Though the Craigie mansion looks much the same as it did when Washington commanded the Continental Army from its library, its years of life and importance are over. A few people live in the upstairs rooms, but the great halls where socialites and poets used to meet are now seen only by the eyes of historians and tourists. The discreetly-placed elevator and the thirty-cent admission sign over the front door have added a commercial tinge to the house's ancient mustiness, and though the desk of Longfellow remains, his air of professorial peacefulness does not.

If the life of the stately house half a mile down Brattle Street is virtually over, no one should weep, for it has been an abnormally long life. Built in 1759 by a young Royalist, the house was confiscated by the American government fifteen years later, when the owner, after a life of unhappy splendor, fled to the besieged British in Boston. It wasn't long before the nucleus of the American Navy moved in, a bunch of fishermen from Marblehead. They messed the place up pretty badly, and Washington, deciding to move in from his undesirable quarters in Wadsworth House, had to foot a cleaning and redecorating bill of twelve dollars.

Harassed by poor subordinates and the absence of his wife, Washington paced the rooms of the house, and gazed abstractedly from the windows at the view of the Charles, that reminded him pleasantly of his home by the Potomac. Longfellow, probably standing demurely at the same spot, conceived the lines:

Yes, within this very room

Sat he in those hours of gloom

Weary both in heart and head.

But when the commander-in-chief realized that the siege of Boston would last all winter, he sent for his spouse, who arrived from Virginia in a red and white liveried chaise. She was all for plenty of social life, but he didn't think it was the right kind of time, and only conceded a Twelfth Night Party on their wedding anniversary.

Washington moved out in the spring, and the house was unoccupied until 1781, when a wealthy shipowner bought it, holding resplendent balls in what had once been the officers' wardroom. At one dinner party he served genuine frog soup, with a live bullfrog jumping around in each plate. The result of all this was that he went bankrupt. A few years later Dr. Andrew Craigie bought the mansion, giving it its present name. Another extravagant fellow, he added two piazzas and tried desperately to make his young, beautiful, and eccentric wife happy there. But he went bankrupt, too, and only left the house on Sundays because he couldn't be arrested then. When Craigie died of apoplexy in 1819, his wife stayed on, reading French novels in the front window and watching the beautiful elm trees being eaten up by canker-worms. "Don't molest them," she said. "They are our fellow-worms."

Mrs. Craigie rented rooms to lodgers, and one of them was Professor Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whom she first refused because she thought he was a student. When she died in 1841, it was found that all had not been pleasant between the Craigies. She had a lover whom she had been waiting for all her life, and her husband had been getting letters from an illegitimate daughter. When Oliver Wendell Holmes discovered the undercurrents in the mansion, he exclaimed with relish, "What a household! Mrs. Craigie hiding her letters in the attic and Mr. Craigie hiding his letters in the cellar!" When Longfellow married, his father-in-law bought the house for the couple, and soon their home became a great social and literary center. Among the visitors were Emerson, Louis Phillippe, Don Pedro II of Brazil, Hawthorne, and Dickens. But in 1861 Longfellow's bustling happiness was cut short. His wife, sealing up packages of her daughter's curls, caught her dress on fire, and although he tried to save her, he was unsuccessful.

After Longfellow died in 1882, the real history of Craigie House ended. While the downstairs rooms were turned into a museum, a few married Radcliffe girls live on the second floor, with Longfellow's grandson, who writes historical books on Cambridge, as landlord. A few months ago some of the present residents hysterically reported the presence of a ghost. Whether Washington's or Longfellow's no one cared to say, but the shades of either may very well be still lurking among the elms.