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| Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had a place alongside Tennyson and Dickens as the literary voice of the 19th century. Longfellow retired from a professorship at Harvard to devote himself to poetry and to his family. The death of his wife Fanny in a fire marked a personal and professional turning point, and his secluded life and grave leonine beard in the decades following defined his legacy for posterity. In Longfellow’s later years, a caller who had come to see Longfellow’s house in Cambridge was irritated by the poet answering the door, informing him that Longfellow had died two years earlier. |