Friends
HWL. Address book, 1873, pages 220-21.
Longfellow Papers MS Am 1340 (34). Houghton Library. |
In Longfellow's address book, unknown fans like Clara Tittmann from Karlsruhe, Germany, find themselves on the same page with the literary superstar Alfred, Lord Tennyson and the popular hack Martin Farquhar Tupper. Oddly, Longfellow used his address book also to record Spanish proverbs he had found in Charles Davillier's L'Espagne (Paris 1874), in this case about Trujillo ("From whatever side you approach Trujillo, / you are forced to traverse a league of rocky terrain") and Toledo ("From Madrid to Toledo, / the distance is a dozen leagues / one smooth journey / if one doesn't count the hills"). "Clara C. Thies" in Dresden is Clara Crowninshield, who had accompanied Longfellow on his 1835/1836 trip to Scandinavia and Germany. She had married the German art collector Louis Thies in 1843 and, in 1866, moved to Dresden, where she died, ninety-seven years old, in 1907. |