"Once we were happy, now I am forlorn;
Fortune has darkened, and happiness gone."

Lowell's poetic marriage did not last quite ten years. Maria White was
always frail and delicate, and she became more so continually.
Longfellow's clear foresight noticed the danger she was in years before
her death, which took place in the autumn of 1853. She left one child,
Mabel Lowell, slender and pale like herself, and with poetical lines in
her face, too, but fortunately endowed with her father's good
constitution. Only ten years! But such ten years, worth ten centuries of
the life of a girl of fashion, who thinks she is happy because she has
everything she wants. If the truth were known we might find that in the
twilight of his life Lowell thought more of these ten years with Maria
White than of the six years when he was Ambassador to England,--with
twenty-nine dinner-parties in the month of June.

What would poets do without war? The Trojan war, or some similar
conflict, served as the ground-work of Homer's mighty epic; Virgil
followed in similar lines; Dante would never have been famous but for the
Guelph and Ghibeline struggle. Shakespeare's plays are full of war and
fighting; and the wars of Napoleon stimulated Byron, Schiller, and Goethe
to the best efforts of their lives. In dealing with men like Emerson,
Longfellow, and Lowell, who were the intellectual leaders of their time,
it is impossible to escape their influence in the anti-slavery movement,
and its influence upon them, unpopular as that subject is at present.
That was the heroic age of American history, and the truth concerning it
has not yet been written. It was as heroic to the South as to the North,
for, as Sumner said, the slaveholders would never have made their
desperate attack on the Government of this country if they had not been
themselves the slaves of their own social organization.