LAST OF THE LONGFELLOWS
By S. K. RATCLIFFE THE last surviving daughter of the most popular poet who ever wrote in English; has just died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the age of 78. Annie Allegra Longfellow (Mrs. J. G. Thorp) was the- youngest of the three sisters known by name through a verse of their father's to an innumerable company of readers :
" Grave Alice and laughing Allegra,
And Edith with golden hair."
The tragic death of his wife, by burning in 1861, left Longfellow with five young children. He sent his daughers to Italy, and two of them, Alice and Allegra, went to Newnham College—a real adventure for any Boston girls more than fifty years ago. , Matthew Arnold in his letters refers to their suffering from the savage discomforts of the English winter.
There was nothing particularly grave about Alice Longfellow as her friends knew her in later= years. She lived unmarried into a vigorous and public-spirited old age, dying in 1928. Her sister Edith had married Richard H. Dana, son of the roving author of Two Years Before The Mast, and she was the first to go. The husband of the third sister was Mr. J. G. Thorp, a leading lawyer of Boston, and as his. friends would usually mention, one of the earliest golf-players in that city. He and his wife were insatiable lovers of baseball. So long as they both lived they were never known to miss a Harvard game. Mr. Thorp's sister Sara, not the least remarkable member of the group, became the young wife of Ole Bull, the Norwegian violinist.
Miss Longfellow inherited Craigie House, the poet's home, an admirable specimen of Colonial building, in wood coloured yellow. It stands on Brattle Street, the long, picturesque, agreeable thoroughfare of Cam- bridge, which is enveloped from end to end in literary and academic memories of Boston and Harvard. The house was named after an officer of Washington's army, and was for a time the General's headquarters in the war of the Revolution. Longfellow bought it in 1843, by which time his verse had already won the plaudits of a. large public, soon to become as the sands of the shore for multitude. His son, who bequeathed it to Miss Longfellow, had willed that Craigie House should be kept as a national memorial of their father, as well as a typical Colonial mansion, and had provided for the future in an unusual fashion, making an ample trust fund for its maintenance, with a descendant of the poet, if possible, in perpetual occupation. It is a roomy and very irregular house, the walls covered with book- cases, pictures, and engravings, and the library preserved as it was in the poet's time. For more than thirty years Longfellow enjoyed an extraordinary renown. His melody and sentiment went to the heart of the million. He was beset by admirers and snowed under by corre- spondence. As they say in New England, his latchkey was always out ; he was accessible to all corners. Miss Longfellow kept up the habit of welcome, naturally with discrimination, for the place was her home as well as . a national shrine. She had plenty of interests .of her own, a special concern in later life being the society of American women which undertook the endowment and care of Mount Vernon, George Washington's home in Virginia.
Craigie House is the middle one of the three spacious houses on Brattle Street, belonging to the Longfellows, Danas, and Thorps. The second Richard H. Dana, who died last year, continued to the end of his life the pleasant practice of recording in a family chronicle every- thing of interest that happened to himself, and circu- lating it among his children. His surviving son, Pro- fessor H. W. L. Dana, the present occupant of Craigie House under the trust, may be called the rogue elephant of the clan. Radical and Socialist conferences know him well, both in Europe and in America. He acted as interpreter for M. Henri Barbusse on his recent visit to the United States. He is the leading American authority on the Russian drama.
The death of Mrs. Thorp will mean to a host of friends on both sides of the Atlantic the break-up of a traditional circle, the end of a long chapter. The triple household in Cambridge was a delightful centre of culture and amity. It is now a memory of the America that has almost faded away.
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