Longfellow in Love by Cifelli Edward M

Author:Cifelli, Edward M.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc.
Published: 2018-08-08T16:00:00+00:00

She took a deep breath, suddenly realized how negative her letter had been, and shifted her ground. She thanked God that since the wedding her “feelings have attained a less selfish character. Now that it is over, I actually feel relieved, and live only in the consciousness of their supreme happiness.” But the words had hardly reached the page when she wailed out a final lament: “Yesterday-week she was made a bride, and the joy- and sorrow-fraught name of Mary Appleton ceased to be known on earth!”52

As to the wedding itself, Fanny told Lieber, it had been a quiet affair at home without “smirking brides-maids and men,” presided over by William Ellery Channing himself. Breaking down again, Fanny said that Channing’s “solemn prayers were echoed by more aching hearts and streaming eyes than often hallow this most awful ceremony.” Then she dropped into a description of Mary as bride. She wore a simple white muslin dress, without flowers in her hair, but holding a bouquet “next her heart.” Fanny added that her sister’s face was “radiant with a deep joy and trust which God grant may be eternal.” Afterward, “there was the usual cutting up of cake and spasmodic attempts at hilarity” before the now-married couple went to Lexington for their wedding night.

The whole affair had left poor Fanny reeling. “Even yet, at times,” she continued in her letter to Lieber, “I think it all a dream on which some gracious dawn will arise.” And then, with renewed determination, she returned once again to Robert Mackintosh in order to put him in a better light. She said she’d become “warmly attached” to him, that he had a “genuine, upright, manly character” and “a true, noble heart.” At that point she seems to have been reduced to the platitudes expected of her. Or maybe she was pretending admiration that she hoped would develop into truth in the future. As far as her own future was concerned, she told Lieber, she’d reached a “dead blank” and she thought as little as possible about it. “Life’s kaleidoscope,” she said, was full of “strange shiftings,” so it was impossible to know “what a year may bring forth.”53

The kaleidoscope had already turned up one other strange shifting that fateful summer when Robert Mackintosh had shown up and caused such a stir in her life—and that would be her own unexpected appearance in Professor Henry Longfellow’s new book, Hyperion. A copy reached Fanny in Stockbridge in early August, sent by Longfellow himself and delivered by cousin Isaac Appleton Jewett, who had been spending time with the girls in the Berkshires before taking a trip to New York where he had happened to meet Longfellow, who was seeing Hyperion through the final days of pre-publication in late July and early August. He had picked up a few copies prior to its official release and given one to Jewett for Fanny, who wasn’t sure what to make of it at first.

A few days later, Fanny wrote to her

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