I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day

Like many great artists, American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow experienced a lot of tragedy in his life. At the age of fifty seven (1863) he wrote to a friend, “I have been through a great deal of trouble and anxiety.”

Indeed he had. His first wife died in 1835 from complications from a miscarriage:

28-year-old Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was devastated by the death of his beloved young wife, Mary. The couple had been traveling in Europe as the poet prepared to begin teaching literature at Harvard.

The distraught Longfellow gave vent to his grief, resolving to dedicate himself to a life of "goodness and purity like hers." He vowed to abandon "literary ambition . . . this destroyer of peace and quietude and the soul's self-possession," but by the time he returned to Cambridge in 1836, he had begun writing again and eventually remarried.

Suffering from grief, Longfellow plunged into study and spent the following winter and spring in Heidelberg perfecting his German.

Henry met Fanny Appleton eight months after Mary died, while summering in Switzerland. Fanny captivated Longfellow, but she did not show the same interest in him.

Longfellow proposed marriage in 1837 but Fanny refused him.

The young professor left soon after for America and his duties at Harvard. Longfellow persuaded Elizabeth Craigie to accept him as a boarder at her home overlooking the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His first writings were published during these years.

Resuming his friendship with Fanny Appleton, Longfellow was crushed by her rejection of his marriage proposal in 1837, but he was determined to win Fanny’s heart.

In July 1839, he wrote to a friend: “[V]ictory hangs doubtful. The lady says she will not! I say she shall! It is not pride, but the madness of passion”. His friend George Stillman Hillard encouraged Longfellow in the pursuit: “I delight to see you keeping up so stout a heart for the resolve to conquer is half the battle in love as well as war.”

After seven years of courtship, Fanny married Longfellow on July 13, 1843. Her father purchased the Craigie House later that year, and presented it and the surrounding grounds to the Longfellows as a wedding gift.

Well-educated, Fanny was a perceptive critic of art and literature who happily shared her husband’s pursuits. Henry and Fanny were seldom apart.

The home, well-known even then as George Washington‘s headquarters during the early days of the American Revolution, would be their residence for the rest of their lives. Fanny never changed the room where George and Martha had celebrated their 17th wedding anniversary amid the sorrows and uncertainties of war.

The family home was a favorite gathering place for artists, philosophers, writers and reformers, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Julia Ward Howe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Dickens and Charles Sumner. An active abolitionist, Longfellow contributed money to help freedom-seeking and former slaves and to support the anti-slavery cause.

The Longfellows were blessed with the birth of six children – Charles (1844), Ernest (1845), Fanny (1847, who died in childhood), Alice (1850), Edith (1853) and Allegra (1855). Alice was delivered while her mother was under the anesthetic influence of ether – the first time it was used in North America.

Fanny was a skilled artist, art collector and insightful commentator on 19th-Century Boston literary culture, well-traveled, and well-read in many subjects. She was a loving and attentive mother and had much influence on the intellectual growth of the Longfellow children.

At Craigie House they formed the warm family circle that became a kind of national symbol for domestic love, the innocence of childhood and the pleasure of material comfort.

By 1854 Longfellow was able to resign from Harvard. He had become, at age forty-seven, one of America’s first self-sustaining authors.

For the next seven years, Henry was able to pour his energies into his writing, unimpeded by teaching duties and supported by the love of his family.

But tragedy was to strike again: On July 9, 1862 after trimming some of seven year old Edith’s beautiful curls, Fanny decided to preserve the clippings in an envelope. While she was melting a bar of sealing wax with a candle to seal the keepsake in the envelope, a few drops fell unnoticed in her lap. A breeze came through the window, igniting Fanny’s dress – immediately wrapping her in flames.

In her attempt to protect Edith and Allegra, Fanny ran to Henry’s study in the next room, where Henry frantically attempted to extinguish the flames with a throw rug. Failing to stop the fire with the rug, he tried to smother the flames by throwing his arms around Frances – severely burning his face, arms and hands.

Fanny Longfellow died of her injuries the next morning, July 11, 1861, at the age of 43, and was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge.

Too ill from his burns and grief, Henry did not attend her funeral. His facial scars and the difficulty of shaving caused him to grow the beard that gave him the sage and distinguished look reproduced in so many paintings and photographs.

A month after Fanny’s death, on August 18, 1861, Longfellow wrote about his despair in a letter to his late wife’s sister, Mary Appleton Mackintosh:

"How I am alive after what my eyes have seen, I know not. I am at least patient, if not resigned; and thank God hourly – as I have from the beginning – for the beautiful life we led together, and that I loved her more and more to the end."

Longfellow continued to reside in the house they had shared and served as both father and mother to the children. The first Christmas after Fanny’s death, he wrote, “How inexpressibly sad are all holidays.” The entry for December 25, 1862 reads: “A merry Christmas’ say the children, but that is no more for me.” The Christmas of 1863 was blank in his journal.

His troubles weren't over. Justin Taylor recounts that in March of 1863 his oldest son Charles ran off to join the Union army without his father's permission. In November he suffered a severe shoulder wound – the bullet passing within an inch of his spine.

His father traveled to Washington, D.C., to consult with doctors. Charles' survival was in doubt.

One doctor said the wound could result in paralysis. Another surgical team provided more promising news, saying the young soldier would survive but would require months of healing.

They returned to their home in Cambridge by Christmas 1863. That morning Henry listened to the bells ringing. Taylor writes:

He heard the Christmas bells that December day and the singing of 'peace on earth (Luke 2:14),' but he observed the world of injustice and violence that seemed to mock the truthfulness of this optimistic outlook.

At this moment in which the widower with six children was languishing in the midst of a terrible war and a life of grief and suffering, he found hope in those bells and penned a wonderful poem titled "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day." The poem has been recited and set to music ever since.

It closes with these stanzas (You can read the whole poem here):

And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;
"For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men."

That last stanza should be bring hope to those suffering today in China, Iran, Ukraine, North Korea and everywhere that men of blackened and hate-filled souls are torturing and murdering the weak and the helpless.

Watch and listen: