The Art Institute 4/3/25, Part One: The Torlonia Collection
Truer words were never spoken….
Yesterday I entered the enclosed room where the marbles are currently displayed. A kindly museum guard opened the door for me. I took a few steps in, then stopped.
This is what I saw:
I just stood there and stared. My eyes filled with tears.
Why did this vision of antiquity move me in this way? Don’t know.
Later, I thought of John Keats:
‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,’
And in closing:
‘Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”‘
From Ode on a Grecian Urn, 1819
I whipped through the collection brandishing my phone, taking pictures one after the other, trying to preserve an experience which of course cannot be preserved but only remembered (as Keats could have told me). I then put my phone away and stood before each of the sculptures and sculpture groups for a while.
There was more- much more.
I had never before heard of the Torlonia marbles until their miraculous appearance at the Art Institute. This is the first time these amazing sculptures have traveled to North America. I feel lucky and blessed to have seen them. For more on this singular collection, click here.
Of course, I bought the book –
Part Two of this post will follow soon.
The Demon of Unrest: : A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War, by Erik Larson
“The Civil War is one hell of a drug.” This is the first sentence of Alexis Coe’s review, in the New York Times, of Erik Larson’s The Demon of Unrest. The review is entitled, “Maybe Erik Larson should have left the Civil War Alone.”
I agree with Coe’s opener. Many of us have encountered, at one time or another, someone who is obsessed for one reason or another with that terrible conflict. But I don’t agree with the review’s title, nor with the disparaging tone of the review itself.
The books I’ve read on this subject have tended to be more about Lincoln and the turbulent politics of that time than about the war itself (although I did find a book about the battle of Fredericksburg, A Worse Place Than Hell, fascinating).
Larson’s book is mainly about what actually happened at Fort Sumter in April of 1861. Before he gets to the meat of this story, however, he takes the time to paint a vivid picture of the social life that prevailed in the antebellum South. The planter class dominated this society. With their high-flown notions of honor and their smug self-righteousness, this group of people comes across as uniquely repugnant – or so they seemed to me. They loathed and vilified Northern folk, whose hatred of slavery impugned their belief in their own rectitude. I confess I felt so enraged by their conduct and their inflammatory and perverse assertions that I had to take a break from reading about them for a little while.
But when the story of Fort Sumter takes over the narrative, the book becomes intensely gripping. The fort took a terrible pounding from the forces of the Confederacy arrayed in various locations at Charleston Harbor. These forces seemed to have an endless supply of powerful weaponry.
Eventually, the soldiers at the Fort were forced to surrender, but not before putting up an incredibly valiant fight. In this effort they were led by Major Robert Anderson of the U.S, Army. Major Anderson emerges as the undisputed hero of this story, although he would have been the last person to describe himself in those terms.
These are the words with which Thomas Jefferson praised Meriwether Lewis four years after his death:
“Of courage undaunted, possessing a firmness & perseverance of purpose which nothing but impossibilities could divert from its direction, careful as a father of those committed to his charge, yet steady in the maintenance of order & discipline….”
These words could equally apply to Major Anderson, who was eventually elevated to Brigadier General rank. More people need to know about this individual. His courage and gallantry were nothing short of amazing.
I found The Demon of Unrest hard to put down. Erik Larson is a terrific storyteller, as previous titles such as Isaac’s Storm and The Devil in the White City will attest. In his acknowledgements, Larson mentions two titles which I would also like to recommend: Lincoln on the Verge by Ted Widmer and Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin.
And if you haven’t read Undaunted Courage, Stephen Ambrose’s sweeping narrative of the Lewis and Clark expedition, I recommend that as well.
Let’s Hear It for the Zaporozhian Cossacks (and their latter day embodiment)!
Recently, the artist Emeric Lhiusset was inspired to recreate, by means of a photograph, a painting by Ilya Repin using present day Ukrainian soldiers as stand-ins for the Zaporoshian Cossacks so memorably immortalized by Repin.
‘From Far Away, I Hear the Cossacks Reply’ – photograph by Emeric Lhiusset
This news item, as reported in The Business Insider, caught my attention for two reasons. First, my paternal grandparents emigrated to the U.S. from Ukraine; thus, I feel an attachment to – and concern for – that currently beleaguered country.
Second, I wrote a post on this blog on a similar subject several years ago. In that post, I described the Ukrainian soldiers as “Russian-backed.” Considering the conflict now taking place , I was disconcerted to see my use of that term. The post in question dates from February of 2015. Could this be in reference to the so-called Maidan revolution?
I regret my lack of knowledge of foreign affairs in general, and of this situation in particular. I would welcome any enlightening information from any informed individual who reads this.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has recently altered Ilya Repin’s designated nationality from Russian to Ukrainian. Sergei Prokofiev, composer of the achingly beautiful music I incorporated in the older post, is likewise of Ukrainian birth.
Emeric Lhiusset offers the following commentary:
“This painting, so important in the Ukrainian national narrative, is in the collection of the State Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg,” he adds. “Culture is a weapon in a vast battlefield, let’s not try to forget it.”
For that last observation, so full of wisdom, we can only be grateful.
Who Killed Jane Stanford? by Richard White
Who even knew this was an issue? The main reason so few people knew is that from the moment of her demise in Hawaii in 1905, those who were associated with Jane Stanford fought desperately and cunningly to have her death ruled as natural. This included her family, her friends, her servants, and others who were part of her circle at the fledgling university founded by her late husband and herself.
They each had their reasons.
The Stanfords had one child, Leland Stanford Junior, born in 1868 when Jane was 39 years old. While they were vacationing in Florence, Italy, Leland Junior died of typhoid fever. He was fifteen years old.
His parents were devastated. Their grief gave rise to a desire to memorialize their deceased son in a way that would be meaningful and enduring. Leland Stanford Junior University opened on October 1, 1891.
Leland Stanford’s enormous wealth derived from his initial investment in the Central Pacific Railroad, followed by his acquisition of the Southern Pacific Railroad. There’s more – Stanford’s rise to power and fortune is a complex story. When he died in 1893 at the age of 69, he left an extremely well-off widow. This book is her story.
Actually, it’s the story of the last years of her life, those that culminated in the act that caused her death. Jane Stanford was poisoned. The attempt was made twice. The first time, in California, it failed. The second time, in Hawaii, it succeeded. Both times the agent used was strychnine.
For me, the most interesting aspect of this book was the story it told of the early days of Stanford University. It was a surprisingly rocky beginning. Jane Stanford’s domineering presence on the scene was not helpful. Somehow, from the turmoil of a constant power struggle, Stanford ultimately emerged as a world class institution of higher learning.
Not long after Jane’s death, William James arrived at the university. His brief while there was to teach a course in philosophy to a group of relatively clueless undergraduates. “James was attracted to Stanford University by an easterner’s fascination with California, but mostly he came for the money.” He had some things in common with Jane Stanford: he too had lost a child, and he was also drawn to the practice of spiritualism. But James was possessed of a towering intellect which Jane, for all her affluence, could not even approach.
As for Jane Stanford herself, she is not an especially sympathetic person. Her obsession with the memory of her husband and even more powerfully with that of her son should have made her more so, and yet, for this reader at least, by and large they did not. She adhered to a confused mixture of fervent Christianity and spiritualism in a desperate attempt to obtain solace for her profound losses. And her interference with the running of the university was frequent and unhelpful.
At times, White’s narrative drags. The reporting on the wrangling among Jane Stanford’s servants and among various luminaries in the university’s administration at times seemed positively granular. Admittedly, true crime maven that I am, I was chomping at the bit as I awaited the climactic story of the murder of Jane Stanford. But somehow, when it finally came,it seemed a bit of an anticlimax. But…the description of death by strychnine poisoning is harrowing. In her last moments, Jane cried out that “This a horrible death to die.” Events bear out her final cry of agony.
No one deserves to die in so terrible a manner. And yet, despite all the evidence to the contrary, Jane Stanford’s demise was judged to be by natural causes. The title of this book tells you right away that the author Richard White does not accept this ruling. In fact, in the epilogue – entitled “Who Killed Her?” – he offers a solution to the mystery. I won’t reveal the name here, but I will say that, given all that went on before the event, it was not at all surprising.
The Taking of Jemima Boone: Colonial Settlers, Tribal Nations, and the Kidnap That Shaped America, by Matthew Pearl
The title pretty much sums it up. It was summer, 1776. The kidnap victim was thirteen-year-old Jemima Boone. She was taken, along with two other girls, by a Cherokee-Shawnee raiding party. The girls had gone off for a canoe trip on the Kentucky River. Understandably given their age, they were tired of being hemmed in by the walls of Boonesboro, the settlement in which they lived. As often happens in these instances, they got more than they bargained for.
Boonesboro was founded by Jemima’s father Daniel. He was determined to create a settlement in Kentucky, despite advice to the contrary from just about everyone. In particular, the Native American tribes of the region depended on Kentucky to furnish them with game, crops, and other necessities. It was fertile, bountiful, and beautiful country.
Daniel Boone and other men of the settlement rescued Jemima and her fellow captives in fairly short order. But that was just the beginning….
Concerning this book, the descriptor that keeps recurring to me is rip-roaring. Yes – nonstop, rip-roaring adventure! Colonials versus Natives, Colonials battling each other, Natives doing much the same. Never a dull moment. And no one has a monopoly on goodness – at least, not when slavery is involved. And in this mass of confused and shifting loyalties and almost relentless fighting – it is, after all, the year 1776 – slavery is most definitely involved.
The manner in which Boonesboro settlers pushed against external controls reflected the new nation’s larger search for freedom. Independence was a complex political process, but freedom was visceral, a state of mind. Moral costs included consistent reliance on slave labor and trampling the tribes’ longstanding access to Kentucky’s natural resources.
Still, the repeated displays of raw courage on all sides are astonishing. In this remote corner of the land, a nation was struggling to be born. It is an exciting and illuminating, if, at times, depressing story.
And Matthew Pearl is the right one to tell it. The narrative is propulsive and the writing is meticulous. I would expect no less from this gifted young man. He is the nephew of one of my oldest and dearest friends. I’ve known his mother since childhood.
Matthew Pearl
Congratulations on a job well done!
‘The Missionary doctor not only became a champion of Manifest Destiny but did so with his eyes open to the potentially catastrophic consequences–for the Cayuses and for himself.’ — Murder at the Mission by Blaine Harden
For a book that purports to belong in the True Crime genre, Murder at the Mission is unusual. To begin with, the murders happen very early on in the narrative; from the outset, there is no doubt as to the perpetrators. The remainder of the story concerns the use and abuse of an historical incident, providing a vivid illustration of the ease with which disinformation could be spread across a vast distance, way before the advent of social media.
The chief dramatic personae:
Narcissa Prentiss Whitman and Dr. Marcus Whitman
Henry Spalding
All three were missionaries, come to Oregon in 1836 to convert the Native Americans, specifically those of two tribes:
Nez Perce
The Cayuse, astride their famous ponies
Before too much time went by, Marcus Whitman’s work devolved from Christianizing the Indians to facilitating the settlement of Oregon by Easterners and immigrants. As their rightful claim to the land was subverted over and over again, the Cayuse people became increasingly angry and resentful. Then a measles epidemic ravaged the area, often proving fatal to Native Americans and White settlers alike.
The Cayuse held the missionaries responsible for all of these evils. They had, finally, had enough.
This is not to say that their slaughter of the Whitmans was in any way justified. But they considered themselves to have been provoked beyond reason and thus impelled to act.
(It is worth remembering that Oregon was not even a Territory in the 1830s – it was a settlement, and one both jointly owned and disputed with the British, at that. It became a U.S. Territory in 1848, and finally a State in 1859.)
As I stated at the outset, the tragic story of the killings is told very soon after the book commences, The mystery is not about who was responsible for the carnage. That was known almost immediately afterwards. Rather, the remainder of the narrative concerns a rather amazing journey undertaken by Marcus Whitman not long before his demise. The purpose of the journey…well, let’s say that the purpose of the journey was vigorously disputed.
Meanwhile, Blaine Harden gives us a deep, hard look into the hearts and minds of the missionaries. It is a fascinating depiction. And at times an enraging one. And as I headed toward the fraught conclusion of this tale, I could not help pondering the central question…What on Earth were they thinking??
The American missionaries demanded more than just religious conversion. Assuming that their way of life was superior in every way to the centuries-old spiritual beliefs and cultural practices of Indians, they sought to transform the “copies of their white neighbors.”
To that end, the missionaries insisted that the Indians learn English, cut their hair, wear white people’s clothes, forsake collective ownership of land, accept private property, settle down as farmers, embrace “hard work,” learn to plow, and raise row crops–all the while obeying the Ten Commandments, and renouncing polygamy, drinking, gambling, dancing, and horse racing.
Don’t know about you, but I don’t know many people who could live like that, whatever their ethnicity.
And what, pray tell, were they supposed to do for fun?
There is plenty of material in Murder at the Mission concerning the treatment of Native Americans that was meted out by their White counterparts. It is an appalling record of deliberate injustice – ‘If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.’
Blaine Harden demystifies these matters with a sense of quiet outrage. He is a native of Washington State, so truth telling in this aspect obviously carries great weight with him.
This is an amazing, illuminating, and ultimately heartbreaking story.
A Worse Place Than Hell: How The Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation, by John Matteson
This handsome youth is Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. In the course of his military service in the Union Army, he was wounded on three separate occasions. Afterwards, having made it through this harrowing experience, he vowed to enter the practice of law. He was not only interested in becoming a lawyer, but was equally interested in exploring the philosophical underpinnings of the profession.
In this photo, Holmes appears composed and confident. He was not that way at all by the time his service ended. He was lucky to be alive and he knew it. But he had seen terrible things that could never be forgotten. They affected the entire remainder of his long life.
As far as can be known, Holmes regarded his survival as mere happenstance— confirming, not disrupting, his sense of the universe as a place of inscrutable, mindless forces. If it had any effect on his thinking at all, the wounding at Antietam more stoutly convinced Holmes, already a religious doubter, that the world had neither plan nor reason. The power that drove the world could be neither understood nor appeased. Randomness had become God.
Holmes went on to become one of the most distinguished Supreme Court Judges this country has known. He also served in that capacity for a very long time – just under thirty years. This record remains unbroken.
In A Worse Place Than Hell, John Matteson describes some of these terrible things in excruciating detail. I had to force myself to read some passages. But I felt that I had to. For one thing, this was such a compelling narrative and so beautifully written. For another, it was such a huge part of this country’s past, and therefore, of my past. I have heard it said that the Civil War was America’s Iliad. It seems to me an apt comparison.
The lives of four other individuals are delineated in this book. 
Louis May Alcott came to Washington to work in the hospitals where wounded soldiers were treated.
She told herself, “There is work for me, and I’ll have it.” She went back to her room “resolved to take Fate by the throat and shake a living out of her.”
Walt Whitman did likewise, although he worked at a different location from Alcott. There is no evidence that they ever encountered one another.
Here is another picture of Whitman, taken when he was younger. I was struck by this image, having only seen him as an elderly, heavily bearded sage.
Whitman was a big-hearted man of very modest means, with not much in the way of tangible effects to give to these sick and wounded young men. So he did what he could:
The poet gave almost every form of sustenance: blackberries, peaches, lemons, preserves, pickles, milk, wine, brandy, tobacco, tea, underclothing, and handkerchiefs all passed into the hands of his grateful boys. He wrote countless letters and read aloud, both from his own poetry and from whatever material a soldier might fancy. It seemed to Whitman, however, that the most precious gift he gave lay in “the simple matter of physical presence, and emanating ordinary cheer and magnetism.”
Arthur Fuller was a native of Massachusetts and a graduate of Harvard Divinity school. A gentle soul who yearned to ‘do something for my country,’ Fuller became chaplain to to the Sixteenth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry in 1861.
He came from a distinguished family. Margaret Fuller was his sister. His full name was Arthur Buckminster Fuller, and yes, R. Buckminster Fuller, he of geodesic dome fame, was his grandson.
Arthur Fuller’s brother Richard wrote his biography in 1864. It is available on the Internet Archive.
It opens thus:
HERE is a natural curiosity to trace a stream to its source — to follow it back to the hills from whose bosom it first springs to life-. The more noble the flow of its current, the more beneficent its waters, in opening paths to inland navigation or furnishing food for man, so much the keener is curiosity to trace it to the crystal fountain of its origin. The undiscovered source of the Nile was for centuries the theme of speculation. Inquirers, after the ancient method, propounded this practical question to the oracles of reason, and drew from them the enigmatical responses of theory ; never apparently thinking of the solution, which modern empiricism has reached, by actually threading back the stream, and thus working out the safe result of observation.
Human life, like the river, may attract little public notice in its playful early course, when prattling among the parent hills, or leaping in gay cascades on its downward way, to swell, eventually, into the graver, deeper current of manhood. But if, as its waters gather head, they furnish a spectacle of natural beauty in their flow or fall, or bestow public blessings in banks made green and fruitful, or bountiful fisheries, or bear upon their back the burdens of navigation, or attract attention by the glory of their exit into the sea, symbolizing the issue of life for time into the ocean of eternity, — then men turn their steps back to the early stream, and search out, in its source and surroundings, every presage of its destiny.
How I yearn to read more of such lovely, old-fashioned prose! And in the service of Arthur Buckminster Fuller, a courageous and immensely appealing man.
And finally, John Pelham, a young tearaway from Alabama who became a first rate artillery officer. Not only that, he astonished his fellow soldiers with acts of brazen, almost inhuman bravado on the battlefield.
John G. White of the Second Maryland Infantry outdid even [J.E.B.] Stuart in his appreciation. To him, Pelham was nothing less than “some god of battle.” But in an instant, a battle can turn a god to dust.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Louisa May Alcott, Walt Whitman, Arthur Fuller, John Pelham. These five individuals are the linchpins of this narrative. There is plenty of description of battles also, especially of Antietam and Fredericksburg. Much of it was difficult to read.
Men killed with cold, unthinking hatred— hatred for the war, for the enemy, for the miserable fate that had led them here, hatred perhaps above all for themselves. Many of the participants who told of it later, even though they had seen the slaughter with their own eyes, could not believe the heartbreaking truths that they were telling.
Heartbreaking is exactly the right word. I experienced that sensation over and over as I read this book. Yet I think that, at least from my perspective, One owes it to these mean to learn of what they went through, to acknowledged both the heroism and the horror of this brutal war.
This book is superb. I’ve been reading a great deal of history lately, yet the stories contained in A Worse Place Than Hell – the words are Lincoln’s; the full quotation is “If There Is a Worse Place Than Hell, I Am In It” – will remain with me the longest.
They watched as “the sun set in the smoke of battle,” a sight that, for some of them, surpassed anything they had ever imagined. Now and then a shell would explode against the sky, ironically forming “the most beautiful wreaths” of color. As the sound of the artillery rolled on, the heavens darkened, and the blood-red sun went down, Chaplain Hartsock thought “the orb of day” wore “a fitting appearance” as it looked down “upon the crimson tide that flowed from American veins.”
Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, by Nicholas A. Basbanes
In my youth, when my parents were still very much alive and very ardent fans of the opera, especially the productions of the Metropolitan Opera, I recall how when they got home from a performance, they were filled with exultation – such art! such beauty!
This seems like as good a time and place as any to insert one of my favorite pictures of my parents. The place is Bayreuth, Germany, home of the world famous Bayreuth Festival. They are standing beside the Festspeilhaus, the hall purpose built for performance of the operas of Richard Wagner. Mother and Dad loved this music. At the time this was taken, mid-twentieth century, they were in their glamorous heyday, as this photo will attest:
So, as I said, they’d come from the opera, almost always exultant at the memory of what they’d seen and heard. And then they’d read the review in the New York Times. More often than not, the opera they’d just seen had received a review more or less in the ‘meh’ range. My father would thunder to anyone within range, “Did this idiot see to the same opera we did?!”
So, there are times when I read a review of a book I’ve just read and highly esteemed, when I am genuinely perplexed, not to say dismayed, by the reviewer’s take on that same work. For instance, Charles McGrath’s review of the new biography of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow appeared last month in the New York Times. Here’s part of it:
Nicholas A. Basbanes thinks that the tumble in Longfellow’s reputation was not the natural, inevitable result of changing tastes. In his new biography, “Cross of Snow,” he argues, on not much evidence, that Longfellow was done in by a cabal of modernists and New Critics who conspired to expel him from their snobbish, rarefied canon. So his book, which has at times a defensive, anti-elitist chip on its shoulder, is a rehab mission of sorts, and seeks to restore Longfellow in our present eyes mostly just by reminding us how important he was back in his own day.
Wait just a second…”a defensive, anti-elitist chip on its shoulder…”? Yes, Basbanes writes about the issue of Longfellow’s reputation, but he does not, at least in my view, belabor the subject.
But wait – there’s more:
…by the time of Longfellow’s centennial, in 1907, he was already beginning to be dismissed as old-fashioned, and nowadays, if he’s remembered at all, it’s mostly as the author of lines almost laughable in their badness: “By the shores of Gitche Gumee, /By the shining Big-Sea-Water”; “I shot an arrow into the air, /It fell to earth, I knew not where”; “Thy fate is the common fate of all, /Into each life some rain must fall.”
“Laughable in their badness?” Okay, dated, quaint, I’ll grant you. But ludicrous? Just plain bad? Sorry, I don’t buy it.
It’s true that some of Longfellow’s poetry has not worn well. It can be sentimental, and his insistence on rhyme imbues some of the poems with a childish quality. But others have a timeless essence that I for one find appealing; plus the language can be quite beautiful.
One of my favorites is called “Resignation.” I did not know this poem before I encountered it in The Escher Twist, a mystery by Jane Langton:
There is no Death! What seems so is transition;
This life of mortal breath
Is but a suburb of the life elysian,
Whose portal we call Death.
Toward the conclusion of The Escher Twist, Eloise Winthrop, a widow who has daily visited her husband’s grave at Mount Auburn Cemetery, suddenly finds herself welcomed to a tea party given by none other than Isabella Stewart Gardner!
It was so exciting! There was the little stone bridge across Auburn Lake, and there was Mrs. Gardner herself on the other side, her long skirt trailing on the grass. She was holding out both hands.
“Welcome, my dear,” called Mrs. Gardner, laughing. “Welcome to the other side.”
Overjoyed, Eloise hurried across the bridge. The party was in her honor! Gently Mrs. Gardner took her arm and introduced her to the other guests. “Mrs. Winthrop, have you met Mr. Longfellow? Do you know Mrs. Farmer? Oh, Fanny, dear, your triangular sandwiches are so delicious.”
This is one of my favorite scenes in all of crime fiction – in all of fiction, for that matter.
(Fanny Farmer, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow are all three buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery. Longfellow mentions the place very particularly in a letter:
Yesterday I was at Mount Auburn, and saw my own grave dug; that is, my own tomb. I assure you, I looked quietly down into it without one feeling of dread. It is a beautiful spot, this Mount Auburn. Were you ever there?)
Jane Langton (1922-2018) never made it into the top tier of famous mystery authors, but I’ve long considered her to be one of the best. Her mixture of inventive storytelling, wit, mercurial characters, and perhaps a soupçon of the supernatural I find captivating.
Anyway, back to Longfellow:
Charles McGrath obviously is no fan of either Nicholas Basbanes or Longfellow, but he does offer this grudging admission:
…whatever you think of Longfellow the writer, Longfellow the person is hard to dislike.
What an understatement. Longfellow was kind, empathetic, generous to a fault, and endlessly patient. For most of his adult life, he mixed readily with the great and the good of this country and Europe, but throughout, he retained the modesty and forthrightness that characterized his interactions with others.
More things I learned about Longfellow from this book:
The house in which he and his family lived had, some sixty years before they moved into it, been inhabited by George Washington as he planned a strategy for dealing with the Siege of Boston.
The National Park Service now administers The Longfellow House – Washington’s Headquarters National Site. They have made a lovely welcoming video:
Longfellow was a scholar of languages, able to read at least fifteen different ones, and to speak almost as many. In his position as a professor at Harvard, he taught literature in many languages. He did a great deal of translating, often aided in these endeavors by his brilliant wife Fanny; in some cases they were the first to introduce works in various foreign tongues to American readers.
Longfellow translated Dante’s Divine Comedy. The late, great critic Harold Bloom has high praise for it:
[Longfellow’s] “translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy seems to me undervalued, and compares favorably with the current versions.” In an interview for this book, Bloom went further, saying that he preferred the Longfellow translation to “all the current versions.” His reason: the “fidelity” it shows to Dante’s original Italian.
Although we associate Longfellow with the constellation of worthies who inhabited the Boston-Cambridge area in the early to mid nineteenth century, he was actually born and raised in Maine. Moreover, he attended Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, graduating in 1825, the same year as his classmate Nathaniel Hawthorne. (Bowdoin has an impressive list of alumni.) Longfellow taught for a time at Bowdoin before moving on to Harvard.
There’s much more in this lively biography. Longfellow’s personal life receives welcome attention. He was married twice. His first wife Mary died at the age of 24, following a miscarriage. He later wed Frances “Fanny” Appleton, after an arduous courtship of several years. Once she finally accepted him, though, theirs proved to be a marriage of true minds, if there ever was one. They shared a deep love of literature and the arts, and together they had six children, losing one, a daughter, not long past infancy.
Longfellow, Fanny, and their two eldest sons, Charley – a real handful, apparently – and Ernest
(Many years ago, I visited the Longfellow home on Brattle Street in Cambridge. I came away with a vivid memory of the story, told by a docent, of the terrible accident which cost Fanny her life. It took place in the house. She was 44 years old at the time. I confess I read a large part of this book with mounting dread, as I was not sure at what point I would encounter this story.)
The book’s title refers to both a photo and a painting of a site in the Rocky Mountains where a cross made of snow lingered on the mountain’s face the year round.
The Mountain of the Holy Cross, by Thomas Moran, 1890
Mountain of the Holy Cross, Colorado, photo by William Henry Jackson, circa 1873
Here is Longfellow’s poem, “The Cross of Snow:”
In the long, sleepless watches of the night,A gentle face — the face of one long dead —Looks at me from the wall, where round its headThe night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.Here in this room she died; and soul more whiteNever through martyrdom of fire was ledTo its repose; nor can in books be readThe legend of a life more benedight.There is a mountain in the distant WestThat, sun-defying, in its deep ravinesDisplays a cross of snow upon its side.Such is the cross I wear upon my breastThese eighteen years, through all the changing scenesAnd seasons, changeless since the day she died.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 1807-1882, photo by Julia Margaret Cameron
‘Gilgamesh, who saw the wellspring, the foundations of the land….’
First, let me say:
I am deeply grateful to Osher Life Long Learning (affiliated with Johns Hopkins University) for making our classes available by means of Zoom technology.
The subject of one of my classes is the Epic of Gilgamesh. Numerous translations of this work are extant; for our class, our instructor, Dr. Lederman, uses this one: 
Herewith are the opening lines from Tablet I:
He who saw the wellspring, the foundations of the land,
Who knew the world’s ways, was wise in all things,
Gilgamesh, who saw the wellspring, the foundations of the land,
Who knew the world’s ways, was wise in all things,
He it was who studied seats of power everywhere,
Full knowledge of it all he gained,
He saw what was secret and revealed what was hidden,
He brought back tidings from before the Flood,
From a distant journey came home, weary, but at peace,
Set out all his hardships on a monument of stone,
He built the walls of ramparted Uruk,
The lustrous treasure of hallowed Eanna!
Gilgamesh, supposedly
This passage continues to limn the glories of Uruk; then we return to the subject of Gilgamesh the praiseworthy. Except that he actually isn’t very praiseworthy. He is, at least at the story’s beginning not much more than an arrogant brute. He is cruel and rough with the young men of Uruk; worse, he exercises his “right of the first night” ( known also as jus prima noctis, or droit du seigneur) with every new bride, on her wedding night.
The people of Uruk cry out to the gods about Gilgamesh’s abuses, and they realize that a way must be found to inculcate civility into the wild ruler. The god Anu summons another god, Aruru, and more or less kicks the ball into her court. These are Aruru’s orders:
Let her create a match for Gilgamesh, mighty in strength,
Let them contend with each other, that Uruk may have peace.
So Aruru gets to work, and this is the result:
She created valiant Enkidu in the steppe,
Offspring of silence*, with the force of the valiant Ninurta.
He was made lush with head hair, like a woman,
The locks of his hair grew think as a grain field.
He knew neither people nor inhabited land,
He dressed as animals do.
He ate grass with gazelles,
With beasts he jostled at the water hole,
With wildlife he drank his fill of water.*The footnote says of the phrase “Offspring of silence” that it may refer to the fact that Enkidu, having been formed of clay, did not enter into the world with “the tumult that normally accompanies childbirth.”
Is all of this starting to seem weird? Trust me, we’re just beginning.
Chief agent in charge of “civilizing” Enkidu is a harlot named Shamhat. She knows just how to proceed:
Shamhat loosened her garments,
She opened her loins, he took her charms.
She was not bashful, she took his vitality.
She tossed aside her clothing and he lay upon her,
She treated him, a human, to woman’s work,
As in his ardor he caressed her.
Six days, seven nights was Enkidu aroused, flowing into Shamhat.
Well golly! You could have knocked me over with a proverbial feather when I first read that. Pornography in an ancient Mesopotamian epic??!! And depending on the translation, this episode is rendered in even more explicit language. Click here for an example. And no, I’m not going to place the actual text here. This is, after all, a family friendly blog!
Now, as a topic of study, this epic is hugely complex and many-faceted. I don’t mean to be flippant and/or dismissive. People give their entire professional lives to the explication, translation, and study of the epic of Gilgamesh and its place in Mesopotamian civilization. And our lecturer, Dr. Richard Lederman, is himself a marvel of scholarship. In a recent class, he came out with a throwaway line which I will cherish: “My Akkadian is a bit rusty.” Oh and he is fluent in Hebrew and a scholar of the Old Testament as well.
So I have to say that for myself, from a purely esthetic standpoint, the Epic of Gilgamesh is a bit lacking. Here’s why I’m of that opinion:
1. Repetition. There’s too much of it. The first four lines of the first passage quoted above are typical. This may be due to the fact that at times, the story may have been presented orally.
2. The plot disjointed, not especially compelling, and sometimes just too strange to summon forth any empathy.
3. The same is true for the characters. I had a lot of trouble caring about what happened to them.
4. The writing, for the most part, is flat and uninspired. Admittedly, the exact language is dependent on the translation you’re reading. Nevertheless, I was hoping to encounter some of the literary devices that occur in the Homeric epics – you know, epithets such as “rosy-fingered Dawn,” “wine-dark Sea,”” bright-eyed Athena,” and the amazingly vivid extended similes and metaphors. They simply were not there.
Dr. Lederman recommended this video to us. I found it both enlightening and engaging:
The Lure of Ancient Egypt
I am most fortunate to own this book: 
The author, John Boardman, boasts a most impressive CV. From the publisher Thames & Hudson:
Sir John Boardman was born in 1927, and educated at Chigwell School and Magdalene College, Cambridge. He spent several years in Greece, three of them as Assistant Director of the British School of Archaeology at Athens, and he has excavated in Smyrna, Crete, Chios and Libya. For four years he was an Assistant Keeper in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and he subsequently became Reader in Classical Archaeology and Fellow of Merton College, Oxford. He is now Lincoln Professor Emeritus of Classical Archaeology and Art in Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy, from whom he received the Kenyon Medal in 1995. He was awarded the Onassis Prize for Humanities in 2009. Professor Boardman has written widely on the art and archaeology of Ancient Greece.
You can see and hear Sir John Boardman talking about his life’s work here.
Professor Boardman’s graceful prose is redolent of times past:
The civilization and arts of Egypt have revealed themselves to the rest of the world in dramatic ways. In antiquity Greeks, then Romans, were attracted to Egypt’s obviously extreme antiquity and the exoticism of its arts….Biblical associations and the longevity of its styles of art and writing seemed to mark it out as something exceptional in the history of man….
Sporadically, the country divided politically into North and South. Overall, however, there was undisturbed unity of culture, language, and art which must have contributed to the fact that the highly distinctive idiom for the arts which had been developed in Egypt by the third millennium BC lasted with very little basic change in appearance, styles, subjects and techniques, for more than three thousand years….
Egyptian art is overwhelming in its stylistic idiosyncrasy, its at-first-sight unlikeness even to the various other arts of the urban world with which it made contact. In this must lie much of its unceasing appeal to modern eyes.
There is, of course, so much more in this section, where Sir John’s erudition shines forth in a way that is never pedantic but invariably engaging.
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Rahotep and Nofret
Rahotep ruled during ancient Egypt’s Fourth Dynasty. These statues of Prince and his wife Nofret were discovered deep inside their mastaba in 1871, by Albert Daninos an assistant to the French archaeologist Auguste Mariette.
These statues are in such superb condition due to the fact that they had not seen the light of day for several millennia. Particularly striking are the eyes, which were crafted chiefly of rock crystal:
Indeed, so lifelike were they that when the workman shone their lights upon them, they thought they were in the presence of living beings. Terrified, they fled the premises.
Books to the Ceiling 
