“Better, better, thank you, Dr. Holmes. I’m afraid, though, I was not well enough to attend Judge Healey’s funeral.” George Washington Greene was generally referred to as “old” by the rest of them, but he was actually sixty– just four years older than Holmes and two years ahead of Longfellow. Chronic illnesses had aged the retired Unitarian minister and historian decades beyond his years. But he railroaded in each week from East Greenwich, Rhode Island, with as much enthusiasm for the Wednesday nights at Craigie House as for the guest sermons he offered whenever called upon—or for the Revolutionary War histories that his name had fated him to compile. “Longfellow, were you present?”

“I’m afraid not, my dear Mr. Greene,” said Longfellow. Longfellow had not been to Mount Auburn Cemetery since before Fanny Longfellow’s funeral, a ceremony during which he was confined to his bed. “But I trust it was well attended?”

“Oh, quite so, Longfellow.” Holmes locked his fingers over his chest thoughtfully. “A beautiful and fitting tribute.”

“Too well attended, perhaps,” Lowell said, coming in from the library with a handful of books and ignoring the fact that Holmes had already answered the question.

“Old Healey knew the best of himself,” Holmes pointed out gently. “He knew his place was the courthouse, not the barbaric arena of politics.”

“Wendell! You can’t mean that,” said Lowell authoritatively.

“Lowell.” Fields gazed pointedly at him.

“To think we became the hunters of slaves.” Lowell backed away from Holmes only for a second. Lowell was a sixth or seventh cousin to the Healeys, as the Lowells were sixth or seventh cousins—at least—to all the best Brahmin families, and this only increased his resistance. “Would you ever have ruled as cowardly as Healey, Wendell? If I proposed that it had been your choice, would you have sent that Sims boy back to his plantation in chains? Tell me that. Just tell me that, Holmes.”

“We must respect the family’s loss,” said Holmes quietly, directing his comment mainly at the half-deaf Mr. Greene, who nodded politely.

Longfellow excused himself when a bell sounded from upstairs. There could be professors or reverends, senators or kings among his guests, but at the signal, Longfellow would make his way to listen to the bedtime prayers of Alice, Edith, and Annie Allegra.

By the time he returned, Fields had deftly redirected the conversation toward lighter fare, so the poet walked into a round of laughter produced by an anecdote jointly retold by Holmes and Lowell. The host checked his Aaron Willard mahogany clock, an old timepiece he was partial to, not because of its looks or accuracy but because it seemed to tick more leisurely than others.

“Schooltime,” he said softly.

The room fell hush. Longfellow closed the green shutters over the windows. Holmes turned down the flames of the moderator lamps while the others helped arrange a row of candles. This series of overlapping halos communed with the flickering glow of the fire. The five scholars and Trap– Longfellow’s plump Scotch terrier—assumed their preordained posts along the circumference of the small room.

Longfellow gathered up a sheaf of papers from his drawer and passed out a few pages of Dante’s Italian to each guest, along with a set of printed proof sheets with his corresponding line-by-line translation. In the delicately woven chiaroscuro of hearth, lamp, and wick, the ink seemed to lift off Longfellow’s proofs, as if a page of Dante suddenly came alive under one’s eyes. Dante had arranged his verse in a terza rima, every three lines a poetic set, the first and third rhyming and the middle projecting a rhyme with the first line of the next set, so that the verses leaned ahead in forward motion.

Holmes always relished how Longfellow opened their Dante meetings with a recitation of the first lines of the Commedia in unassumingly perfect Italian.

“ ‘Midway through the journey of our life, I found myself within a dark wood, for the right way had been lost.’ “

III

As the first order of business in a Dante Club meeting, the host reviewed the proof sheets from the previous week’s session.

“Good work, my dear Longfellow,” Dr. Holmes said. He was satisfied whenever one of his suggested amendments was approved, and two from last Wednesday had found their way into Longfellow’s final proofs. Holmes turned his attention to this evening’s cantos. He had taken extra care to prepare, because today he would have to persuade them he had come to protect Dante.

“In the seventh circle,” Longfellow said, “Dante tells us how he and Virgil come upon a black forest.” In each region of Hell, Dante followed his adored guide, the Roman poet Virgil. Along the way, he learned the fate of each group of sinners, singling out one or two to address the living world.

“The lost forest that has occupied the private nightmares of all of Dante’s readers at one time or another,” Lowell said. “Dante writes like Rembrandt, with a brush dipped in darkness and a gleam of hellfire as his light.”

Lowell, as usual, would have every inch of Dante at his tongue’s end; he lived Dante’s poetry, body and mind. Holmes, for one of the only instances in his life, envied another person’s talent.

Longfellow read from his translation. His reading voice rang deep and true, without any harshness, like the sound of water running under a fresh cover of snow. George Washington Greene seemed particularly lulled, for the scholar, in the spacious green armchair in the corner, drifted to sleep amid the soft intonations of the poet and the mild heat from the fire. The little terrier Trap, who had rolled onto his plump stomach under Greene’s chair, also dozed off, and their snores arranged themselves in tandem, like the grumbling bass in a Beethoven symphony.

In the canto at hand, Dante found himself in the Wood of Suicides, where the “shades” of sinners have been turned into trees, dripping blood where sap belonged. Then further punishment arrived: Bestial harpies, faces and necks of women and bodies of birds, feet clawed and bellies bulging, crashed through the brush, feeding and tearing at every tree in their way. But along with great pain, the rips and tears in the trees provided the only outlet for the shades to utter their pain, to tell their stories to Dante.

“The blood and words must come out together.” So said Longfellow.

After two cantos of punishments witnessed by Dante, books were marked and stored, papers shuffled, and admiration exchanged. Longfellow said, “School is done, gentlemen. It is only half-past nine and we deserve some refreshment for our labors.”

“You know,” Holmes said, “I was thinking of our Dante work in a new light just the other day.”

Longfellow’s servant, Peter, knocked and conveyed a message to Lowell in a hesitant whisper.

“Someone to see me?” Lowell protested, interrupting Holmes. “Who would find me here?” When Peter stammered a vague response, Lowell thundered loud enough for the whole household to hear. “Who in the name of Heaven would come on the night of our club?”

Peter leaned closer to Lowell. “Mistah Lowell, he say he’s a policeman, sah.”

In the front hall, Patrolman Nicholas Rey stomped the fresh snow from his boots, then froze at Longfellow’s army of George Washington sculptures and paintings. The house had headquartered Washington in the earliest days of the American Revolution.

Peter, the black servant, had cocked his head doubtfully when Rey showed him his badge. Rey was told that Mr. Longfellow’s Wednesday meeting could not be disturbed and, policeman or no policeman, he would have to wait in the parlor. The room into which he was led was enshrined with an intangibly light decor—flowered wallpaper and curtains suspended from Gothic acorns. A creamy marble bust of a woman was guarded under an arch by the chimneypiece, curls of stone hair falling gently over softly carved features.