The Dante Club

Longfellow had been at his standing desk in the study, throwing some black sand on a newly inked poem to blot it. Fa

With the fire out, he carried the trembling body upstairs to the bedroom. Later that night, the doctors put her to rest with ether, in the morning, assuring Longfellow in a bold whisper that she could feel very little pain, she took some coffee and then drifted into a coma. The funeral service in the Craigie House library fell on their eighteenth wedding a

The poet was confined to his bed that day by his own burns, but he could hear the unrestrained weeping of his friends, women and men, down in the parlor, weeping for him, he knew, as well as for Fa

Longfellow, recuperating in his bedchamber, raised his bandaged hands upward. For nearly a week, the children could hear delirious words float into the hall whenever they passed by. Little A

“Why could I not save her? Why could I not save her?”

After Fa

Soon Longfellow found reinforcements around his table: first Lowell, then Holmes, Fields, and Greene. Longfellow often said they had formed the Dante Club to amuse themselves during bleak New England winters. This was the diffident way he expressed its importance to him. The attention to defects and deficiencies was sometimes not the most agreeable interaction for Longfellow, but when critiques were harsh, the supper afterward made amends.

Resuming his editing of these latest Inferno cantos, Longfellow heard a hollow thud come from outside Craigie House. Trap let out a sharp bark.

“Master Trap? What is it, old fellow?”

But Trap, finding no source for the disturbance, yawned and burrowed back into the warm straw lining of his champagne basket. Longfellow peered outside his unlit dining room but saw nothing. Then a pair of eyes jumped out from the darkness, followed by what seemed a blinding flash of light. Longfellow’s heart leapt, not so much at the sight of a face appearing but at the sight of the face, if that is what it was, suddenly vanishing after locking eyes with him, the glass misting under Longfellow’s gasp. Longfellow stumbled backward, knocking into a cabinet and sending headlong onto the floor an entire set of Appleton family dishes (a wedding gift, as was Craigie House itself, from Fa

Trap pounced and yapped with his entire diminutive might. Longfellow escaped from the dining room to the parlor, and then to the lazy wood fire of the library, where he examined the windows for any further sign of the eyes. He was hoping Jamey Lowell or Wendell Holmes would appear at the door and apologize for the unintended fright and the late hour. But as Longfellow’s writing hand trembled, all he could discern out his window was blackness.

As Longfellow’s scream rang down Brattle Street, James Russell Lowell’s ears were half submerged in his tub. He was listening to the hollow skip of the water, letting his eyelids droop shut, wondering where life had gone. The small window overhead was propped open and the night was cool. If Fa

Lowell had risen to fame when most of the celebrated poets were significantly older than he, including Longfellow and Holmes, who were both around ten years his senior. He had grown so content with the title Young Poet that it had seemed at forty-eight he had done something wrong to lose it.

He puffed indifferently on his fourth cigar of the day, carelessly letting the ashes defile his water. He could recall times only a few years earlier when the tub had seemed much roomier for his body. He wondered at the spare razor blades, now missing, that he had hidden years earlier on the shelf above. Had Fa

When Maria White Lowell died, her husband of nine years felt old for the first time, felt as if he suddenly had a past, something alien to his present life, from which he was now exiled. Lowell consulted Dr. Holmes in a professional capacity about his dark emotions. Holmes recommended punctual retirement by ten-thirty at night and cold water rather than coffee in the morning. It was for the best, Lowell now thought, that Wendell had turned in the stethoscope for the professor’s lectern; he did not have the patience to see suffering through to the end.

Fa

Besides Mabel, Lowell had fathered three children with Maria, the healthiest of whom lived two years. The death of this last child, Walter, preceded Maria’s by a year. Fa

When she was young, Lowell thought it would be enough to hope Mabel would be a great, strong, vulgar, mud pudding-baking, tree-climbing little wench. He taught her to swim, to skate, and to walk twenty miles a day, as he could.