Longfellow's wife, Fanny, was spiritual and inspiring

It is heart-warming to find a woman who possesses great spiritual as well as physical beauty; a woman who, of her own accord, seeks the promptings of the Spirit and strives to rise upward in all things.

Such a remarkable woman was Fanny Appleton Longfellow, wife of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Longfellow lost his first wife, Mary, in November of 1835 while he was studying abroad for a year in preparation for a professorship at Harvard. Both she and the child she had been carrying died.

Half a year later he met Fanny Appleton and her family in Switzerland, and the first part of their courtship took place abroad. Her father, Nathan Appleton, one of the founders of the city of Lowell, was a brilliant, insightful leader in trade, the textile industry and politics. Her mother, Maria Gold, also of a prominent family, died in February 1833, when Frances (Fanny) was not yet 16, but old enough to partake of the beauty and courage of her mother's last days.

Fanny was raised amid privilege and ease, yet she was deeply religious in nature and sought the depths of spiritual experiences. After one of these, she recorded in her journal, speaking in third person, "O most merciful Father, receive the overflowing love and gratitude of thy child for this crowning blessing … cleanse her heart that it may be worthy for the indwelling of thy Spirit. Teach it how near thou ever art."

Henry and Fanny did not marry until July of 1843 when, after eight years, their relationship had grown and matured. Longfellow had been lodging at the historic Craigie House in Cambridge, which George Washington used as his headquarters during the siege of Boston. Fanny's father purchased the house as a wedding gift for the couple, and Fanny never changed the room where George and Martha had celebrated their 17th wedding anniversary amid the sorrows and uncertainties of war. She and Henry loved the quiet peaceful spirit of Craigie House. In a letter to her husband's sister, Anne, she wrote, "I have no eloquence equal to expressing our delight in being at home again; the silence here is alone such a blessing that I often stop to listen to it as to the most exquisite music, or as Leigh Hunt says when removed from noise to rest, 'I drink in the quiet at my ears as if they were thirsty.' "

On July 13, 1844, she wrote in her journal, "The celebration of our wedding day … I wonder if these old walls ever looked upon happier faces or through them down into happier hearts."

Fanny's first daughter, whom she had so passionately desired, was born April 7, 1847, at which time Fanny became the first woman in the Western world to bear a child under the influence of ether. She had already given birth to two sons, Charley and Ernest.