CHAPTER XVI.

Alas! my birds, you wisdom wantOf perils you are ignorant;Ofttimes in grass, on trees, in flight,Sore accidents on you may light;Oh, to your safety have an eye,So happy may you live and die.

"In accepting your kind invitation, I confess that I was ignorant of my perils. I did not follow the counsel of my grandmamma with the four g's in having an eye to my own safety. For I fear that if I had dreamed of being called on to answer for American literature, one of those 'previous engagements,' which crop out so opportunely, would have stood between me and my present trying position. I had meant, if called upon, to say a few words about a Japanese youth who studied law in Boston, a very cultivated and singularly charming young person, who died not very long after his return to his native country. Some of you may remember young Enouie—I am not sure that I spell it rightly, and I know that I cannot pronounce it properly; for from his own lips it was as soft as an angel's whisper. His intelligence, his delicate breeding, the loveliness of his character, captivated all who knew him. We loved him, and we mourned for him as if he had been a child of our own soil. But of him I must say no more.

"In speaking of American literature we naturally think first of our historical efforts. We see that books hold but a small part of American history. The axe and the ploughshare are the two pens with which our New World annals have been principally written, with schoolhouses as notes of interrogation, and steeples as exclamation points of pious adoration and gratitude. Within half a century the railroad has ruled our broad page all over, and rewritten the story, with States for new chapters and cities for paragraphs. This is the kind of history which he who runs may read, and he must run fast and far if he means to read any considerable part of it.

"But we must not forget our political history, perishable in great measure as to its form, long enduring in its results. This literature is the index of our progress—in both directions—forward and the contrary. From the days of Washington and Franklin to the times still fresh in our memory, from the Declaration of Independence to the proclamation which enfranchised the colored race, our political literature, with all its terrible blunders and short-comings, has been, after all, the fairest expression the world has yet seen of what a free people and a free press have to say and to show for themselves.

"But besides 'Congressional Documents' and the like, the terror of librarians and the delight of paper-makers, we do a good deal of other printing. We make some books, a good many books, a great many books, so many that the hyperbole at the end of St. John's gospel would hardly be an extravagance in speaking of them. And among these are a number of histories which hold an honorable place on the shelves of all the great libraries of Christendom. Why should I enumerate them? For history is a Boston specialty. From the days of Prescott and Ticknor to those of Motley and Parkman, we have always had an historian or two on hand, as they used always to have a lion or two in the Tower of London.

"Next to the historians naturally come the story-tellers and romancers. The essential difference is—I would not apply the rough side of the remark to historians like the best of our own, but it is very often the fact—that history tells lies about real persons and fiction tells truth through the mouths of unreal ones. England threw open the side doors of its library to Irving. The continent flungwide its folding doors to Cooper. Laplace was once asked who was the greatest mathematician of Germany. 'Pfaff is the greatest,' he answered. 'I thought Gauss was,' the questioner said. 'You asked me,' rejoined Laplace, 'who was the greatest mathematician of Germany. Gauss was the greatest mathematician of Europe.' So, I suppose we might sayThe Pilotis or was the most popular book ever written in America, butUncle Tom's Cabinis the most popular story ever published in the world. And ifThe Heart of Mid Lothianadded a new glory of romance to the traditions of Auld Reekie,The Scarlet Letterdid as much for the memories of our own New England. I need not speak of the living writers, some of whom are among us, who have changed the old scornful question into 'Whodoes notread an American book?'

"As to poetical literature, I must confess that, except a line or two of Philip Freneau's, I know little worthy of special remembrance before the beginning of this century, always excepting, as in duty bound, the verses of my manifold grandmother. The conditions ofthe country were unfavorable to the poetical habit of mind. The voice that broke the silence was that of Bryant, a clear and smooth baritone, if I may borrow a musical term, with a gamut of a few notes of a grave and manly quality. Then came Longfellow, the poet of the fireside, of the library, of all gentle souls and cultivated tastes, whose Muse breathed a soft contralto that was melody itself, and Emerson, with notes that reached an octave higher than any American poet—a singer whose

Voice fell like a falling star.

Like that of the bird addressed by Wordsworth—

At once far off and near,

it was a

CryWhich made [us] look a thousand ways,In bush and tree and sky;

for whether it soared from the earth or dropped from heaven, it was next to impossible to divine.

"I will not speak of the living poets of the old or the new generation. It belongs to theyoung to give the heartiest welcome to the new brood of singers. Samuel Rogers said that when he heard a new book praised, he read an old one. Mr. Emerson, in one of his later essays, advises us never to read a book that is not a year old. This I will say, that every month shows us in the magazines, and even in the newspapers, verse that would have made a reputation in the early days of theNorth American Review, but which attracts little more notice than a breaking bubble.

"A great improvement is noticeable in the character of criticism, which is leaving the hands of the 'general utility' writers and passing into the hands of experts. The true critic is the last product of literary civilization. It costs as great an effort to humanize the being known by that name as it does to make a good church-member of a scalping savage. Criticism is a noble function, but only so in noble hands. We have just welcomed Mr. Arnold as its worthy English representative; we could not secure our creditors more handsomely than we have done by leaving Mr. Lowell in pledge for our visitor's safe return.

"One more hopeful mark of literary progress is seen in our cyclopædias, our periodicals, our newspapers, and I may add our indexes. I would commend to the attention of our enlightened friends such works as Mr. Pool's greatIndex to Periodical Literature, Mr. Alibone'sDictionary of Authors, and theIndex Medicus, now publishing at Washington—a wonderful achievement of organized industry, still carried on under the superintendence of Doctor Billings, and well deserving examination by all scholars, whatever their calling.

"We have learned so much from our Japanese friends, that we should be thankful to pay them back something in return. With art such as they have, they must also have a literature showing the same originality, grace, facility and simple effectiveness. Let us hope they will carry away something of our intellectual products, as well as those good wishes which follow them wherever they show their beautiful works of art and their pleasant and always welcome faces."

DOCTORHolmes has two sons and one daughter. Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior, his eldest child, was born in 1841. When a young lad, he attended the school of Mr. E.S. Dixwell, in Boston, and it was here that he met his future wife, Miss Fannie Dixwell. In his graduating year at Harvard College (1861), he joined the Fourth Battalion of Infantry, commanded by Major Thomas G. Stevenson. The company was at that time stationed at Fort Independence, Boston Harbor, and it was there that young Holmes wrote his poem for Class Day. He served three years in the war, and was wounded first in the breast at Ball's Bluff, and then in the neck at the Battle of Antietam.

In Doctor Holmes'Hunt after the Captain, we have not only a vivid picture of war times,but a most touching revelation of fatherly love and solicitude. The young captain was wounded yet again at Sharpsburgh, and was afterwards brevetted as Lieutenant-Colonel. During General Grant's campaign of 1864 he served as aide-de-camp to Brigadier-General H.G. Wright. After the war he entered the Harvard Law School, and in 1866 received the degree of LL. B. Since then he has practised law in Boston, and has written many valuable articles upon legal subjects.

His edition of Kent'sCommentaries on American Law, to which he devoted three years of careful labor, has received the highest encomiums, and his volume onThe Common Lawforms an indispensable part of every law student's library.

In 1882, he was appointed Professor in the Harvard Law School, and a few weeks later was elected Justice in the Supreme Court of Massachusetts.

At the Lawyers' Banquet, given January 30th, 1883, at the Hotel Vendome, Honorable William G. Russell thus introduced the father of the newly-appointed judge:

"We come now to a many-sided subject, andI know not on which side to attack him with any hope of capturing him. I might hail him as our poet, for he was born a poet; they are all born so. If he didn't lisp in numbers, it was because he spoke plainly at a very early age. I might hail him as physician, and a long and well-spent life in that profession would justify it; but I don't believe it will ever be known whether he has cured more cases of dyspepsia and blues by his poems or his powders and his pills. I might hail him as professor, and as professoremeritushe has added a new wreath to his brow. I might hail him as Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, for there he had a long reign. He will defend himself with courage, for he never showed the white feather but once, and that is, that he does not dare to be as funny as he can. A tough subject, surely, and I must try him on the tender side, the paternal. I give you the father who went in search of a captain, and, finding him, presents to us now his son, the judge."

On rising, Doctor Holmes held up a sheet of paper, and said, "You see before you" (referring to the paper) "all that you have to fearor hope. For thirty-five years I have taught anatomy. I have often heard of the roots of the tongue, but I never found them. The danger of a tongue let loose you have had opportunity to know before, but the danger of a scrap of paper like this is so trivial that I hardly need to apologize for it."

His Honor's father yet remains,His proud paternal posture firm in;But, while his right he still maintainsTo wield the household rod and reins,He bows before the filial ermine.What curious tales has life in store,With all its must-bes and its may-bes!The sage of eighty years and moreOnce crept a nursling on the floor,—Kings, conquerors, judges, all were babies.The fearless soldier, who has facedThe serried bayonets' gleam appalling,For nothing save a pin misplacedThe peaceful nursery has disgracedWith hours of unheroic bawling.The mighty monarch, whose renownFills up the stately page historic,Has howled to waken half the town,And finished off by gulping downHis castor oil or paregoric.The justice, who, in gown and cap,Condemns a wretch to strangulation,Has scratched his nurse and spilled his pap,And sprawled across his mother's lapFor wholesome law's administration.Ah, life has many a reef to shunBefore in port we drop our anchor,But when its course is nobly runLook aft! for there the work was done.Life owes its headway to the spanker!Yon seat of justice well might aweThe fairest manhood's half-blown summer;There Parsons scourged the laggard law,There reigned and ruled majestic Shaw,—What ghosts to hail the last new-comer!One cause of fear I faintly name,—The dread lest duty's derelictionShall give so rarely cause for blameOur guileless voters will exclaim,"No need of human jurisdiction!"What keeps the doctor's trade alive?Bad air, bad water; more's the pity!But lawyers walk where doctors drive,And starve in streets where surgeons thrive,Our Boston is so pure a city.What call for judge or court, indeed,When righteousness prevails so through itOur virtuous car-conductors needOnly a card whereon they read"Do right; it's naughty not to do it!"The whirligig of time goes round,And changes all things but affection;One blessed comfort may be foundIn heaven's broad statute which has boundEach household to its head's protection.If e'er aggrieved, attacked, accused,A sire may claim a son's devotionTo shield his innocence abused,As old Anchises freely usedHis offspring's legs for locomotion.You smile. You did not come to weep,Nor I my weakness to be showing;And these gay stanzas, slight and cheap,Have served their simple use,—to keepA father's eyes from overflowing.

His Honor's father yet remains,His proud paternal posture firm in;But, while his right he still maintainsTo wield the household rod and reins,He bows before the filial ermine.

What curious tales has life in store,With all its must-bes and its may-bes!The sage of eighty years and moreOnce crept a nursling on the floor,—Kings, conquerors, judges, all were babies.

The fearless soldier, who has facedThe serried bayonets' gleam appalling,For nothing save a pin misplacedThe peaceful nursery has disgracedWith hours of unheroic bawling.

The mighty monarch, whose renownFills up the stately page historic,Has howled to waken half the town,And finished off by gulping downHis castor oil or paregoric.

The justice, who, in gown and cap,Condemns a wretch to strangulation,Has scratched his nurse and spilled his pap,And sprawled across his mother's lapFor wholesome law's administration.

Ah, life has many a reef to shunBefore in port we drop our anchor,But when its course is nobly runLook aft! for there the work was done.Life owes its headway to the spanker!

Yon seat of justice well might aweThe fairest manhood's half-blown summer;There Parsons scourged the laggard law,There reigned and ruled majestic Shaw,—What ghosts to hail the last new-comer!

One cause of fear I faintly name,—The dread lest duty's derelictionShall give so rarely cause for blameOur guileless voters will exclaim,"No need of human jurisdiction!"

What keeps the doctor's trade alive?Bad air, bad water; more's the pity!But lawyers walk where doctors drive,And starve in streets where surgeons thrive,Our Boston is so pure a city.

What call for judge or court, indeed,When righteousness prevails so through itOur virtuous car-conductors needOnly a card whereon they read"Do right; it's naughty not to do it!"

The whirligig of time goes round,And changes all things but affection;One blessed comfort may be foundIn heaven's broad statute which has boundEach household to its head's protection.

If e'er aggrieved, attacked, accused,A sire may claim a son's devotionTo shield his innocence abused,As old Anchises freely usedHis offspring's legs for locomotion.

You smile. You did not come to weep,Nor I my weakness to be showing;And these gay stanzas, slight and cheap,Have served their simple use,—to keepA father's eyes from overflowing.

Doctor Holmes' daughter, who bore her mother's name, Amelia Jackson, married the late John Turner Sargent. In herSketches and Reminiscences of the Radical Club, we have some pithy remarks of Doctor Holmes'. To speak without premeditation, he says, on a carefully written essay, made him feel as he should if, at a chemical lecture, somebody should pass around a precipitate, and when the mixture had become turbid should request him to give his opinion concerning it. The fallacies continually rising in such a discussion fromthe want of a proper understanding of terms, always made him feel as if quicksilver had been substituted for the ordinary silver of speech. The only true way to criticize such an essay was to take it home, slowly assimilate it, and not talk about it until it had become a part of one's self.

Edward, the youngest son of Doctor Holmes, had chosen the same profession as his brother.

It was at Mrs. Sargent's home, at Beverly Farms, that Doctor Holmes passed most of his summers. The pretty, cream-colored house, with its broad veranda in front, can be easily seen from the station; but to appreciate the charms of this pleasant country home, one should catch a glimpse of the cosey interior.

Robert Rantoul, John T. Morse and Henry Lee were neighbors of Doctor Holmes at Beverly Farms, and Lucy Larcom's home was not far distant.

After eighteen years' residence at No. 8 Montgomery Place, Doctor Holmes moved to 164 Charles street, where he lived about twelve years. His home in Boston was at No. 296 Beacon street.

"We die out of houses," says the poet,"just as we die out of our bodies.... The body has been called the house we live in; the house is quite as much the body we live in.... The soul of a man has a series of concentric envelopes around it, like the core of an onion, or the innermost of a nest of boxes. First, he has his natural garment of flesh and blood. Then his artificial integuments, with their true skin of solid stuffs, their cuticle of lighter tissues, and their variously-tinted pigments. Thirdly, his domicile, be it a single chamber or a stately mansion. And then the whole visible world, in which Time buttons him up as in a loose, outside wrapper.... Our houses shape themselves palpably on our inner and outer nature. See a householder breaking up and you will be sure of it. There is a shell fish which builds all manner of smaller shells into the walls of its own. A house is never a home until we have crusted it with the spoils of a hundred lives besides those of our own past. See what these are and you can tell what the occupant is."

The poet's home on Beacon street well illustrates the above extract. I shall not soon forgetthe charming picture that greeted me, one gray winter day, as I was ushered into the poet's cheerful study. A blazing wood fire was crackling on the hearth, and the ruddy glow was reflected now on the stately features of "Dorothy Q.," now on the Copley portrait of old Doctor Cooper, and now with a peculiar Rembrandt effect upon the low rows of books, the orderly desk, and the kind, cordial face of the poet himself. An "Emerson Calendar" was hanging over the mantel, and after calling my attention to the excellent picture upon it of the old home at Concord, Doctor Holmes began to talk of his brother poet in terms of warmest affection.

As he afterwards remarked at the Nineteenth Century Club, the difference between Emerson's poetry and that of others with whom he might naturally be compared, was that of algebra and arithmetic. The fascination of his poems was in their spiritual depth and sincerity and their all pervading symbolism. Emerson's writings in prose and verse were worthy of all honor and admiration, but his manhood was the noblest of all his high endowments. A bigot here and there might have avoided meeting him, but if He who knew what was in men had wandered from door to door in New England, as of old in Palestine, one of the thresholds which "those blessed feet" would have crossed would have been that of the lovely and quiet home of Emerson.

Hand written Poem signed by Oliver Wendell Holmes

The view from the broad bay window in Doctor Holmes' study, recalled his own description:

Through my north window, in the wintry weather,My airy oriel on the river shore,I watch the sea-fowl as they flock together,Where late the boatman flashed his dripping oar.The gull, high floating, like a sloop unladen,Lets the loose water waft him as it will;The duck, round-breasted as a rustic maiden,Paddles and plunges, busy, busy still.

Through my north window, in the wintry weather,My airy oriel on the river shore,I watch the sea-fowl as they flock together,Where late the boatman flashed his dripping oar.

The gull, high floating, like a sloop unladen,Lets the loose water waft him as it will;The duck, round-breasted as a rustic maiden,Paddles and plunges, busy, busy still.

A microscopical apparatus placed under another window in the study, reminds the visitor of the "man of science," while the books—

A mingled race, the wreck of chance and timeThat talk all tongues and breathe of every clime—

speak in eloquent numbers of the "man of letters."

There is the Plato on the lower shelf, with the inscription, Ezra Stiles, 1766, to which Doctor Holmes alludes in his tribute to the New England clergy. Here is the hand-lens imported by the Reverend John Prince, of Salem, and just before us, in the "unpretending row of local historians," is Jeremy Belknap'sHistory of New Hampshire, "in the pages of which," says Doctor Holmes, "may be found a chapter contributed in part by the most remarkable man in many respects, among all the older clergymen,—preacher, lawyer, physician, astronomer, botanist, entomologist, explorer, colonist, legislator in State and national governments, and only not seated on the bench of the Supreme Court of a Territory because he declined the office when Washington offered it to him. This manifold individual," adds Doctor Holmes, "was the minister of Hamilton, a pleasant little town in Essex County, Massachusetts, the Reverend Manasseh Cutler."

Dr. Holmes' Library, Beacon St.

Here is theAëtiusfound one never-to-be-forgotten rainy day, in that dingy bookshop in Lyons, and here the vellum-boundTulpius, "my only reading," says Doctor Holmes, "when imprisoned in quarantine at Marseilles, so that the two hundred and twenty-eight cases he has recorded are, many of them, to this day still fresh in my memory." Here, too, is theSchenckius,—"the folio filled withcasus rariores, which had strayed in among the rubbish of the bookstall on the boulevard—and here the noble oldVesalius, with its grand frontispiece not unworthy of Titian, and the fine oldAmbroise Parié, long waited for even in Paris and long ago, and the colossal Spigelius, with his eviscerated beauties, and Dutch Bidloo with its miracles of fine engraving and bad dissection, and Italian Mascagni, the despair of all would-be imitators, and pre-Adamite John de Ketam, and antediluvianBerengarius Carpensis," and many other rare volumes, dear to the heart of every bibliophile.

Glancing again from the window, I catch a glimpse of the West Boston Bridge, and recall the poet's description of the "crunching of ice at the edges of the river as the tide rises and falls, the little cluster of tent-like screens on the frozen desert, the excitement of watching the springy hoops, the mystery of drawing up life from silent, unseen depths." With his opera glass he watches the boys and men, black and white, fishing over the rails of the bridge "as hopefully as if the river were full of salmon."At certain seasons, he observes, there will now and then be captured a youthful and inexperienced codfish, always, however, of quite trivial dimensions. The fame of the exploit has no sooner gone abroad than the enthusiasts of the art come flocking down to the river and cast their lines in side by side, until they look like a row of harp-strings for number. "That a codfish is once in a while caught," says Doctor Holmes, "I have asserted to be a fact; but I have often watched the anglers, and do not remember ever seeing one drawn from the water, or even any unequivocal symptom of a bite. The spring sculpin and the flabby, muddy flounder are the common rewards of the angler's toil.

The silhouette figures on the white background enliven the winter landscape, but now the blazing log on the hearthstone rolls over and the whole study is aglow with light! Truly "winterisa cheerful season to people who have open fireplaces;" and who will not agree with our poet-philosopher when he says, "A house without these is like a face without eyes, and that never smiles. I have seen respectability and amiability grouped over the air-tight stove; I have seen virtue and intelligence hoveringover the register; but I have never seen true happiness in a family circle where the faces were not illuminated by the blaze of an open fireplace."

A well-known journalist writes as follows of Doctor Holmes "at home."

"All who pay their respects to the distinguished Autocrat will find the genial, merry gentleman whose form and kindly greeting all admirers have anticipated while reading his sparkling poems. He is the perfect essence of wit and hospitality—courteous, amiable and entertaining to a degree which is more easily remembered than imparted or described. If the caller expects to find blue-blood snobbishness at 296 Beacon street, he will be disappointed. It is one of the most elegant and charming residences on that broad and fashionable thoroughfare, but far less pretentious, both inwardly and outwardly, than many of the others. For an uninterrupted period of forty-seven years, Doctor Holmes has lived in Boston, and for the last dozen years he has occupied his present residence on Beacon street.

"The chief point of attraction in the presentresidence—for the visitor as well as the host—is the magnificent and spacious library, which may be more aptly termed the Autocrat's workshop. It is up one flight, and seemingly occupies the entire rear half of the whole building on this floor. It is a very inviting room in every respect, and from the spacious windows overlooking the broad expanse of the Charles River, there can be had an extensive view of the surrounding suburbs in the northerly, eastern and western directions. On a clear day there can be more or less distinctly described the cities and towns of Cambridge, Arlington, Medford, Somerville, Malden, Revere, Everett, Chelsea, Charlestown and East Boston. Even in the picture can be recognized the lofty tower of the Harvard Memorial Hall, which is but a few steps from the doctor's birthplace and first home. Arthur Gilman, in his admirable pen and pencil sketches of the homes of the American poets, makes a happy and appropriate allusion to the Autocrat's library. 'The ancient Hebrew,' he says, 'always had a window open toward Jerusalem, the city about which his most cherished hopes and memories clustered, and this window gives its owner thepleasure of looking straight to the place of his birth, and thus of freshening all the happy memories of a successful life.'

"In renewing his old-time acquaintance with theAtlanticfamily circle, the Autocrat recognized the modern invention of the journalistic interviewer, and submitted some plans for his regulation, to be considered by the various local governments. His idea is that the interviewer is a product of our civilization, one who does for the living what the undertaker does for the dead, taking such liberties as he chooses with the subject of his mental and conversational manipulations, whom he is to arrange for public inspection. 'The interview system has its legitimate use,' says Doctor Holmes, 'and is often a convenience to politicians, and may even gratify the vanity and serve the interests of an author.' He very properly believes, however, that in its abuse it is an infringement of the liberty of the private citizen to be ranked with the edicts of the council of ten, the decrees of the star chamber, thelettres de cachet, and the visits of the Inquisition. The interviewer, if excluded, becomes an enemy, and has the columns of anewspaper at his service in which to revenge himself. If admitted, the interviewed is at the mercy of the interviewer's memory, if he is the best meaning of men; of his accuracy, if he is careless; of his malevolence, if he is ill-disposed; of his prejudices, if he has any, and of his sense of propriety, at any rate.

"Doctor Holmes humorously suggests the following restrictions: 'A licensed corps of interviewers, to be appointed by the municipal authorities, each interviewer to wear, in a conspicuous position, a number and a badge, for which the following emblems and inscriptions are suggested: Zephyrus, with his lips at the ear of Boreas, who holds a speaking trumpet, signifying that what is said by the interviewed in a whisper will be shouted to the world by the interviewer through that brazen instrument. For mottoes, either of the following:Fænum halct in cornu;Hunc tu Romane caveto. No person to be admitted to the corps of interviewers without a strict preliminary examination. The candidate to be proved free from color blindness and amblyopia, ocular and mental strabismus, double refraction of memory, kleptomania, mendacityof more than average dimensions, and tendency to alcholic endosmosis. His moral and religious character to be vouched for by three orthodox clergymen of the same belief, and as many deacons who agree with them and each other. All reports to be submitted to the interviewed, and the proofs thereof to be corrected and sanctioned by him before being given to the public. Until the above provisions are carried out no record of an alleged interview to be considered as anything more than the untrustworthy gossip of an irresponsible impersonality.'"

"What business have young scribblers to send me their verses and ask my opinion of the stuff?" said Doctor Holmes one day, annoyed by the officiousness of certain would-be aspirants to literary fame. "They have no more right to ask than they have to stop me on the street, run out their tongues, and ask what the matter is with their stomachs, and what they shall take as a remedy." At another time he made the remark: "Everybody that writes a book must needs send me a copy. It's very good of them, of course, but they're not all successful attempts at bookmaking, and most of them are relegated to my hospital for sick books up-stairs."

But once a young writer sent from California a sample of his poetry, and asked Holmes if it was worth while for him to keep on writing. It was evident that the doctor was impressed by something decidedly original in the style of the writer, for he wrote back that he should keep on, by all means.

Some time afterward a gentleman called at the home of Professor Holmes in Boston and asked him if he remembered the incident. "I do, indeed," replied Holmes. "Well," said his visitor, who was none other than Bret Harte, "I am the man."

ITis city-life, Boston-life, in fact, that forms the fitting frame of any pen-picture one might draw of Oliver Wendell Holmes, and yet even his prose writings are full of all a poet's love for country sights and sounds. Listen, for instance, to this rich word-picture of the opening spring: "A flock of wild geese wedging their way northward, with strange, far-off clamor, are the heralds of April; the flowers are opening fast; the leaves are springing bright green upon the currant bushes; dark, almost livid, upon the lilacs; the grass is growing apace, the plants are coming up in the garden beds, and the children are thinking of May-day....

"The birds come pouring in with May. Wrens, brown thrushes, the various kinds of swallows, orioles, cat-birds, golden robins, bobo'links, whippoorwills, cuckoos, yellow-birds, hummingbirds, are busy in establishing their new households. The bumble-bee comes in with his 'mellow, breezy bass,' to swell the song of the busy minstrels.

"And now June comes in with roses in her hand ... the azalea—wild honeysuckle—is sweetening the road-sides; the laurels are beginning to blow, the white lilies are getting ready to open, the fireflies are seen now and then flitting across the darkness; the katydids, the grasshoppers, the crickets, make themselves heard; the bull-frogs utter their tremendous voices, and the full chorus of birds makes the air vocal with melody."

How like Thoreau the following passage reads:

"O, for a huckleberry pasture to wander in, with labyrinths of taller bushes, with bayberry leaves at hand to pluck and press and smell of, and sweet fern, its fragrant rival, growing near!... I wonder if others have noticed what an imitative fruit the blackberry is. I have tasted the strawberry, the pine-apple, and I do not know how many other flavors in it—if you think a little, and have read Darwin, and Huxley, perhaps you will believe that it, and all the fruits ittastes of, may have come from a common progenitor."

And there is the poet's beautiful picture of Indian summer.

"It is the time to be in the woods or on the seashore,—a sweet season that should be given to lonely walks, to stumbling about in old churchyards, plucking on the way the aromatic silvery herb everlasting, and smelling at its dry flower until it etherizes the soul into aimless reveries outside of space and time. There is little need of painting the still, warm, misty, dreamy Indian summer in words; there are many states that have no articulate vocabulary, and are only to be reproduced by music, and the mood this season produces is of that nature. By and by, when the white man is thoroughly Indianized (if he can bear the process), some native Hayden will perhaps turn the Indian summer into the loveliestandanteof the new 'Creation.'"

And again: "To those who know the Indian summer of our Northern States, it is needless to describe the influence it exerts on the senses and the soul. The stillness of the landscape in that beautiful time is as if the planet weresleepinglike a top, before it begins to rock withthe storms of autumn. All natures seem to find themselves more truly in its light; love grows more tender, religion more spiritual, memory sees farther back into the past, grief revisits its mossy marbles, the poet harvests the ripe thoughts which he will tie in sheaves of verse by his winter fireside."

At another time, when revisiting the scenes of his old schooldays at Andover, he gives us the following vivid description of mountain scenery:

"Far to the north and west the mountains of New Hampshire lifted their summits in a long encircling ridge of pale-blue waves. The day was clear, and every mound and peak traced its outline with perfect definition against the sky.

I have been by the seaside now and then, but the sea is constantly busy with its own affairs, running here and there, listening to what the winds have to say, and getting angry with them, always indifferent, often insolent, and ready to do a mischief to those who seek its companionship. But these still, serene, unchanging mountains,—Monadnock, Kearsarge,—what memories that name recalls! and the others, the dateless Pyramids of New England, the eternal monuments of her ancient race, around whichcluster the homes of so many of her bravest and hardiest children, I can never look at them without feeling that, vast and remote and awful as they are, there is a kind of inward heat and muffled throb in their stony cores, that brings them into a vague sort of sympathy with human hearts. How delightful all those reminiscences, as he wanders, "the ghost of a boy" by his side, now by the old elm that held, buried in it by growth, iron rings to keep the Indians from destroying it with their tomahawks; and now through the old playground sown with memories of the time when he was young.

"A kind of romance gilds for me," he says, "the sober tableland of that cold New England hill where I came a slight, immature boy, in contact with a world so strange to me, and destined to leave such mingled and lasting impressions. I looked across the valley to the hillside where Methuen hung suspended, and dreamed of its wooded seclusion as a village paradise. I tripped lightly down the long northern slope withfacilis descensuson my lips, and toiled up again, repeatingsed revocare gradum. I wandered in the autumnal woods that crown the 'Indian Ridge,' much wondering at that vastembankment, which we young philosophers believed with the vulgar to be of aboriginal workmanship, not less curious, perhaps, since we call it an escar, and refer it to alluvial agencies. The little Shawsheen was our swimming-school, and the great Merrimac, the right arm of four toiling cities, was within reach of a morning stroll."

Nor does he forget to recall a visit to Haverhill with his room-mate, when he saw the mighty bridge over the Merrimac that defied the ice-rafts of the river, and the old meeting-house door with the bullet-hole in it, through which the minister, Benjamin Rolfe, was shot by the Indians. "What a vision it was," he exclaims, "when I awoke in the morning to see the fog on the river seeming as if it wrapped the towers and spires of a great city! for such was my fancy, and whether it was a mirage of youth, or a fantastic natural effect, I hate to inquire too nicely."

Like all poets, Doctor Holmes had a passionate love for flowers, and with a delight that is most heartily shared by the sympathetic reader, he thus recalls the old garden belonging to the gambrel-roofed house in Cambridge.

"There were old lilac bushes, at the right ofthe entrance, and in the corner at the left that remarkable moral pear-tree, which gave me one of my first lessons in life. Its fruit never ripened but always rotted at the core just before it began to grow mellow. It was a vulgar plebeian specimen, at best, and was set there, no doubt, only to preach its annual sermon, a sort of 'Dudleian Lecture' by a country preacher of small parts. But in the northern border was a high-bred Saint Michael pear-tree, which taught a lesson that all of gentle blood might take to heart; for its fruit used to get hard and dark, and break into unseemly cracks, so that when the lord of the harvest came for it, it was like those rich men's sons we see too often, who have never ripened, but only rusted, hardened and shrunken. We had peaches, lovely nectarines, and sweet, white grapes, growing and coming to kindly maturity in those days; we should hardly expect them now, and yet there is no obvious change of climate. As for the garden-beds, they were cared for by the Jonathan or Ephraim of the household, sometimes assisted by one Rule, a little old Scotch gardener, with a stippled face and a lively temper. Nothing but old-fashioned flowers in them—hyacinths, pushing their green beaksthrough as soon as the snow was gone, or earlier tulips, coming up in the shape of sugar 'cockles,' or cornucopiæ, one was almost tempted to look to see whether nature had not packed one of those two-line 'sentiments,' we remember so well in each of them; peonies, butting their way bluntly through the loosened earth; flower-de-luces (so I will call them, not otherwise); lilies; roses, damask, white, blush, cinnamon (these names served us then); larkspurs, lupins, and gorgeous holyhocks.

"With these upper-class plants were blended, in republican fellowship, the useful vegetables of the working sort;—beets, handsome with dark-red leaves; carrots, with their elegant filigree foliage, parsnips that cling to the earth like mandrakes; radishes, illustrations of total depravity, a prey to every evil underground emissary of the powers of darkness; onions, never easy until they are out of bed, so to speak, a communicative and companionable vegetable, with a real genius for soups; squash vines with their generous fruits, the winter ones that will hang up 'ag'in the chimbly' by and by—the summer ones, vase like, as Hawthorne described them, with skins so whiteand delicate, when they are yet new-born, that one thinks of little sucking pigs turned vegetables, like Daphne into a laurel, and then of tender human infancy, which Charles Lamb's favorite so calls to mind;—these, with melons, promising as 'first scholars,' but apt to put off ripening until the frost came and blasted their vines and leaves, as if it had been a shower of boiling water, were among the customary growths of the Garden."

Then follows, in these charming reminiscences, an account of the reconstruction of the dear old Garden.

"Consuls Madisonius and Monrovious left the seat of office, and Consuls Johannes Quincius, and Andreas, and Martinus, and the rest, followed in their turn, until the good Abraham sat in the curule chair. In the meantime changes had been going on under our old gambrel roof, and the Garden had been suffered to relapse slowly into a state of wild nature. The haughty flower-de-luces, the curled hyacinths, the perfumed roses, had yielded their place to suckers from locust-trees, to milkweed, burdock, plantain, sorrel, purslane; the gravel walks, which were to nature as rents in her greengarment, had been gradually darned over with the million threaded needles of her grasses until nothing was left to show that a garden had been there.

"But the Garden still existed in my memory; the walks were all mapped out there, and the place of every herb and flower was laid down as if on a chart.

"By that pattern I reconstructed the Garden, lost for a whole generation as much as Pompeii was lost, and in the consulate of our good Abraham it was once more as it had been in the days of my childhood. It was not much to look upon for a stranger; but when the flowers came up in their old places, the effect on me was something like what the widow of Nain may have felt when her dead son rose on his bier and smiled upon her.

"Nature behaved admirably, and sent me back all the little tokens of her affection she had kept so long. The same delegates from the underground fauna ate up my early radishes; I think I should have been disappointed if they had not. The same buff-colored bugs devoured my roses that I remembered ofold. The aphids and the caterpillar and the squash-bug were cordial as ever; just as if nothing had happened to produce a coolness or entire forgetfulness between us. But the butterflies came back too, and the bees and the birds."

Says a well-known writer:

"Though born and reared beneath the shadow of the great city, yet Doctor Holmes has ever found great delight in spending a portion of each year in the country. The last few summers he has made his home at Beverly Farms, but from 1849 to 1856, inclusive, his summer home was in Pittsfield, in Berkshire County. His recollections of the scenes and people in that charming town are pleasant and abundant. The villa which he built was upon a round knoll, commanding a fine view of the whole circle of Berkshire mountains, and of the Housatonic, winding in its serpentine way through the fertile meadows and valleys to the sound of Long Island. Yielding to his own good nature and the soft persuasion of a committee of Pittsfield ladies, Doctor Holmes once contributed a couple of poems to a fancy fair which was being held in the town during hisresidence there. They do not appear in any of the published collections, which is the one reason, above all others, why we print them now. Each of the poems was inclosed in an envelope bearing a motto; and the right to a second choice, guided by these, was disposed of in a raffle, to the no small emolument of the objects of the fair. The two pieces are even to this day represented by at least a square yard of the quaint ecclesiastical heraldry which illuminates the gorgeous chancel window of the St. Stephen's church in Pittsfield. The motto of the first envelope ran thus:

Back to Index Next