Welcome to the Eric Mataxis show.

It's the show that Mark Twain once called Smartern, a Blue Jay, what can talk possum,

and faster than a naked fat man riding a bolt of lightning.

So here's your main spoken homespun

host eric mottaxus folks i'm talking to nick bas baines the book is a biography of as you know

probably uh one of my favorite writers longfellow the book is called cross of snow um nick uh in in this book, there's so much that came to me that was new, that was unknown.

One of the things that I think is remarkable in the basic sense of the word remarkable,

is that Longfellow and Fannie, his wife, lived at a time

when to have a basic Christian faith was significant. And you see that in just a few lines,

you don't go into it, but there are a number of things that each of them

says, and that certainly Julia Ward Howe says that some of their contemporaries, they really

had a deep and a strong faith. And I'm just guessing from what a little I read on this subject,

that that had to be one of the ways that Longfellow was

able to get through the tragic death of his amazing, wonderful wife.

I just wrote, and it should be published shortly, a piece for Humanities magazine,

and it was, I was inspired by what we're going through now with the

pandemic and far in this fear of contagion and death that we have so many

people have and how the Longfellow's dealt with this same sort of thing in

the 19th century it was it was a commonplace And so not only you're quite perceptive and you're

quite correct in your evaluation of how Henry dealt with this, but Fannie was the same. When they

met, you know, when they first met in 1836, she was traveling through Europe and in Switzerland

with her family. And the reason that they left is because her 20-year-old brother had just died of consumption.

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