LONGFELLOW, Henry Wadsworth.
Autograph letter, signed ‘Henry W. Longfellow’, to ‘Lady Emily’.
Ouchy, 16 September 1868.
8vo bifolium (180 x 113 mm), pp. [4]; lightly soiled and stained, ‘MS[?] Longfellow Sept. 16/68’ added in ink at head of first page in a different hand, but in very good condition.
Addressed to ‘Lady Emily’, Longfellow here expresses his regret at not being able to see her at Sécheron while he was staying at Geneva, and apologises also for not being able to return to Geneva ‘to accept your hospitable invitation. We go tomorrow to Yverdon, and thence through Neuchâtel, and Dijon to Paris’. Nevertheless, Longfellow feels ‘confident, that I shall have the pleasure of seeing you once more before leaving Europe; and so I will not take leave of you’. He ends by asking Lady Emily to present his compliments to the ‘Baroness de Rothschild’ (i.e. Charlotte, Baroness Nathaniel de Rothschild, 1825–1899).
‘Longfellow [1807–1882] was enormously popular, especially during his later years; at the end of his life, his birthday was even being celebrated in schools. He was as beloved in England as in America; people from everywhere came to see him, and his last trip to Europe in 1868–1869 was virtually a triumphant processional. Queen Victoria received him in a private audience, and both Oxford and Cambridge gave him honorary degrees. He was the first front-ranking New England poet of his time to die, and his death in Cambridge, closely followed by that of Ralph Waldo Emerson for many marked the end of an era’ (American National Biography).
‘Lady Emily’ is doubtless Lady Emily Peel (1836–1924), seventh daughter of the eighth marquess of Tweeddale. Lady Emily Hay, as she then was, married the politician Sir Robert Peel, third baronet, on 13 January 1856, but she left her husband and went to live in Geneva (she later moved to Florence). Four letters from Lady Emily Peel to Longfellow, 1868–1873, are preserved in the Houghton Library at Harvard (bMS Am 1340.2).
Not in Hilen, ed., The letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, which nevertheless records that Longfellow dined with Sir Robert Peel’s brother Frederick Peel (1823–1906) at Cambridge, Mass., on 16 June 1848 (vol. III p. 176 n. 1).
