The book-lined apartment over the study--once the bedchamber of Washington and later of Talleyrand--was occupied by Longfellow when he first lived as a lodger in the old house. It was here he heard "Footsteps of Angels" and "Voices of the Night," and saw by the fitful firelight the "Being Beauteous" at his side; here he wrote "Hyperion" and the earlier poems which made him known and loved in every clime. Later this room became the nursery of his children, and some of the grotesque tiles which adorn its chimney are mentioned in his poem "To a Child:"
"The lady with the gay macaw, The dancing-girl, the grave bashaw. The Chinese mandarin."
Along the western façade of the mansion stretches a wide veranda, where the poet was wont to take his daily exercise when "the goddess Neuralgia" or "the two Ws" (Work and Weather) prevented his walking abroad. In this stately old house his children were born and reared, here his wife met her tragic death, and here his daughter--the "grave Alice" of "The Children's Hour"--abides and preserves its precious relics, while "laughing Allegra" (Anna) and "Edith with golden hair"--now Mrs. Dana and Mrs. Thorp--have dwellings within the grounds of their childhood home, and their brother Ernst owns a modern cottage a few rods westward on the same street.
In Sparks Street, just out of Brattle, dwelt the author Robert Carter,--familiarly, "The Don,"--sometime secretary to Prescott and long the especial friend of Lowell, with whom he was associated in the editorship of the short-lived "Pioneer." Carter's home here was the rendezvous of a circle of choice spirits, where one might often meet "Prince" Lowell,--as his friends delighted to call him,--Bartlett of "Familiar Quotations," and that "songless poet" John Holmes, brother of the "American Montaigne."