Is this your glory in a noble line,To leave your confines and to ravage mine?Whom I—but let these troubled waves subside—Another tempest and I'll quell your pride!Go bear our message to your master's ear,That wide as ocean I am despot here;Let him sit monarch in his barren caves!I wield the trident and control the waves.
Is this your glory in a noble line,To leave your confines and to ravage mine?Whom I—but let these troubled waves subside—Another tempest and I'll quell your pride!Go bear our message to your master's ear,That wide as ocean I am despot here;Let him sit monarch in his barren caves!I wield the trident and control the waves.
Is this your glory in a noble line,To leave your confines and to ravage mine?Whom I—but let these troubled waves subside—Another tempest and I'll quell your pride!Go bear our message to your master's ear,That wide as ocean I am despot here;Let him sit monarch in his barren caves!I wield the trident and control the waves.
INhis vacations the inquiring mind of the young student had made "strange acquaintances" in a certain book infirmary up in the attic of the gambrel-roofed house.
"The Negro Plot at New York," he says, "helped to implant a feeling in me which it took Mr. Garrison a good many years to root out.Thinks I to myself, an old novel which has been attributed to a famous statesman, introduced me to a world of fiction which was not represented on the shelves of the library proper, unless perhaps byCaelebs in search of a Wife, or allegories of the bitter tonic class."
Then there was an old, old Latin alchemy book, with the manuscript annotations of some ancient Rosicrucian, "In the pages of which," he says, "I had a vague notion that I might find the mighty secret of theLapis Philosophorum,otherwise called Chaos, the Dragon, the Green Lion, theQuinta Essentia, the Soap of Sages, the vinegar of Heavenly Grace, the Egg, the Old Man, the Sun, the Moon, and by all manner of oddaliases, as I am assured by the plethoric little book before me, in parchment covers browned like a meerschaum with the smoke of furnaces, and the thumbing of dead gold-seekers, and the fingering of bony-handed book-misers, and the long intervals of dusty slumber on the shelves of thebonquiniste."
"I have never lost my taste for alchemy," he adds, "since I first got hold of thePalladium Spagyricumof Peter John Faber, and sought—in vain, it is true—through its pages for a clear, intelligible, and practical statement of how I could turn my lead sinkers and the weights of the tall kitchen clock into good yellow gold specific gravity, 19.2, and exchangeable for whatever I then wanted, and for many more things than I was then aware of.
"One of the greatest pleasures of childhood is found in the mysteries which it hides from the scepticism of the elders, and works up into small mythologies of its own. I have seen all this played over again in adult life, the samedelightful bewilderment of semi-emotional belief in listening to the gaseous promises of this or that fantastic system, that I found in the pleasing mirages conjured up for me by the ragged old volume I used to pore over in the southeast attic chamber."
There are other reminiscences of these days that show us not only the outward surroundings, but the inner workings of the boy's mind.
"The great Destroyer," he says, "had come near me, but never so as to be distinctly seen and remembered during my tender years. There flits dimly before me the image of a little girl whose name even I have forgotten, a schoolmate whom we missed one day, and were told that she had died. But what death was I never had any very distinct idea until one day I climbed the low stone-wall of the old burial ground and mingled with a group that were looking into a very deep, long, narrow hole, dug down through the green sod, down through the brown loam, down through the yellow gravel, and there at the bottom was an oblong red box, and a still, sharp, white face of a young man seen through an opening at one end of it.
"When the lid was closed, and the graveland stones rattled down pell-mell, and the woman in black who was crying and wringing her hands went off with the other mourners, and left him, then I felt that I had seen Death, and should never forget him."
There were certain sounds too, he tells us, that had "a mysterious suggestiveness" to him. One was the "creaking of the woodsleds, bringing their loads of oak and walnut from the country, as the slow-swinging oxen trailed them along over the complaining snow in the cold, brown light of early morning. Lying in bed and listening to their dreary music had a pleasure in it akin to the Lucretian luxury, or that which Byron speaks of as to be enjoyed in looking on at a battle by one 'who hath no friend, no brother there.'
"Yes, and there was still another sound which mingled its solemn cadences with the waking and sleeping dreams of my boyhood. It was heard only at times, a deep, muffled roar, which rose and fell, not loud, but vast; a whistling boy would have drowned it for his next neighbor, but it must have been heard over the space of a hundred square miles. I used to wonder what this might be. Could itbe the roar of the thousand wheels and the ten thousand footsteps jarring and trampling along the stones of the neighboring city? That would be continuous; but this, as I have said, rose and fell in regular rhythm. I remember being told, and I suppose this to have been the true solution, that it was the sound of the waves after a high wind breaking on the long beaches many miles distant."
After a year's study at Andover, he was fully prepared to enter Harvard University.
In the Charlestown Navy Yard, at this time, was the old frigateConstitution, which the government purposed to break up as unfit for service, thoughtless of the desecration:
There was an hour when patriots dared profaneThe mast that Britain strove to bow in vain,And one, who listened to the tale of shame,Whose heart still answered to that sacred name,Whose eye still followed o'er his country's tidesThy glorious flag, our braveOld Ironsides!yon lone attic, on a summer's morn,Thus mocked the spoilers with his schoolboy scorn:Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!Long has it waved on high,And many an eye has danced to seeThat banner in the sky;Beneath it rung the battle shout,And burst the cannon's roar;The meteor of the ocean airShall sweep the clouds no more!Her deck, once red with heroes' blood,Where knelt the vanquished foe,When winds were hurrying o'er the flood,And waves were white below,No more shall feel the victor's tread,Or know the conquered knee;The harpies of the shore shall pluckThe eagle of the sea.Oh, better that her shattered hulkShould sink beneath the wave;Her thunders shook the mighty deep,And there should be her grave;Nail to the mast her holy flag,Set every thread-bare sail,And give her to the god of stormsThe lightning and the gale!
There was an hour when patriots dared profaneThe mast that Britain strove to bow in vain,And one, who listened to the tale of shame,Whose heart still answered to that sacred name,Whose eye still followed o'er his country's tidesThy glorious flag, our braveOld Ironsides!yon lone attic, on a summer's morn,Thus mocked the spoilers with his schoolboy scorn:Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!Long has it waved on high,And many an eye has danced to seeThat banner in the sky;Beneath it rung the battle shout,And burst the cannon's roar;The meteor of the ocean airShall sweep the clouds no more!Her deck, once red with heroes' blood,Where knelt the vanquished foe,When winds were hurrying o'er the flood,And waves were white below,No more shall feel the victor's tread,Or know the conquered knee;The harpies of the shore shall pluckThe eagle of the sea.Oh, better that her shattered hulkShould sink beneath the wave;Her thunders shook the mighty deep,And there should be her grave;Nail to the mast her holy flag,Set every thread-bare sail,And give her to the god of stormsThe lightning and the gale!
There was an hour when patriots dared profaneThe mast that Britain strove to bow in vain,And one, who listened to the tale of shame,Whose heart still answered to that sacred name,Whose eye still followed o'er his country's tidesThy glorious flag, our braveOld Ironsides!yon lone attic, on a summer's morn,Thus mocked the spoilers with his schoolboy scorn:
Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!Long has it waved on high,And many an eye has danced to seeThat banner in the sky;Beneath it rung the battle shout,And burst the cannon's roar;The meteor of the ocean airShall sweep the clouds no more!
Her deck, once red with heroes' blood,Where knelt the vanquished foe,When winds were hurrying o'er the flood,And waves were white below,No more shall feel the victor's tread,Or know the conquered knee;The harpies of the shore shall pluckThe eagle of the sea.
Oh, better that her shattered hulkShould sink beneath the wave;Her thunders shook the mighty deep,And there should be her grave;Nail to the mast her holy flag,Set every thread-bare sail,And give her to the god of stormsThe lightning and the gale!
This stirring poem—the first to make him known—was written by Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1830, "with a pencil in the White ChamberStans pede in uno, pretty nearly," and was published in the BostonAdvertiser. From these columns it was extensively copied by other newspapers throughout the country, and handbills containing the verses were circulated inWashington. The eloquent, patriotic outburst not only brought instant fame to the young poet, but so thoroughly aroused the heart of the people that the grand old vessel was saved from destruction.
The "schoolboy" had already entered Harvard College, and among his classmates in that famous class of 1829, were Benjamin R. Curtis, afterwards Judge of the Supreme Court, James Freeman Clarke, Chandler Robbins, Samuel F. Smith (the author of "My country, 'tis of thee"), G.T. Bigelow (Judge of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts), G.T. Davis, and Benjamin Pierce.
In the class just below him (1830) was Charles Sumner; and his cousin, Wendell Phillips, with John Lothrop Motley, entered Harvard during his Junior year. George Ticknor was one of his instructors, and Josiah Quincy became president of the college before he graduated.
Throughout his whole college course Oliver Wendell Holmes maintained an excellent rank in scholarship. He was a frequent contributor to the college periodicals, and delivered several poems upon a variety of subjects. One ofthese was given before the "Hasty Pudding Club," and another entitled "Forgotten Days," at an "Exhibition." He was the class poet; was called upon to write the poem at Commencement, and was one of the sixteen chosen into the Phi Beta Kappa Society.[6]
After his graduation, he studied law one year in the Dane Law School of Harvard College. It was at this time thatThe Collegian, a periodical published by a number of the Harvard under-graduates, was started at Cambridge. To this paper the young law student sent numerous anonymous contributions, among them "Evening, by a Tailor," "The Height of the Ridiculous," "The Meeting of the Dryads," and "The Spectre Pig." A brilliant little journal it must have been with Holmes' inimitable outbursts of wit, "Lochfast's" (William H. Simmons) translations from Schiller, and the numerous pen thrusts from John O. Sargent, Robert Habersham and Theodore William Snow, who wrote under the respective signatures of "Charles Sherry," "Mr. Airy" and "Geoffery La Touche." Young Motley, too, was an occasional contributor toThe Collegian, and hisbrother-in-law, Park Benjamin, joined Holmes and Epes Sargent, in 1833, in writing a gift book called "The Harbinger," the profits of which were given to Dr. Howe's Asylum for the blind.
AFTERa year's study of law, during which time the Muses were constantly tempting him to "pen a stanza when he should engross," young Holmes determined to take up the study of medicine, which was much more congenial to his tastes than the formulas of Coke and Blackstone. Doctor James Jackson and his associates were his instructors for the following two years and a half; and then before taking his degree of M.D., he spent three years in Europe, perfecting his studies in the hospitals and lecture-rooms of Paris and Edinburgh.
Of this European tour, we find occasional allusions scattered throughout his writings. Listen, for instance, to this grand description of Salisbury Cathedral:
"It was the first cathedral we ever saw, and none has ever so impressed us since.Vast, simple, awful in dimensions and height, just beginning to grow tall at the point where our proudest steeples taper out, it fills the whole soul, pervades the vast landscape over which it reigns, and, like Niagara and the Alps, abolishes that five or six foot personality in the beholder which is fostered by keeping company with the little life of the day in its little dwellings. In the Alps your voice is as the piping of a cricket. Under the sheet of Niagara the beating of your heart seems too trivial a movement to take reckoning of. In the buttressed hollow of one of these paleozoic cathedrals you are ashamed of your ribs, and blush for the exiguous pillars of bone on which your breathing structure reposes.... These old cathedrals are beyond all comparison, what are best worth seeing of man's handiwork in Europe."
"Lively emotions very commonly do not strike us full in front, but obliquely from the side," he says at another time. "A scene or incident inundressoften affects us more than one in full costume."
Is this the mighty ocean?—is this all?
Says the Princess in Gebir. The rush that should have flooded my soul in the Coliseum did not come. But walking one day in the fields about the city, I stumbled over a fragment of broken masonry, and lo! the World's Mistress in her stone girdle—alta mænia Romæ—rose before me, and whitened my cheek with her pale shadow, as never before or since.
"I used very often, when coming home from my morning's work at one of the public institutions of Paris, to stop in at the dear old church of St. Etienne du Mont. The tomb of St. Genevieve, surrounded by burning candles and votive tablets was there; there was a noble organ with carved figures; the pulpit was borne on the oaken shoulders of a stooping Samson; and there was a marvellous staircase, like a coil of lace. These things I mention from memory, but not all of them together impressed me so much as an inscription on a small slab of marble fixed in one of the walls. It told how this Church of St. Stephen was repaired and beautified in the 16**, and how during the celebration of its re-opening, two girls of the parish (filles de la paroisse),fell from the gallery, carrying a part of the balustrade with them, to the pavement, but by miracle escaped uninjured. Two young girls, nameless, but real presences to my imagination, as much as when they came fluttering down on the tiles with a cry that outscreamed the sharpest treble in theTe Deum. All the crowd gone but these twofilles de la paroisse—gone as utterly as the dresses they wore, as the shoes that were on their feet, as the bread and meat that were in the market on that day.
"Not the great historical events, but the personal incidents that call up single sharp pictures of some human being in its pang of struggle, reach us most nearly. I remember the platform at Berne, over the parapet of which Theobald Weinzäpfli's restive horse sprang with him and landed him more than a hundred feet beneath in the lower town, not dead, but sorely broken, and no longer a wild youth, but God's servant from that day forward. I have forgotten the famous bears and all else. I remember the Percy lion on the bridge over the little river at Alnwick—the leaden lion with his tail stretched out straight like a pump-handle—and why?Because of the story of the village boy who must fain bestride the leaden tail, standing out over the water—which breaking, he dropped into the stream far below, and was taken out an idiot for the rest of his life."
Again he says: "I once ascended the spire of Strasburg Cathedral, which is the highest, I think, in Europe. It is a shaft of stone filigree-work, frightfully open, so that the guide puts his arms behind you to keep you from falling. To climb it is a noonday nightmare, and to think of having climbed it crisps all the fifty-six joints of one's twenty digits. While I was on it, 'pinnacled dim in the intense inane,' a strong wind was blowing, and I felt sure that the spire was rocking. It swayed back and forward like a stalk of rye, or a cat-o'-nine tails (bulrush) with a bobolink on it. I mentioned it to the guide, and he said that the spire did really swing back and forward, I think he said some feet.
"Keep any line of knowledge ten years and some other line will intersect it. Long after I was hunting out a paper of Dumeril's in an old journal—the 'Magazin Encyclopédique'—forl'an troiséme(1795), when I stumbled upon abrief article on the vibrations of the spire of Strasburg Cathedral. A man can shake it so the movement shall be shown in a vessel of water nearly seventy feet below the summit, and higher up the vibration is like that of an earthquake. I have seen one of those wretched wooden spires with which we very shabbily finish some of our stone churches (thinking that the lidless blue eye of heaven cannot tell the counterfeit we try to pass on it), swinging like a reed in a wind, but one would hardly think of such a thing happening in a stone spire."
Nor does he forget that dear little child he saw and heard in a French hospital. "Between two and three years old. Fell out of her chair and snapped both thigh-bones. Lying in bed, patient, gentle. Rough students round her, some in white aprons, looking fearfully businesslike; but the child placid, perfectly still. I spoke to her, and the blessed little creature answered me in a voice of such heavenly sweetness, with that reedy thrill in it which you have heard in the thrush's even-song, that I hear it at this moment. 'C'est tout comme unserin,' said the French student at my side."
The Birthplace of Oliver Wendell Holmes.
The ruins of a Roman aqueduct he describes in another place, and now and then some incident that happened in England or Scotland, may be found among his writings; but when, after three years' absence, he returns to Cambridge and delivers his poem before the "Phi Beta Kappa Society," he begs his classmates to—
Ask no garlands sought beyond the tide,But take the leaflets gathered at your side.
Ask no garlands sought beyond the tide,But take the leaflets gathered at your side.
Ask no garlands sought beyond the tide,But take the leaflets gathered at your side.
How affectionately his thoughts turned homeward is strikingly shown in the very first lines of the poem:
Scenes of my youth! awake its slumbering fire!Ye winds of memory, sweep the silent lyre!Ray of the past, if yet thou canst appear,Break through the clouds of Fancy's waning year;Chase from her breast the thin autumnal snow,If leaf or blossom still is fresh below!Long have I wandered; the returning tideBrought back an exile to his cradle's side;And as my bark her time-worn flag unrolledTo greet the land-breeze with its faded fold,So, in remembrance of my boyhood's time,I lift these ensigns of neglected rhyme;O more than blest, that all my wanderings through,My anchor falls where first my pennons flew!
Scenes of my youth! awake its slumbering fire!Ye winds of memory, sweep the silent lyre!Ray of the past, if yet thou canst appear,Break through the clouds of Fancy's waning year;Chase from her breast the thin autumnal snow,If leaf or blossom still is fresh below!Long have I wandered; the returning tideBrought back an exile to his cradle's side;And as my bark her time-worn flag unrolledTo greet the land-breeze with its faded fold,So, in remembrance of my boyhood's time,I lift these ensigns of neglected rhyme;O more than blest, that all my wanderings through,My anchor falls where first my pennons flew!
Scenes of my youth! awake its slumbering fire!Ye winds of memory, sweep the silent lyre!Ray of the past, if yet thou canst appear,Break through the clouds of Fancy's waning year;Chase from her breast the thin autumnal snow,If leaf or blossom still is fresh below!Long have I wandered; the returning tideBrought back an exile to his cradle's side;And as my bark her time-worn flag unrolledTo greet the land-breeze with its faded fold,So, in remembrance of my boyhood's time,I lift these ensigns of neglected rhyme;O more than blest, that all my wanderings through,My anchor falls where first my pennons flew!
And read yet again in another place this loving tribute to the home of his childhood:
"To what small things our memory and our affections attach themselves! I remember when I was a child that one of the girls planted some Star of Bethlehem bulbs in the southwest corner of our front yard. Well, I left the paternal roof and wandered in other lands, and learned to think in the words of strange people. But after many years, as I looked in the little front yard again, it occurred to me that there used to be some Stars of Bethlehem in the southwest corner. The grass was tall there, and the blade of the plant is very much like grass, only thicker and glossier.
"Even as Tully parted the briers and brambles when he hunted for the sphere-containing cylinder that marked the grave of Archimedes, so did I comb the grass with my fingers for my monumental memorial flower. Nature had stored my keepsake tenderly in her bosom. The glossy, faintly-streaked blades were there; they are there still, though they never flower, darkened as they are by the shade of the elms and rooted in the matted turf.
"Our hearts are held down to our homes by innumerable fibres, trivial as that I have just recalled; but Gulliver was fixed to the soil,you remember, by pinning his head a hair at a time. Even a stone, with a whitish band crossing it, belonging to the pavement of the back yard, insisted on becoming one of the talismans of memory.
"This intersusception of the ideas of inanimate objects, and their faithful storing away among the sentiments, are curiously prefigured in the material structure of the thinking centre itself. In the very core of the brain, in the part where Des Cartes placed the soul, is a small mineral deposit of grape-like masses of crystalline matter.
"But the plants that come up every year in the same place, like the Stars of Bethlehem, of all the lesser objects, give me the liveliest home-feeling."
To return to the Phi Beta Kappa poem, modestly termed by the author "A Metrical Essay," it is interesting to note Lowell's hearty appreciation of it in hisFable for Critics:
There'sHolmes, who is matchless among you for wit,A Leyden jar always full-charged, from which flitThe electrical tingles of hit after hit.In long poems 'tis painful sometimes, and invitesA thought of the way the new telegraph writes,Which pricks down its little sharp sentences spitefully,As if you got more than you'd title to rightfully.And you find yourself hoping its wild father LightningWould flame in for a second and give you a fright'ning.He has perfect sway of what I call a sham metre,But many admire it, the English pentameter,And Campbell, I think, wrote most commonly worse.With less nerve, swing and fire, in the same kind of verse.Nor e'er achieved aught in 't so worthy of praiseAs the tribute of Holmes to the grandMarseillaise.You went crazy last year over Bulwer'sNew Simon;Why, if B., to the day of his dying should rhyme on,Heaping verses on verses and tomes upon tomes,He could ne'er reach the best point and vigor of Holmes!His are just the fine hands, too, to weave you a lyricFull of fancy, fun, feeling, or spiced with satyricIn a measure so kindly, you doubt if the toesThat are trodden upon, are your own or your foes.
There'sHolmes, who is matchless among you for wit,A Leyden jar always full-charged, from which flitThe electrical tingles of hit after hit.In long poems 'tis painful sometimes, and invitesA thought of the way the new telegraph writes,Which pricks down its little sharp sentences spitefully,As if you got more than you'd title to rightfully.And you find yourself hoping its wild father LightningWould flame in for a second and give you a fright'ning.He has perfect sway of what I call a sham metre,But many admire it, the English pentameter,And Campbell, I think, wrote most commonly worse.With less nerve, swing and fire, in the same kind of verse.Nor e'er achieved aught in 't so worthy of praiseAs the tribute of Holmes to the grandMarseillaise.You went crazy last year over Bulwer'sNew Simon;Why, if B., to the day of his dying should rhyme on,Heaping verses on verses and tomes upon tomes,He could ne'er reach the best point and vigor of Holmes!His are just the fine hands, too, to weave you a lyricFull of fancy, fun, feeling, or spiced with satyricIn a measure so kindly, you doubt if the toesThat are trodden upon, are your own or your foes.
There'sHolmes, who is matchless among you for wit,A Leyden jar always full-charged, from which flitThe electrical tingles of hit after hit.In long poems 'tis painful sometimes, and invitesA thought of the way the new telegraph writes,Which pricks down its little sharp sentences spitefully,As if you got more than you'd title to rightfully.And you find yourself hoping its wild father LightningWould flame in for a second and give you a fright'ning.He has perfect sway of what I call a sham metre,But many admire it, the English pentameter,And Campbell, I think, wrote most commonly worse.With less nerve, swing and fire, in the same kind of verse.Nor e'er achieved aught in 't so worthy of praiseAs the tribute of Holmes to the grandMarseillaise.You went crazy last year over Bulwer'sNew Simon;Why, if B., to the day of his dying should rhyme on,Heaping verses on verses and tomes upon tomes,He could ne'er reach the best point and vigor of Holmes!His are just the fine hands, too, to weave you a lyricFull of fancy, fun, feeling, or spiced with satyricIn a measure so kindly, you doubt if the toesThat are trodden upon, are your own or your foes.
This tribute of Holmes to the grand Marseillaise is indeed one of the finest passages in a poem abounding in point and vigor, as well as in fancy and feeling. Who can read these stirring lines without a sympathetic thrill for the watching, weeping Rouget de l'Isle, composing in one night both music and words of the nameless song?
The city slept beneath the moonbeam's glance,Her white walls gleaming through the vines of France,And all was hushed save where the footsteps fellOn some high tower, of midnight sentinel.But one still watched; no self-encircled woesChased from his lids the angel of repose;He watched, he wept, for thoughts of bitter yearsBowed his dark lashes, wet with burning tears;His country's sufferings and her children's shameStreamed o'er his memory like a forest's flame,Each treasured insult, each remembered wrong,Rolled through his heart and kindled into song;His taper faded; and the morning galesSwept through the world the war song of Marseilles!
The city slept beneath the moonbeam's glance,Her white walls gleaming through the vines of France,And all was hushed save where the footsteps fellOn some high tower, of midnight sentinel.But one still watched; no self-encircled woesChased from his lids the angel of repose;He watched, he wept, for thoughts of bitter yearsBowed his dark lashes, wet with burning tears;His country's sufferings and her children's shameStreamed o'er his memory like a forest's flame,Each treasured insult, each remembered wrong,Rolled through his heart and kindled into song;His taper faded; and the morning galesSwept through the world the war song of Marseilles!
The city slept beneath the moonbeam's glance,Her white walls gleaming through the vines of France,And all was hushed save where the footsteps fellOn some high tower, of midnight sentinel.But one still watched; no self-encircled woesChased from his lids the angel of repose;He watched, he wept, for thoughts of bitter yearsBowed his dark lashes, wet with burning tears;His country's sufferings and her children's shameStreamed o'er his memory like a forest's flame,Each treasured insult, each remembered wrong,Rolled through his heart and kindled into song;His taper faded; and the morning galesSwept through the world the war song of Marseilles!
In this same Phi Beta Kappa poem may be found that beautiful pastoral,The Cambridge Churchyard, and
Since the lyric dressRelieves the statelier with its sprightliness,
Since the lyric dressRelieves the statelier with its sprightliness,
Since the lyric dressRelieves the statelier with its sprightliness,
the stirring verses onOld Ironsidesare here repeated. Said one who heard young Holmes deliver this poem in the college church:
"Extremely youthful in his appearance, bubbling over with the mingled humor and pathos that have always marked his poetry, and sparkling with the coruscations of his peculiar genius, he delivered the poem with a clear, ringing enunciation which imparted to the hearers his own enjoyment of his thoughts and expressions."
IN1836, Oliver Wendell Holmes took his degree of M.D. The following year was made sadly memorable to the happy family at the parsonage by the death of the beloved father. He had reached his threescore years and ten, but still seemed so vigorous in mind and body that neither his family nor the parish were prepared for the sad event. Mary and Ann, the two eldest daughters, were already married; the one to Usher Parson, M.D., the other to Honorable Charles Wentworth Upham. Sarah, the youngest, had died in early childhood, and only Oliver Wendell and his brother John remained of the once large family at the parsonage. Mrs. Holmes still continued to reside with her two sons in the old gambrel-roofed house which her father, Judge Oliver Wendell, had bought for her at the time of her marriage.
ThePoet at the Breakfast-Tablethus describes the delightful old dwelling now used as one of the College buildings:
"The worst of a modern stylish mansion is, that it has no place for ghosts.... Now the old house had wainscots behind which the mice were always scampering, and squeaking, and rattling down the plaster, and enacting family scenes and parlor theatricals. It had a cellar where the cold slug clung to the walls and the misanthropic spider withdrew from the garish day; where the green mould loved to grow, and the long, white, potato-shoots went feeling along the floor if happily they might find the daylight; it had great brick pillars, always in a cold sweat with holding up the burden they had been aching under day and night for a century and more; it had sepulchral arches closed by rough doors that hung on hinges rotten with rust, behind which doors, if there was not a heap of bones connected with a mysterious disappearance of long ago, there well might have been, for it was just the place to look for them.
"Let us look at the garret as I can reproduce it from memory. It has a flooring oflath, with ridges of mortar squeezed up between them, which if you tread on you will go to—the Lord have mercy on you! where will you go to?—the same being crossed by narrow bridges of boards, on which you may put your feet, but with fear and trembling.
"Above you and around you are beams and joists, on some of which you may see, when the light is let in, the marks of the conchoidal clippings of the broadaxes, showing the rude way in which the timber was shaped, as it came, full of sap, from the neighboring forest. It is a realm of darkness and thick dust, and shroudlike cobwebs and dead things they wrap in their gray folds. For a garret is like a seashore, where wrecks are thrown up and slowly go to pieces. There is the cradle which the old man you just remember was rocked in; there is the ruin of the bedstead he died on; that ugly slanting contrivance used to be put under his pillow in the days when his breath came hard; there is his old chair with both arms gone, symbol of the desolate time when he had nothing earthly left to lean on; there is the large wooden reel which the blear-eyed old deacon sent the minister's lady, who thanked him graciously, and twirled it smilingly, and in fitting season bowed it out decently to the limbo of troublesome conveniences. And there are old leather portmanteaus, like stranded porpoises, their mouths gaping in gaunt hunger for the food with which they used to be gorged to bulging repletion; and the empty churn with its idle dasher which the Nancys and Phebes, who have left their comfortable places to the Bridgets and Norahs, used to handle to good purpose; and the brown, shaky old spinningwheel, which was running, it may be, in the days when they were hanging the Salem witches.
"Under the dark and haunted garret were attic chambers which themselves had histories.... The rooms of the second story, the chambers of birth and death, are sacred to silent memories.
"Let us go down to the ground floor. I retain my doubts about those dents on the floor of the right-hand room, the study of successive occupants, said to have been made by the butts of the Continental militia's firelocks, but this was the cause the story told me in childhood, laid them to. That militaryconsultations were held in that room when the house was General Ward's headquarters, that the Provincial generals and colonels and other men of war there planned the movement which ended in the fortifying of Bunker's Hill, that Warren slept in the house the night before the battle, that President Langdon went forth from the western door and prayed for God's blessing on the men just setting forth on their bloody expedition—all these things have been told, and perhaps none of them need be doubted....
"In the days of my earliest remembrance, a row of tall Lombardy poplars mounted guard on the western side of the old mansion. Whether like the cypress, these trees suggest the idea of the funeral torch or the monumental spire, whether their tremulous leaves make us afraid by sympathy with their nervous thrills, whether the faint balsamic smell of their leaves and their closely swathed limbs have in them vague hints of dead Pharaohs stiffened in their cerements, I will not guess; but they always seemed to me to give an air of sepulchral sadness to the house before which they stood sentries.
"Not so with the row of elms you may see leading up towards the western entrance. I think the patriarch of them all went over in the great gale of 1815; I know I used to shake the youngest of them with my hands, stout as it is now, with a trunk that would defy the bully of Crotona, or the strong man whoseliaisonwith the Lady Delilah proved so disastrous.
"The College plain would be nothing without its elms. As the long hair of a woman is a glory to her, so are these green tresses that bank themselves against the sky in thick clustered masses, the ornament and the pride of the classic green....
"There is a row of elms just in front of the old house on the south. When I was a child the one at the southwest corner was struck by lightning, and one of its limbs and a long ribbon of bark torn away. The tree never fully recovered its symmetry and vigor, and forty years and more afterwards a second thunderbolt crashed upon it and set its heart on fire, like those of the lost souls in the Hall of Eblis. Heaven had twice blasted it, and the axe finished what the lightning had begun."
"Ah me!" he exclaims at another time, "what strains of unwritten verse pulsate through my soul when I open a certain closet in the ancient house where I was born! On its shelves used to lie bundles of sweet marjoram and pennyroyal and lavender and mint and3 catnip; there apples were stored until their seeds should grow black, which happy period there were sharp little milk teeth always ready to anticipate; there peaches lay in the dark, thinking of the sunshine they had lost, until, like the hearts of saints that dream of heaven in their sorrow, they grew fragrant as the breath of angels. The odorous echo of a score of dead summers lingers yet in those dim recesses."
IN1839, Doctor Holmes was appointed Professor of Anatomy and Physiology in Dartmouth College, and pleasantly describes inThe Professor, his "Autumnal sojourn by the Connecticut, where it comes loitering down from its mountain fastnesses like a great lord swallowing up the small proprietary rivulets very quietly as it goes." The little country tavern where he stayed while delivering his lectures, he calls "that caravansary on the banks of the stream where Ledyard launched his log canoe, and the jovial old Colonel used to lead the Commencement processions." And what a charming description this of the little town of Hanover, "where blue Ascutney looked down from the far distance and the 'hills of Beulah' rolled up the opposite horizon in soft, climbing masses, so suggestive of the Pilgrim's Heavenward Paththat he (the Professor) used to look through his old 'Dollond' to see if the Shining Ones were not within range of sight—sweet visions, sweetest in those Sunday walks which carried him by the peaceful common, through the solemn village lying in cataleptic stillness under the shadow of the rod of Moses, to the terminus of his harmless stroll, the spreading beech-tree."
In 1840, Doctor Holmes was married to Amelia Lee Jackson, a daughter of Hon. Charles Jackson, formerly judge of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts. The first home of the young couple was at No. 8, Montgomery Place, the house at the left-hand side of the court, and next the farther corner. Here Doctor Holmes resided for about eighteen years,[7]and here all his children were born.
"When he entered that door, two shadows glided over the threshold; five lingered in the doorway when he passed through it for the last time, and one of the shadows was claimed by its owner to be longer than his own. What changes he saw in that quiet place! Death rained through every roof but his; children came into life, grew to maturity, wedded,faded away, threw themselves away; the whole drama of life was played in that stock company's theatre of a dozen houses, one of which was his, and no deep sorrow or severe calamity ever entered his dwelling in that little court where he lived in gay loneliness so long."
In order to devote himself more strictly to his practice in Boston, Doctor Holmes resigned his professorship at Dartmouth College soon after his marriage. During the summer months, however, he delivered lectures before the Berkshire Medical School at Pittsfield, Mass., and established his summer residence "up among those hills that shut in the amber-flowing Housatonic, in the home overlooking the winding stream and the smooth, flat meadow; looked down upon by wild hills where the tracks of bears and catamounts may yet sometimes be seen upon the winter snow—a home," he adds, "where seven blessed summers were passed which stand in memory like the seven golden candlesticks in the beatific vision of the holy dreamer."
The township of Pontoosuc, now Pittsfield, including some twenty-four thousand acres, was bought by Doctor Holmes' great-grandfather, JacobWendell, about the year 1734. It was on a small part of this large possession that "Canoe Place," the pleasant summer home of Doctor Holmes, was built.
Hawthorne was then living at Lenox, which is only a few miles from Pittsfield, and in his contribution to Lowell's magazine,The Pioneer, in 1843, he describes in hisHall of Fantasy, the poets he saw "talking in groups, with a liveliness of expression, or ready smile, and a light, intellectual laughter which showed how rapidly the shafts of wit were glancing to and fro among them. In the most vivacious of these," he adds, "I recognized Holmes."
Beside Hawthorne, there was Herman Melville, Miss Sedgwick and Fanny Kemble near by on those "maple-shadowed plains of Berkshire," while Bryant and Ellery Channing not unfrequently joined the brilliant circle in their summer trips to the Stockbridge hills.
In the Boston home of Doctor Holmes, John Lothrop Motley was a welcome visitor—a man whose "generous sympathies with popular liberty no homage paid to his genius by the class whose admiring welcome is most seductive to scholars could ever spoil." Both young men were members of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and after the death of Motley, Holmes became his biographer.
Charles Sumner formed another of this pleasant literary coterie, and is described by Doctor Holmes, after a short acquaintance, as "an amiable, blameless young man; pleasant, affable and cheerful." Years after, when Sumner was assaulted in the Senate, Doctor Holmes, at a public dinner in Boston, denounced in strong language, the shameful outrage as an assault not only upon the man, but upon the Union.
At the Berkshire festivals, the poet was often called upon to furnish a song, and brimful of wit and wisdom they always were, though often composed upon the spur of the moment. Here is a part of one of them:
Come back to your mother, ye children, for shame,Who have wandered like truants, for riches or fame!With a smile on her face, and a sprig in her cap,She calls you to feast from her bountiful lap.Come out from your alleys, your courts, and your lanes,And breathe, like young eagles, the air of our plains,Take a whiff from our fields, and your excellent wivesWill declare it's all nonsense insuring your lives.Come you of the law, who can talk, if you please,Till the Man in the Moon will declare it's a cheese,And leave 'the old lady that never tell lies,'To sleep with her handkerchief over her eyes.Ye healers of men, for a moment declineYour feats in the rhubarb and ipecac line;While you shut up your turnpike, your neighbors can goThe old roundabout road, to the regions below.You clerk, on whose ears are a couple of pens,And whose head is an anthill of units and tens,Though Plato denies you, we welcome you stillAs a featherless biped, in spite of your quill.Poor drudge of the city! how happy he feelsWith the burrs on his legs and the grass at his heels!Nododgerbehind, his bandannas to share,No constable grumbling "You mustn't walk there!"In yonder green meadow, to memory dear,He slaps a mosquito and brushes a tear;The dewdrops hang round him on blossoms and shoots,He breathes but one sigh for his youth and his boots.There stands the old schoolhouse, hard by the old churchThat tree at its side had the flavor of birch;O sweet were the days of his juvenile tricks,Though the prairie of youth had so many "big licks."By the side of yon river he weeps and he slumps,The boots fill with water as if they were pumps;Till, sated with rapture, he steals to his bed,With a glow in his heart, and a cold in his head.
Come back to your mother, ye children, for shame,Who have wandered like truants, for riches or fame!With a smile on her face, and a sprig in her cap,She calls you to feast from her bountiful lap.Come out from your alleys, your courts, and your lanes,And breathe, like young eagles, the air of our plains,Take a whiff from our fields, and your excellent wivesWill declare it's all nonsense insuring your lives.Come you of the law, who can talk, if you please,Till the Man in the Moon will declare it's a cheese,And leave 'the old lady that never tell lies,'To sleep with her handkerchief over her eyes.Ye healers of men, for a moment declineYour feats in the rhubarb and ipecac line;While you shut up your turnpike, your neighbors can goThe old roundabout road, to the regions below.You clerk, on whose ears are a couple of pens,And whose head is an anthill of units and tens,Though Plato denies you, we welcome you stillAs a featherless biped, in spite of your quill.Poor drudge of the city! how happy he feelsWith the burrs on his legs and the grass at his heels!Nododgerbehind, his bandannas to share,No constable grumbling "You mustn't walk there!"In yonder green meadow, to memory dear,He slaps a mosquito and brushes a tear;The dewdrops hang round him on blossoms and shoots,He breathes but one sigh for his youth and his boots.There stands the old schoolhouse, hard by the old churchThat tree at its side had the flavor of birch;O sweet were the days of his juvenile tricks,Though the prairie of youth had so many "big licks."By the side of yon river he weeps and he slumps,The boots fill with water as if they were pumps;Till, sated with rapture, he steals to his bed,With a glow in his heart, and a cold in his head.
Come back to your mother, ye children, for shame,Who have wandered like truants, for riches or fame!With a smile on her face, and a sprig in her cap,She calls you to feast from her bountiful lap.
Come out from your alleys, your courts, and your lanes,And breathe, like young eagles, the air of our plains,Take a whiff from our fields, and your excellent wivesWill declare it's all nonsense insuring your lives.
Come you of the law, who can talk, if you please,Till the Man in the Moon will declare it's a cheese,And leave 'the old lady that never tell lies,'To sleep with her handkerchief over her eyes.
Ye healers of men, for a moment declineYour feats in the rhubarb and ipecac line;While you shut up your turnpike, your neighbors can goThe old roundabout road, to the regions below.
You clerk, on whose ears are a couple of pens,And whose head is an anthill of units and tens,Though Plato denies you, we welcome you stillAs a featherless biped, in spite of your quill.
Poor drudge of the city! how happy he feelsWith the burrs on his legs and the grass at his heels!Nododgerbehind, his bandannas to share,No constable grumbling "You mustn't walk there!"
In yonder green meadow, to memory dear,He slaps a mosquito and brushes a tear;The dewdrops hang round him on blossoms and shoots,He breathes but one sigh for his youth and his boots.
There stands the old schoolhouse, hard by the old churchThat tree at its side had the flavor of birch;O sweet were the days of his juvenile tricks,Though the prairie of youth had so many "big licks."
By the side of yon river he weeps and he slumps,The boots fill with water as if they were pumps;Till, sated with rapture, he steals to his bed,With a glow in his heart, and a cold in his head.
At the annual dinner of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, in 1843, Doctor Holmes read the fine poem entitledTerpsichore.
Three years later he deliveredUrania, A Rhyme Lessonbefore the Boston Mercantile Library Association. "To save a question that is sometimes put," remarks the poet, "it is proper to say that in naming these two poems after two of the Muses, nothing more was intended than a suggestion of their general character and aim."
WHENDoctor Warren gave up the Parkman professorship at Harvard, in 1847, Doctor Holmes was appointed to take his place as Professor of Anatomy and Physiology. For eight months of the year, four lectures are delivered each week in this department of the college, and yet Doctor Holmes still found time "between whiles," to attend to his Boston practice, and to write many charming poems and essays. He also entered the lyceum arena, "an original American contrivance," as Theodore Parker describes it in 1857, "for educating the people. The world has nothing like it. In it are combined the best things of the Church: i.e., the preaching; and of the College: i.e., the informing thought, with some of the fun of the theatre. Besides, it gives the rural districts a chance to see the men they read about—to see the lions—for the lecturer isalso a show to the eyes. For ten years past six or eight of the most progressive minds in America have been lecturing fifty or a hundred times a year."
Among the many subjects that Doctor Holmes touched upon in these lyceum lectures was a fine, witty, and remarkably just criticism on theEnglish Poets of the Nineteenth Century. What a pity that Oscar Wilde and his brother poets of this later day could not have the benefit of just such a clear, microscopic analysis! What the Autocrat himself thought of these lecturing tours through the country we have in his own words:
"I have played the part of 'Poor Gentleman' before many audiences," he says; "more, I trust, than I shall ever face again. I did not wear a stage costume, nor a wig, nor mustaches of burnt cork; but I was placarded and announced as a public performer, and at the proper hour I came forward with the ballet-dancer's smile upon my countenance, and made my bow and acted my part. I have seen my name stuck up in letters so big that I was ashamed to show myself in the place by daylight. I have gone to a town with a sober literary essay in mypocket, and seen myself everywhere announced as the most desperate ofbuffos. I have been through as many hardships as Ulysses in the exercise of my histrionic vocation. I have sometimes felt as if I were a wandering spirit, and this great, unchanging multivertebrate which I faced night after night was one ever-listening animal, which writhed along after me wherever I fled, and coiled at my feet every evening turning up to me the same sleepless eyes which I thought I had closed with my last drowsy incantation."
Of his audiences he writes again as follows:
"Two lyceum assemblies, of five hundred each, are so nearly alike, that they are absolutely undistinguishable in many cases by any definite mark, and there is nothing but the place and time by which one can tell the 'remarkably intelligent audience' of a town in New York or Ohio from one in any New England town of similar size. Of course, if any principle of selection has come in, as in those special associations of young men which are common in cities, it deranges the uniformity of the assemblage. But let there be no such interfering circumstances, and one knows pretty well eventhe look the audience will have, before he goes in. Front seats, a few old folks—shiny-headed—slant up best ear toward the speaker—drop off asleep after a while, when the air begins to get a little narcotic with carbonic acid. Bright women's faces, young and middle-aged, a little behind these, but toward the front—(pick out the best, and lecture mainly to that). Here and there a countenance, sharp and scholarlike, and a dozen pretty female ones sprinkled about. An indefinite number of pairs of young people—happy, but not always very attentive. Boys in the background more or less quiet. Dull faces here, there—in how many places! I don't say dullpeople, but faces without a ray of sympathy or a movement of expression. They are what kill the lecturer. These negative faces with their vacuous eyes and stony lineaments pump and suck the warm soul out of him;—that is the chief reason why lecturers grow so pale before the season is over.
"Out of all these inevitable elements the audience is generated—a great compound vertebrate, as much like fifty others you have seen as any two mammals of the same species are like each other."
"Pretty nigh killed himself," says the good landlady, "goin' about lecterin' two or three winters, talking in cold country lyceums—as he used to say—goin' home to cold parlors and bein' treated to cold apples and cold water, and then goin' up into a cold bed in a cold chamber, and comin' home next mornin' with a cold in his head as bad as the horse distemper. Then he'd look kind of sorry for havin' said it, and tell how kind some of the good women was to him; how one spread an eiderdown comforter for him, and another fixed up somethin' hot for him after the lectur, and another one said, 'There now, you smoke that cigar of yours after the lectur, jest as if you was at home,' and if they'd all been like that, he'd have gone on lecturing forever, but, as it was, he had got pooty nigh enough of it, and preferred a nateral death to puttin' himself out of the world by such violent means as lecturin'."
To these graphic pictures of the "lyceum lecturer" we would add one more which was given by Mr. J.W. Harper, at the Holmes Breakfast.
"I well remember," he said, "the first timeI saw Doctor Holmes. It was long ago; not as our Autocrat expresses it, 'in the year eighteen hundred and ever so few;' nor, as Thackeray has it, 'when the present century was in its teens.' It was just after the close of the last half century, and on a cold winter's afternoon, when the sun was fast setting behind the then ungilded dome of the State House, and it was in old Bromfield street. It was not in the Bromfield Street Methodist Church, nor in the contiguous Methodist inn, known as the Bromfield House, which, for many years, might have been the convenient resort of good Methodist elders, and of the peripatetic presiding elders, who were called by the genial Bishop Wainwright, the 'bob-tailed bishops' of their flocks and districts.... I was in the large stable adjoining the Bromfield House, endeavoring to secure a sleigh, when there entered a gentleman apparently of my own age. He came in quickly, and with impatience demanded the immediate production of a team and sleigh, which, though ordered for him, had somehow been forgotten. The new-comer, it was evident, was not to be trifled with. There was no nonsense about him, and I was not surprised,when, a few years later, I learned that he had become an Autocrat.
"On that particular night he had a long drive before him, for he was to lecture at Newburyport, or Nantasket, or Nantucket, or some other then unannexed suburb of Boston. I doubt if the horse survived the drive, and I am quite sure he is not now living. But the driver lives, and the young New Yorker who then admired him, and would fain have driven with him on that cold winter night, has since, in common with thousands of other New Yorkers, been filled with grateful admiration for what that driver has done for literature, and for the happiness and improvement of the world."
In 1838 Doctor Holmes wrote theBoylston Prize Dissertation, and in 1842,Homœopothy and its kindred Delusions. The Boylston prizes were established in 1803, by Ward Nicholas Boylston. Doctor Holmes gained three of these prizes, and theDissertations, one of which was upon Intermittent Fever, were published together in book form in 1838.
When, in February of the same year (1842), the young men of Boston gave a dinner to Charles Dickens, Doctor Holmes welcomed thedistinguished visitor in the following beautiful song: