Maine History Online

Hearing the news, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Longfellow's colleague and friend, wrote to the Boston publisher James Fields, "How does Longfellow bear this terrible misfortune? I cannot reconcile this calamity to my sense of fitness.

"One would think that there ought to have been no deep sorrow in the life of a man like him.... I shall be afraid ever to meet him again; he cannot again be the man I have known."

Longfellow himself wrote, "[I] thank God hourly ... for the beautiful life we led together."