n old colonial mansion, shaded by
trees, which Washington had used for his headquarters in 1775-1776. He
married a most beautiful and accomplished lady, a daughter of Hon.
Nathan Appleton, of Boston, whom he had met abroad, and who is
supposed to be described in his romance "Hyperion." Here, happy in his
domestic life, surrounded by the most scholarly men of America, his
literary life ripened, his fame as a poet grew, and his sympathy with
life as expressed in his works won all hearts. His "Voices of the
Night" made him the poet of the home; "Evangeline," which is the
American book of Ruth, made him the singer of the fidelity of holy
affections, and "Hiawatha," the voice of the dying traditions of the
Indian race.

He was a lover of his family, and a great affliction came to him in
the summer of 1861. One July day his wife was playing with some
sealing-wax with her children, when her dress caught fire, and she was
enveloped in the flames, and burned to death. The poet is said to have
suddenly changed from a young man to an old man under his weight of
grief; he appeared in the streets of Cambridge again, in a few weeks,
but unlike his former self. His affection for his dead wife in his
widowerhood is expressed in the "Cross of Snow," written many years
after her death:

"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 benedight.
There is a mountain in the distant West
That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
Displays a cross of snow upon its side.
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."

He would take a dear friend into the room where her portrait hung,
point to it, and say "my dear wife," and turn away to weep. His loving
dream of his first wife is pictured in "The Footsteps of Angels:"

"And with them the Being Beauteous,
Who unto my youth was given,
More than all things else to love me,
And is now a saint in heaven.

"With a slow and noiseless footstep
Comes that messenger divine,
Takes the vacant chair beside me,
Lays her gentle