Physically, it was a
carpenter's box, of a sort which is readily imagined by the Anglo-
American genius for ugliness.
Any sort of diversion was hailed, and once Appleton proposed that
Longfellow should show us his wine-cellar. He took up the candle burning
on the table for the cigars, and led the way into the basement of the
beautiful old Colonial mansion, doubly memorable as Washington's
headquarters while he was in Cambridge, and as the home of Longfellow for
so many years. The taper cast just the right gleams on the darkness,
bringing into relief the massive piers of brick, and the solid walls of
stone, which gave the cellar the effect of a casemate in some fortress,
and leaving the corners and distances to a romantic gloom. This basement
was a work of the days when men built more heavily if not more
substantially than now.
The ill-will that seemed nearly always to go with adverse criticism made
him distrust criticism, and the discomfort which mistaken or blundering
praise gives probably made him shy of all criticism.
The memory will not be ruled as to what it shall bind and what it shall
loose.
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