[Speech of Oliver Wendell Holmes as President of the day, at the annual dinner of the Harvard Alumni Association, in Cambridge, July 19, 1860, inaugurating the practice of public speaking at the "Harvard Dinners." That year also took place the inauguration of President C. Felton, an event to which the speaker alludes in his graceful reference to the "goodly armful of scholarship, experience and fidelity" once more filling the "old chair of office."]
[Speech of Oliver Wendell Holmes as President of the day, at the annual dinner of the Harvard Alumni Association, in Cambridge, July 19, 1860, inaugurating the practice of public speaking at the "Harvard Dinners." That year also took place the inauguration of President C. Felton, an event to which the speaker alludes in his graceful reference to the "goodly armful of scholarship, experience and fidelity" once more filling the "old chair of office."]
Oliver WendelL Holmes
Brothers, by the side of her who is mother of us all, and Friends, whom she welcomes as her own children:—The older sons of our common parent who should have greeted you from this chair of office, being for different reasons absent, it has become my duty to half fill the place of these honored, but truant, children to the best of my ability—a most grateful office, so far as the expression of kind feeling is concerned; an undesired duty, if I look to the comparisons you must draw between the government of the association existingde jure, and its governmentde facto. Your President [Robert C. Winthrop] so graces every assembly which he visits, by his presence, his dignity, his suavity, his art of ruling, whether it be the council of a nation, the legislature of a State, or the lively democracy of a dinner-table, that when he enters a meeting like this, it seems as if the chairs stood back of their own will to let him pass to the head of the board, and the table itself, that most intelligent of quadrupeds, the half reasoning mahogany, tipped him a spontaneous welcome to its highest seat, and of itself rapped the assembly to order. [Applause.]
Your first Vice-President [Charles Francis Adams], whose name and growing fame you know so much better than his bodily presentment, has not been able to gratify your eyes and ears by showing you the lineaments and stirring you with the tones inherited from men who made their country or shaped its destinies. [Applause.] You and I have no choice therefore, and I must submit to stand in this place of eminence as a speaker, instead of sitting a happy listener with my friends and classmates on the broader platform beneath. Through my lips must flow the gracious welcome of this auspicious day, which brings us all together in this family temple under the benignant smile of our household divinities, around the ancient altar fragrant with the incense of our grateful memories.
This festival is always a joyous occasion. It resembles a scattered family without making any distinction except that which age establishes, an aristocracy of silver hairs which all inherit in their turn, and none is too eager to anticipate. In the great world outside there are and must be differences of lot and position; one has been fortunate, another, toiling as nobly perhaps, has fallen in with adverse currents; one has become famous, his name stares in great letters from the hand-bills of the drama of his generation; another lurks in small type among the supernumeraries. But here we stand in one unbroken row of brotherhood. No symbol establishes a hierarchy that divides one from another; every name which has passed into our golden book, the triennial catalogue, is illuminated and emblazoned in our remembrance and affection with the purple and sunshine of our common Mother's hallowed past and hopeful future.
We have at this time a twofold reason for welcoming the return of our day of festive meeting. The old chair of office, against whose uneasy knobs have rested so many well-compacted spines, whose uncushioned arms have embraced so many stately forms, over whose inheritance of cares and toils have ached so many ample brows, is filled once more with a goodly armful of scholarship, experience and fidelity. The President never dies. Our precious Mother must not be left too long a widow, for the most urgent of reasons. We talk so much about her maternity that we are apt to overlook the fact that a responsibleFatheris as necessary to the good name of a well-ordered college as to that of a well-regulated household. As children of the College, our thoughts naturally centre on the fact that she has this day put off the weeds of her nominal widowhood, and stands before us radiant inthe adornment of her new espousals. You will not murmur, that, without debating questions of precedence, we turn our eyes upon the new head of the family, to whom our younger brothers are to look as their guide and counsellor as we hope and trust through many long and prosperous years.
Brothers of the Association of the Alumini! Our own existence as a society is so bound up with that of the College whose seal is upon our foreheads, that every blessing we invoke on our parent's head returns like the dew from Heaven upon our own. So closely is the welfare of our beloved Mother knitted to that of her chief counsellor and official consort, that in honoring him we honor her under whose roof we are gathered, at whose breast we have been nurtured, whose fair fame is our glory, whose prosperity is our success, whose lease of long life is the charter of our own perpetuity.
I propose the health of the President of Harvard University: We greet our brother as the happy father of a long line of future alumni.
[Speech of Oliver Wendell Holmes at the banquet of the Boston Merchants' Association at Boston, Mass., May 23, 1884, in honor of the Hon. John Lowell.]
[Speech of Oliver Wendell Holmes at the banquet of the Boston Merchants' Association at Boston, Mass., May 23, 1884, in honor of the Hon. John Lowell.]
Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen:—It was my intention, when I accepted the public invitation to be with you this evening, to excuse myself from saying a word. I am a professor emeritus, which means pretty nearly the same thing as a tired-out or a worn-out instructor. And I do seriously desire that, having during the last fifty years done my share of work at public entertainments, I may hereafter be permitted, as a post-prandial emeritus, to look on and listen in silence at the festivals to which I may have the honor of being invited—unless, indeed, I may happen to wish to be heard. [Applause.] In that case I trust I may be indulged, as an unspoken speech and an unread poem are apt to "strike in," as some complaints are said to, and cause inward commotions. [Applause.] Judge Lowell's eulogy will be on every one's lips this evening. His soundness,his fairness, his learning, his devotion to duty, his urbanity,—these are the qualities which have commended him to universal esteem and honor. [Applause.] I will not say more of the living; I wish to speak of the dead.
In respectfully proposing the memory of his great-great-grandmother [laughter], I am speaking of one whom few if any of you can remember. [Laughter.] Yet her face is as familiar to me as that of any member of my household. She looks upon me as I sit at my writing-table; she does not smile, she does not speak; even the green parrot on her hand has never opened his beak; but there she is, calm, unchanging, in her immortal youth, as when the untutored artist fixed her features on the canvas. To think that one little word from the lips of Dorothy Quincy, your great-great-grandmother, my great-grandmother, decided the question whether you and I should be here to-night [laughter], in fact whether we should be anywhere [laughter] at all, or remain two bodiless dreams of nature! But it was Dorothy Quincy's "Yes" or "No" to Edward Jackson which was to settle that important matter—important to both of us, certainly—yes, Your Honor; and I can say truly, as I look at you and remember your career, important to this and the whole American community. [Applause.]
The picture I referred to is but a rude one, and yet I was not ashamed of it when I wrote a copy of verses about it, three or four of which this audience will listen to for the sake of Dorothy's great-grandson. I must alter the pronouns a little, for this occasion only:—
Look not on her with eyes of scorn—Dorothy Q. was a lady born;Ay! since the galloping Normans cameEngland's annals have known her name;And still to the three-hilled rebel townDear is that ancient name's renown,For many a civic wreath they won,The youthful sire and the gray-haired son.O damsel Dorothy! Dorothy Q.!Strange is the gift (we) owe to you!Such a gift as never a kingSave to daughter or son might bring—All (our) tenure of heart and hand,All (our) title to house and land;Mother and sister and child and wifeAnd joy and sorrow and death and life!What if a hundred years agoThose close-shut lips had answered "No!"When forth the tremulous question cameThat cost the maiden her Norman name,And under the folds that look so stillThe bodice swelled with the bosom's thrill—Should (we) be (we), or could it beOne-tenth (two others) and nine-tenths (we)?Soft is the breath of a maiden's Yes:Not the light gossamer stirs with less;But never a cable that holds so fastThrough all the battles of wave and blast,And never an echo of speech or songThat lives in the babbling air so long!There were tones in the voice that whispered thenYou may hear to-day in a hundred men.O lady and lover, now faint and farYour images hover—and here we are,Solid and stirring in flesh and bone—Edwards and Dorothys—all their own—A goodly record for time to showOf a syllable whispered so long ago.
[Applause prolonged.]
I give you: "The memory of Dorothy Jackson, born Dorothy Quincy, to whose choice of the right monosyllable we owe the presence of our honored guest and all that his life has achieved for the welfare of the community." [Great applause and cheers.]
[Speech of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, son of the "Autocrat," at the Harvard Alumni Dinner, at Cambridge, June 25, 1884.]
[Speech of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, son of the "Autocrat," at the Harvard Alumni Dinner, at Cambridge, June 25, 1884.]
Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Alumni:—Another day than this has been consecrated to the memories of the war. On that day we think not of the children of the university or the city, hardly, even, of the children whom the State has lost, but of a mighty brotherhood whose parent was our common country. To-day the college is the centre of all our feeling, and if we refer to the war it is in connection with the college, and not for its own sake that we do so. What then did the college do to justify our speaking of the war now? She sent a few gentlemen into the field, who died there becomingly. I know of nothing more. The great forces which ensured the North success would have been at work even if those men had been absent. Our means of raising money and troops would not have been less, I dare say. The great qualities of the race, too, would still have been there. The greatest qualities, after all, are those of a man, not those of a gentleman, and neither North nor South needed colleges to learn them.
And yet—and yet I think we all feel that, to us, at least, the war would seem less beautiful and inspiring, if those few gentlemen had not died as they did. Look at yonder portrait[7]and yonder bust[8]and tell me if stories such as they commemorate do not add a glory to the bare fact that the strongest legions prevailed. So it has been since wars began. After history has done its best to fix men's thoughtsupon strategy and finance, their eyes have turned and rested on some single romantic figure—some Sidney, some Falkland, some Wolfe, some Montcalm, some Shaw. This is that little touch of the superfluous which is necessary. Necessary as art is necessary, and knowledge which serves no mechanical end. Superfluous only as glory is superfluous, or a bit of red ribbon that a man would die to win.
It has been one merit of Harvard College that it has never quite sunk to believing that its only function was to carry a body of specialists through the first stage of their preparation. About these halls there has always been an aroma of high feeling not to be found or lost in science or Greek—not to be fixed, yet all-pervading. And the warrant of Harvard College for writing the names of its dead graduates upon its tablets is not in the mathematics, the chemistry, the political economy which it taught them, but that, in ways not to be discovered, by traditions not to be written down, it helped men of lofty natures to make good their faculties. I hope and I believe that it will long give such help to its children. I hope and I believe that long after our tears for the dead have been forgotten, this monument to their memory will still give such help to generations to whom it is only a symbol—a symbol of man's destiny and power for duty, but a symbol also of that something more by which duty is swallowed up in generosity, that something more which led men like Shaw to toss life and hope like a flower before the feet of their country and their cause. [Cheers.]
[Speech of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, at a banquet in his honor given by the Suffolk Bar Association, Boston, March 7, 1900, upon his elevation to the Chief Justiceship of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. Justice Holmes, upon rising to the toast of the presiding officer, was received with cheers, the entire company rising.]
[Speech of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, at a banquet in his honor given by the Suffolk Bar Association, Boston, March 7, 1900, upon his elevation to the Chief Justiceship of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. Justice Holmes, upon rising to the toast of the presiding officer, was received with cheers, the entire company rising.]
Gentlemen of the Suffolk Bar:—The kindness of this reception almost unmans me, and it shakes me the more when taken with a kind of seriousness which the moment has for me. As with a drowning man, the past is telescoped into a minute, and the stages are all here at once in my mind. The day before yesterday I was at the law school, fresh fromthe army, arguing cases in a little club with Goulding and Beaman and Peter Olney, and laying the dust of pleading by certain sprinklings which Huntington Jackson, another ex-soldier, and I managed to contrive together. A little later in the day, in Bob Morse's, I saw a real writ, acquired a practical conviction of the difference between assumpsit and trover, and marvelled open-mouthed at the swift certainty with which a master of his business turned it off.
Yesterday I was at the law school again, in the chair instead of on the benches, when my dear partner, Shattuck, came out and told me that in one hour the Governor would submit my name to the council for a judgeship, if notified of my assent. It was a stroke of lightning which changed the whole course of my life.
And the day before yesterday, gentlemen, was thirty-five years, and yesterday was more than eighteen years, ago. I have gone on feeling young, but I have noticed that I have met fewer of the old to whom to show my deference, and recently I was startled by being told that ours is an old bench. Well, I accept the fact, although I find it hard to realize, and I ask myself, what is there to show for this half lifetime that has passed? I look into my book in which I keep a docket of the decisions of the full court which fall to me to write, and find about a thousand cases. A thousand cases, many of them upon trifling or transitory matters, to represent nearly half a lifetime! A thousand cases, when one would have liked to study to the bottom and to say his say on every question which the law ever has presented, and then to go on and invent new problems which should be the test of doctrine, and then to generalize it all and write it in continuous, logical, philosophic exposition, setting forth the whole corpus with its roots in history and its justifications of expedience, real or supposed!
Alas, gentlemen, that is life. I often imagine Shakespeare or Napoleon summing himself up and thinking: "Yes, I have written five thousand lines of solid gold, and a good deal of padding—I, who have covered the milky way with words which outshine the stars!" "Yes, I beat the Austrians in Italy and elsewhere; I made a few brilliant campaigns, and I ended in middle life in acul-de-sac—I who had dreamed of a world monarchy and of Asiatic power!"We cannot live in our dreams. We are lucky enough if we can give a sample of our best, and if in our hearts we can feel that it has been nobly done.
Some changes come about in the process: changes not necessarily so much in the nature as in the emphasis of our interest. I do not mean in our wish to make a living and to succeed—of course, we all want those things—but I mean in our ulterior intellectual or spiritual interests, in the ideal part, without which we are but snails or tigers.
One begins with a search for a general point of view. After a time he finds one, and then for a while he is absorbed in testing it, in trying to satisfy himself whether it is true. But after many experiments or investigations, all have come out one way, and his theory is confirmed and settled in his mind; he knows in advance that the next case will be but another verification, and the stimulus of anxious curiosity is gone. He realizes that his branch of knowledge only presents more illustrations of the universal principle; he sees it all as another case of the same old ennui, or the same sublime mystery—for it does not matter what epithets you apply to the whole of things, they are merely judgments of yourself. At this stage the pleasure is no less, perhaps, but it is the pure pleasure of doing the work, irrespective of further aims, and when you reach that stage you reach, as it seems to me, the triune formula of the joy, the duty and the end of life.
It was of this that Malebranche was thinking when he said that, if God held in one hand truth and in the other the pursuit of truth, he would say: "Lord, the truth is for thee alone; give me the pursuit." The joy of life is to put out one's power in some natural and useful or harmless way. There is no other. And the real misery is not to do this. The hell of the old world's literature is to be taxed beyond one's powers. This country has expressed in story—I suppose because it has experienced it in life—a deeper abyss of intellectual asphyxia or vital ennui, when powers conscious of themselves are denied their chance.
The rule of joy and the law of duty seem to me all one. I confess that altruistic and cynically selfish talk seem to me about equally unreal. With all humility, I think "Whatever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might," infinitely more important than the vain attempt to love one's neighboras one's self. If you want to hit a bird on the wing, you must have all your will in a focus, you must not be thinking about yourself, and, equally, you must not be thinking about your neighbor; you must be living in your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird on the wing.
The joy, the duty, and, I venture to add, the end of life. I speak only of this world, of course, and of the teachings of this world. I do not seek to trench upon the province of spiritual guides. But from the point of view of the world the end of life is life. Life is action, the use of one's powers. As to use them to their height is our joy and duty, so it is the one end that justifies itself. Until lately the best thing that I was able to think of in favor of civilization, apart from blind acceptance of the order of the universe, was that it made possible the artist, the poet, the philosopher, and the man of science. But I think that is not the greatest thing. Now I believe that the greatest thing is a matter that comes directly home to us all. When it is said that we are too much occupied with the means of living to live, I answer that the chief work of civilization is just that it makes the means of living more complex; that it calls for great and combined intellectual efforts, instead of simple, uncoordinated ones, in order that the crowd may be fed and clothed and housed and moved from place to place. Because more complex and intense intellectual efforts mean a fuller and richer life. They mean more life. Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have enough of it.
I will add but a word. We are all very near despair. The sheathing that floats us over its waves is compounded of hope, faith in the unexplainable worth and sure issue of effort, and the deep, sub-conscious content which comes from the exercise of our powers. In the words of a touching negro song: "sometimes I's up, sometimes I's down, sometimes I's almost to the groun'," but these thoughts have carried me, as I hope they will carry the young men who hear me, through long years of doubt, self-distrust and solitude. They do now, for, although it might seem that the day of trial was over, in fact it is renewed each day. The kindness which you have shown me makes me bold in happy moments to believe that the long and passionate struggle has not been quite in vain. [Applause.]
[Speech of Lord Houghton, in response to William Cullen Bryant, at a breakfast given in his honor at the Century Club, New York, October 17, 1875. William Cullen Bryant, President of the Club, presided, and said in part: "Our guest, Lord Houghton, was not born a lord, but he was born a poet, which I take to be something better. Some forty years ago, I think it was, he wandered in Switzerland, Italy and Greece, and the impressions made upon his mind are woven into his beautiful series of poems published under the title of 'Memorials of Many Scenes.' At a later period, perhaps ten years afterward, he traveled in Egypt and the western coast of Asia, and returned, bringing with him a sheaf of 'Palm-Leaves,' a series of charming poems, inspired by the remarkable places which he visited, and by the incidents of his journey. These 'palm-leaves,' let me say, have a perennial verdure, they are yet as green as when they were gathered and still breathe Sabæan odors—the spicy perfume of the Orient—what the old poet Donne calls 'the almighty balm of the early East.' He is now a traveler in our territory, a region almost without antiquities, but of sufficient interest to attract his steps hither. He will doubtless see faults in our social and political condition—the eyes of a stranger are quicker to discern them than our own can be—but let us hope that he will carry back to his native land the recollections of a cordial reception among our people, such as I hope we are ever ready to accord to personal worth, to genius, and to services rendered to the human race. The only time I ever saw Dr. Bowring, which was some thirty years since, when he was a member of Parliament, of the party called Radical, is memorable with me on account of the eulogy of our guest, which he uttered with much warmth and enthusiasm. He praised the generosity of his sentiments and the largeness of his sympathies. 'At his table,' he added, 'you meet with men of various differing opinions; the only title to his hospitality and esteem is personal merit.' The same rule of preference which he applied to the individuals whom he admitted to his friendship, had governed him throughout a long public life in the measures which he had supported. His co-operation and efficient aid have been given to proceedings and measures which contemplate the well-being of the people—to useful and beneficial reforms. In their favor he steadily gave his vote and raised his voice. In honoring him we, therefore, honor not only the poet, but the philanthropist and the statesman. I propose, therefore, the health of Lord Houghton."]
[Speech of Lord Houghton, in response to William Cullen Bryant, at a breakfast given in his honor at the Century Club, New York, October 17, 1875. William Cullen Bryant, President of the Club, presided, and said in part: "Our guest, Lord Houghton, was not born a lord, but he was born a poet, which I take to be something better. Some forty years ago, I think it was, he wandered in Switzerland, Italy and Greece, and the impressions made upon his mind are woven into his beautiful series of poems published under the title of 'Memorials of Many Scenes.' At a later period, perhaps ten years afterward, he traveled in Egypt and the western coast of Asia, and returned, bringing with him a sheaf of 'Palm-Leaves,' a series of charming poems, inspired by the remarkable places which he visited, and by the incidents of his journey. These 'palm-leaves,' let me say, have a perennial verdure, they are yet as green as when they were gathered and still breathe Sabæan odors—the spicy perfume of the Orient—what the old poet Donne calls 'the almighty balm of the early East.' He is now a traveler in our territory, a region almost without antiquities, but of sufficient interest to attract his steps hither. He will doubtless see faults in our social and political condition—the eyes of a stranger are quicker to discern them than our own can be—but let us hope that he will carry back to his native land the recollections of a cordial reception among our people, such as I hope we are ever ready to accord to personal worth, to genius, and to services rendered to the human race. The only time I ever saw Dr. Bowring, which was some thirty years since, when he was a member of Parliament, of the party called Radical, is memorable with me on account of the eulogy of our guest, which he uttered with much warmth and enthusiasm. He praised the generosity of his sentiments and the largeness of his sympathies. 'At his table,' he added, 'you meet with men of various differing opinions; the only title to his hospitality and esteem is personal merit.' The same rule of preference which he applied to the individuals whom he admitted to his friendship, had governed him throughout a long public life in the measures which he had supported. His co-operation and efficient aid have been given to proceedings and measures which contemplate the well-being of the people—to useful and beneficial reforms. In their favor he steadily gave his vote and raised his voice. In honoring him we, therefore, honor not only the poet, but the philanthropist and the statesman. I propose, therefore, the health of Lord Houghton."]
Mr. Bryant and Gentlemen:—In finding myself here now for the first time, I am agitated by conflicting emotions, by my pleasure in being among you, and by my regret at not having been here before.
In alluding to my poetic experience, Mr. Bryant mentioned that I had passed many years of my early life in Italy, and while he was so doing there arose in my memory a little incident not inapplicable to my present position. I passed some time at Venice; and one summer evening, on the Piazza di San Marco, my attention was attracted by an old man, who walked up and down with a mingled air of wonder and delight, and who, after I had observed him for some moments, came and asked me in the Venetian dialect what streets he was to take toward a certain remote portion of the city. I said I was a foreigner, and that he, being a native of the place, must know its geography better than I could. He then told me that he was there for the first time. He had passed all his life in his own distinct world, there earning his daily bread, and occupied by its little local interests. At last a friend had told him that he must see the Place and Church of San Marco before he died, and put him in a boat and landed him there, and now he wanted to find his way home, charmed and contented.
Gentlemen, I am in the position of that Venetian veteran, and shall return to my country, happy that I have at last found my way to this great place and habitation—the civitas of English-speaking people. Not that I have ever failed to regard this country in many senses as my own, from the time when I took moral comfort from the flight of Mr. Bryant's "Wild Fowl" across the ocean, and took the best lesson of life from the Psalm of Longfellow. Since then I have ever been with you in all your intellectual progress, and in the necessarily checkered course of your constitutional history, and never more than in the late solemn years, in all the national difficulties which you have so energetically, so persistently, and so humanely surmounted.
In looking back to my impressions of those times, I sometimes think that my sympathy with you was not whollyunselfish, but that I felt that, if I had ever written anything which has a chance of a prolonged existence, I should wish it to be read, not by any distracted and impotent communities of British race, but by America, one and indivisible. And, gentlemen, this is not unnatural, for amid all the divisions or distractions of your history, your literature has ever been patriotic and national. Literature, in truth, has been to you a good and faithful emigrant, reproductive not only of all intellectual growth, but of the sympathies—the largest sympathies—which bind together man to man. It has settled among you every classic writer of British origin, and from the Continent it has brought to you Goethe, Schiller, and Heinrich Heine. It is also noticeable that by the side of these great colonizations of thought you have not refused to receive and to pass to your furthest Territories the humblest addition, the single volume of verse, the chance felicitous expression of combined thought and feeling, even some accidental refrain of song that had pleasantly caught the ear and gone to the heart of man.
And this brings me to say to you one professional word respecting that art and the nature of poetry that you have been kind enough to connect with my name. The greater part of the verses I have written were that product of the lyrical period of youth which is by no means uncommon in modern civilization. It exhibits itself sometimes in the strangest manner, without connection with other culture, or even the most common intellectual opportunities. Of this I happen to have given to the world a signal instance in the volume I published of the poems of David Gray, a Scotch weaver-boy, who, without one advantage beyond the common education of his class, described all the nature within his ken in the highest poetic perfection, and passed away, leaving a most pathetic record of a short life of imaginative sensibility. You can contrast this simple and wayside flower of a faculty with such rich and complete cultivation as it can assume in the efflorescence of Tennyson or Swinburne; but in whatever form you find it, do not the less value the faculty itself. Permit me to say that in no condition of society can it be encouraged and fertilized more usefully than among yourselves. For not only will it bring with it calm and comfort amid all the superabundant activities, ambitions, andconfusions of daily life, but it has also the regulative powers teaching men to divide the sphere of the imagination from that of practical life, and thus obviating the dangers that so often arise from the want of this distinction.
There is no better preservative than the exercise of the poetic faculty from religious hallucinations, from political delusions, and I would say even from financial extravagances. Therefore, through the whole vast range of this new world, be on the watch to look out for and to encourage this great gift to man. Do not be too hard with any imperfections or absence of refinement which may accompany its exhibition. Do not treat it too critically or with too much scholastic censure. Recognize also its value on another ground—the extension and the perpetuation of our great common language—an interest not less dear to every one of us here present than to the future welfare of mankind:—
"Beyond the vague Atlantic deep,Far as the farthest prairies sweep,Where mountain wastes the sense appallWhere burns the radiant Western Fall,One duty lies on old and young—With filial piety to guard,As on its greenest native sward,The glory of the English tongue!"That ample speech, that subtle speech,Apt for the needs of all in each,Strong to endure, yet prompt to bendWherever human feelings tend,Preserve its force, expand its powers,And through the maze of civil life,In letters, commerce, e'en in strife,Remember, it is yours and ours!"
[Response of Lord Houghton to the address of Joseph H. Choate at the farewell reception given in honor of Lord Houghton by the Union League Club, New York City, November 23, 1875.]
[Response of Lord Houghton to the address of Joseph H. Choate at the farewell reception given in honor of Lord Houghton by the Union League Club, New York City, November 23, 1875.]
Mr. Choate and Gentlemen:—Before you spoke I had much difficulty to interpret to myself the meaning of my reception here. So unimportant as I know myself to have been before, in political and social life, I have been surprised at the manner in which I have been received in the United States of America. You, sir, have given an explanation of that problem which I am very thankful to receive. The habit of Americans to welcome Englishmen, whatever may be their position, in itself proves to me that you regard us as something above individuals, and that, somehow or other, you connect us in every way by imagination, if no other, as present with that great country over the Atlantic which was your mother, and which it has been the habit of many of your ancestors to call their home. [Applause.] Mr. Choate has alluded to certain events in my political life, which he says fully justify your kindness and remarkable sympathy of to-day, and on that matter, if there are to be any relations between myself and the Americans, upon that point I can say that I deserve credit. I do not say this with any affectation, because I understand fully your feelings upon that matter. I fully recognize, I completely comprehend, as man to man, that in that day of your greatest trouble, even the small voice that came over the great Atlantic was listened to with extreme pleasure and unexaggerated sympathy.
But when I look to myself, I am bound to say I find extremely little merit in the matter. There was one ground of sympathy between you and the English people, which you had the holiest right to believe would have been absolute and overpowering. The English nation had put itself forward as the great opponent of slavery in the world. [Applause.] It had stated at the Congress of Vienna that the one point which England required as thesine qua nonwas the abolition of the slave trade. For that purposeEngland not only asserted itself, but interfered up to the utmost limit, perhaps beyond the limits of the law of nations, with all the powers of the world. Therefore, you had a perfect right to believe, to suppose, that in a question, in a matter in which we were not only internationally but morally interested, the questions would be fully considered.
Well, gentlemen, I cannot say that it was so. As an individual I have not the right to reproach my country upon that point. That was not my first feeling in the matter. I felt, I knew, slavery was doomed from the civilized world. My heart, my instincts, my sense of the well-being of every civilized state was against the continuance of that institution. [Applause.] I knew, though it was possible—aye, I would fain say probable—that the condition of the slave, under many conditions, under many circumstances, might be better than that of the free laborer of the world, that the condition of the slave owner was incompatible with the highest form of moral culture and highest ambition. I always think that question had political as well as moral and religious considerations, and that, through the unhappy condition of this continent, the question of slavery got so intermixed with the question of property that, however humane, however wise men were, yet nevertheless it would bring with it an incidental condition of cruelty abhorrent to mankind, and that, therefore, that institution could not continue to the end. [Applause.]
But, making a clean breast of it, that was not the bottom of my sympathy. My sympathy with you comes, as Mr. Choate has said, by "an instinct unawares," and this was confirmed by any reasoning and any deductions I might have had. From the imagination of my earliest youth, from the sympathy of the most vivid time, and from the most logical look at the situation in my mature life, I came to the conclusion that the destiny of the present and the future world rests with great and undivided empires. [Applause.] I had lived to see Italy, out of its confusion of States, growing up into a great integrity, renewing the promises of the wonderful classic times and the glory of Rome renovated into a new and prosperous nation. I have lived to see, we have all lived to see, the same processtaking place in Germany. In Germany, notwithstanding the greatest division, the most peculiar separation of religion and even of races, yet nevertheless that great German empire is coming forward as a monument of the civilization of the future world, and as the centre of all Europe against any form of Oriental barbarism. And I knew from the history of my own country that that was no new principle, but one we had always maintained. England never at any moment thought of giving up the principle of the integrity of its empire. You yourselves are the evidences of the energy with which we sustained it. [Prolonged applause.] And we had at our doors, we had within us, another nation, in many points alien to ourselves; of a different race largely, of a different religion almost generally; a nation which we had treated sometimes with kindness, sometimes with harshness, sometimes with justice, and many other times with injustice; but always on the principle of the integrity of the empire. [Applause.] And I could not see how an intelligent man could see what Italy was growing to, prophesy what Germany would become, and, knowing the difficulties of the present Ireland, how that man could wish to destroy the integrity of the United States. Fact and history were against him, and in addition to that I felt that—in favoring or in sustaining your separation, in allowing special and local sympathy to act upon me, instead of the great logic of historical truths—if I could have allowed myself to act in that line of sympathy which would have bound me to my countrymen, I should have felt I had belied the truth of history as well as, I believe, the foundation of general morality. [Great applause.]
Therefore, gentlemen, I have little individual merit for whatever I may have said upon that matter. I tell you that that was the calculation, the best calculation of my own mind, that it was the simple result of the deduction of my own reasoning [applause], and if you have shown me gratitude on this matter I will not say that I have not felt in a certain sense it was not deserved, from the motives I have alluded to. And if, as some cynic has said, gratitude is nothing whatever but the means of securing favors to come, I can assure you that you have accomplished your object [laughter and applause], and if you have desired that, in any meanswhich Providence has placed in my power, in any influence direct or indirect which I may exert, I shall speak as I have spoken and think as I have thought of the United States of America, you may be well sure that I will do so. [Applause.]
On another occasion when I have been kindly received, I have spoken of my literary sympathy with this country. Every Englishman rightly looks to this country as he would with a sense of appeal to posterity. He feels that if he has said anything, if he has written anything, if he has touched any chord, if he has struck even any verbal assurance that pleases mankind, if you take it up you pass it on; it does not go from tongue to tongue in the little distant Anglia of Europe.
I recognize that I have met in this country men whom I shall be glad to meet anywhere and with whose familiarity I have been honored. And I might say this, that if I were to compare the best men that I have met here with the best men that I have known in Europe, I should say simply this, that the men that I have found here seem to me as equal to the circumstances in which they have been placed, as intelligent in all their relations of life, as noble in their innermost impulses, as just in their expressions, as any I have ever met with in my intercourse with people in Europe. [Applause.] I have been honored with the familiarity of many distinguished men, I have been received with great kindness by your intelligent and able President. I had the fortune, the other day, to sit by the deathbed of that amiable, honest man, your Vice-President [Henry Wilson], in the Capitol at Washington, dying under the portrait of Jefferson. I have seen some of your able men with whom I have been intimate in Europe, and one whom you will allow me to mention above all others, a man whose career I witnessed during the great and stormy times of your troubles in England—Charles Francis Adams [long applause]—whose maintenance of your dignity was concurrent with a sense of the importance of good relations between England and America.
Gentlemen, next year you will celebrate your Centennial, and I have been kindly asked by every person who wished me good-bye to come back to this Centennial. [Laughter.]As for the Centennial itself, I have no particular inclination to come back. I think it is quite right you should have your Centennial, but I do not quite see what an Englishman has to do with it. [Long laughter and applause.] It is a thing which a philosopher might almost make the foundation of a theory, that you who are going to have this magnificent celebration of the one hundredth year of your liberation from the horrible rule of England, at the same time accompany it with the warmest feelings toward the British nation. [Laughter and applause.] Now, if you will clearly understand that this Centennial is to be your last celebration of this kind, and that from that moment you become part of the great community of Europe, then I say it will be a very useful celebration and one which all the world will be ready to honor. Celebrating your independence, you call it. A very noble act at a very noble time! Your repulsion was fully justified by the folly and the stupidity and the ignorance of England.
The causes of England and America are not different, but common to both. You have your own local difficulties, just as we have. You have your own religious difficulties, just as we have. Take a single instance. The question of local taxation—a very serious question with you, a question agitated in the great States. That question is one of the greatest importance that we are at this moment discussing in politics. It is a matter of great interest to us whether local taxation should be entrusted and commissioned to a body of persons specially appointed for that purpose by the Crown, or whether it should be entrusted to certain persons selected by the people. That will be one of the most important questions we shall have to consider in the next session or two of Parliament. It is said that there is great profusion, great waste, in our present arrangement of those matters, and that if our local expenditure were conducted by persons specially appointed for that purpose, it would be cheaper. I don't say more honestly, but more economically managed. This is a question that you are agitating at the present moment, and one that affects the politics of your great cities.
Take again railroads. It is a question whether the railroad should be in the hands of the State or of private companies. We are talking about it every day. Our interest in rapid transit has been very much the same as yours. Our rapid transit has not only gone over certain unfortunate persons who stood in the way, but it has gone over ruined hopes and prostrated energies. There is hardly a question that I see agitated in American newspapers that, in one form or another, is not agitated with us. The act of Parliament which restored to England specie payments was met with exactly the same argument, exactly the same controversy, exactly the same speciousness as meet you in this country. We have followed you on the matter of popular education. You have been our teachers in that branch. We are at present following in your footsteps. [Applause.]
[Speech of Julia Ward Howe at the breakfast in celebration of the seventieth birthday of Oliver Wendell Holmes, given by the publishers of the "Atlantic Monthly," Boston, Mass., December 3, 1879. Mrs. Howe sat at the right of Mr. Howells, then the editor of the "Atlantic," who presided at one end of the tables, with Mr. Emerson on his left. Dr. Holmes sat on the right of Mr. Houghton, who presided at the other end of the table, with Mrs. Stowe on his left. Mrs. Howe was called up by the toast, "The girls we have not left behind us."]
[Speech of Julia Ward Howe at the breakfast in celebration of the seventieth birthday of Oliver Wendell Holmes, given by the publishers of the "Atlantic Monthly," Boston, Mass., December 3, 1879. Mrs. Howe sat at the right of Mr. Howells, then the editor of the "Atlantic," who presided at one end of the tables, with Mr. Emerson on his left. Dr. Holmes sat on the right of Mr. Houghton, who presided at the other end of the table, with Mrs. Stowe on his left. Mrs. Howe was called up by the toast, "The girls we have not left behind us."]
Ladies and Gentlemen:—One word in courtesy I must say in replying to so kind a mention as that which is made, not only of me, but of those of my sex who are so happy as to be present here to-day. I think, in looking on this scene, of a certain congress which took place in Paris more than a year ago, and it was called a congress of literary people,gens de lettres. When I heard that this was to take place I immediately bestirred myself to attend its sittings and went at once to the headquarters to find how I might do so. I then learned to my great astonishment that no women were to be included among thesegens de lettres, that is, literary people. [Laughter.] Now, we have thought it a very modest phrase sometimes to plead that, whatever women may not be, they are people. [Laughter and applause.] And it would seem to-day that they are recognized as literary people, and I am very glad that you gentlemen have found room for the sisterhood to-day, and have found room to place them so numerously here, and I must say that to my eyes the banquet looks very much more cheerful than it would without them. [Applause.] It looks to me as though it had all blossomed out under a new social influence, and beside each dark stem I see a rose. [Laughterand applause.] But I must say at once that I came here entirely unprovided with a speech, and, not dreaming of one, yet I came provided with something. I considered myself invited as a sort of grandmother—indeed, I am, and I know a grandmother is usually expected to have something in her pocket. [Laughter and applause.] And I have a very modest tribute to the illustrious person whom we are met to-day to honor. With your leave I will read it. [Applause.]
Thou metamorphic god!Who mak'st the straight Olympus thy abode,Hermes to subtle laughter moving,Apollo with serener loving,Thou demi-god also!Who dost all the powers of healing know;Thou hero who dost wieldThe golden sword and shield,—Shield of a comprehensive mind,And sword to wound the foes of human kind;Thou man of noble mould!Whose metal grows not coldBeneath the hammer of the hurrying years;A fiery breath doth blowAcross its fervid glow,And still its resonance delights our ears;Loved of thy brilliant mates,Relinquished to the fates,Whose spirit music used to chime with thine,Transfigured in our sight,Not quenched in death's dark night,They hold thee in companionship divine.O autocratic muse!Soul-rainbow of all hues,Packed full of service are thy bygone years;Thy winged steed doth flyAcross the starry sky,Bearing the lowly burthens of thy tears.I try this little leap,Wishing that from the deep,I might some pearl of song adventurous bring.Despairing, here I stop,And my poor offering drop,—Why stammer I when thou art here to sing?