d he, again, traveled to Europe (Wagenknecht 5). His wife of four years, Mary Storer Potter, accompanied him on the trip. While they were in the Netherlands, Mary "suffered a miscarriage" and died weeks later from the extreme trauma (Wagenknecht 5). Longfellow spent the winter grieving, but met his second wife, Fanny Appleton, in Switzerland the next spring. They were married in the summer of 1843, and Fanny bore nine children before her tragic death on July 9, 1861. He grieved tremendously for his wife of eighteen years, but took comfort in their children and his memories of their life together. Longfellow continued to write poetry and in 1868 he received honorary degrees at Oxford and Cambridge from Queen Victoria. His health began to fail in 1881, and he died of peritonitis on March 24, 1882. A bust of Longfellow was mounted in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey in 1884 as a tribute to the outstanding writer. He is the only non-British author to be awarded this honor (Williams 21). Longfellow was "the first of the front-ranking American poets of his time to go, and his death was widely recognized as marking the beginning of the end of an era" (Wagenknecht 19).
             A popular poet, Longfellow deals "with i
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