A good many, years before Longfellow’s death he began to be sleepless, and he suffered greatly.  He said to me once that he felt as if he were going about with his heart in a kind of mist.  The whole night through he would not be aware of having slept.  “But,” he would add, with his heavenly patience, “I always get a good deal of rest from lying down so long.”  I cannot say whether these conditions persisted, or how much his insomnia had to do with his breaking health; three or four years before the end came, we left Cambridge for a house farther in the country, and I saw him less frequently than before.  He did not allow our meetings to cease; he asked me to dinner from time to time, as if to keep them up, but it could not be with the old frequency.  Once he made a point of coming to see us in our cottage on the hill west of Cambridge, but it was with an effort not visible in the days when he could end one of his brief walks at our house on Concord Avenue; he never came but he left our house more luminous for his having been there.  Once he came to supper there to meet Garfield (an old family friend of mine in Ohio), and though he was suffering from a heavy cold, he would not scant us in his stay.  I had some very bad sherry which he drank with the serenity of a martyr, and I shudder to this day to think what his kindness must have cost him.  He told his story of the clothes-line ghost, and Garfield matched it with the story of an umbrella ghost who sheltered a friend of his through a midnight storm, but was not cheerful company to his beneficiary, who passed his hand through him at one point in the effort to take his arm.

After the end of four years I came to Cambridge to be treated for a long sickness, which had nearly been my last, and when I could get about I returned the visit Longfellow had not failed to pay me.  But I did not find him, and I never saw him again in life.  I went into Boston to finish the winter of 1881-2, and from time to time I heard that the poet was failing in health.  As soon as I felt able to bear the horse-car journey I went out to Cambridge to see him.  I had knocked once at his door, the friendly door that had so often opened to his welcome, and stood with the knocker in my hand when the door was suddenly set ajar, and a maid showed her face wet with tears.  “How is Mr. Longfellow?” I palpitated, and with a burst of grief she answered, “Oh, the poor gentleman has just departed!” I turned away as if from a helpless intrusion at a death-bed.

At the services held in the house before the obsequies at the cemetery, I saw the poet for the last time, where

        “Dead he lay among his books,”