sorrowing and rejoicing as we now do, will have taken our
places: and we shall say, how childish it was for us to mourn for
things so transitory. There may be some consolation in this; but we
are nevertheless children. Our feelings overcome us.

Farewell. Give my kind regards to all, and believe me most truly and
affectionately, your friend,

HENRY W. LONGFELLOW.{36}

{34 _Christian Examiner_, July, 1839, xxvi. 363-367.}

{35 _Life_, i. 259.}

{36 MS. letter.}

CHAPTER X

CRAIGIE HOUSE

In entering on the duties of his Harvard professorship (December, 1836)
Longfellow took rooms at the Craigie House in Cambridge. This house, so
long his residence, has been claimed as having more historic interest
than any house in New England, both from the fact of his ownership and
of its having been the headquarters of General Washington during the
siege of Boston. It has even been called from these two circumstances
the best known residence in the United States, with the exception of Mt.
Vernon, with which it has some analogy both in position and in aspect.
It overlooks the Charles River as the other overlooks the Potomac,
though the latter view is of course far more imposing, and the Craigie
House wants the picturesque semicircle of outbuildings so characteristic
of Mt. Vernon, while it is far finer in respect to rooms, especially in
the upper stories. It was built, in all probability, in 1759 by Colonel
John Vassall, whose family owned the still older house across the way
now called the Batchelder House; and there is a tradition of a
subterranean passage between the two houses, although this has hitherto
been sought in vain. Both these dwellings belong