PASSAGE

Brattle Street is busy today, and the elms that covered what was once the road to the west bordered by country houses now wave over whirring traffic. The house at the head of Longfellow Park peeps from behind its screen of shrubbery as it did seventy years ago, and those who pass the Craigie House turn and look, or do not turn and pass, knowing vaguely that a poet once lived there.

In the Craigie House there died yesterday Miss Alice Longfellow, the daughter of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the poet who made that house his home for forty years. Miss Longfellow remained in the house all her life, active in the work of building the new Cambridge, but by her presence keeping alive the old Cambridge that for Harvard and Harvard men will always be a story cherished with other things as slight and as far off.

The poet Longfellow gave to Harvard the best years of his life in his professorship of modern languages at the University. He was in the center of Harvard when New England, and Boston in particular, were the last words in the story of American culture, and Harvard was the heart of New England and Boston. It was the name of Longfellow that linked with those of Emerson, Lowell, Holmes and Agassiz to bind an intellectual tradition that is still strong.

Miss Longfellow is immortalized in four lines of her father's verse, and with her name there remains much that shall stay as long as Harvard is Harvard.