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Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes, by E. E. Brown

Title: Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes

Author: E. E. Brown

Release Date: October 30, 2011 [EBook #37878] Language: English

*** LIFE OF OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES ***

Produced by Tor Martin Kristiansen, Ron Stephens, Carol

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OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. LIFE OF

Oliver Wendell Holmes

BY

E.E. BROWN

Author of "Life of Garfield," "Life of Washington," "From Night to Light," ETC., ETC.

CHICAGO NEW YORK THE WERNER COMPANY

COPYRIGHT 1884

By D. LOTHROP AND COMPANY

COPYRIGHT 1895

By THE WERNER COMPANY

Holmes

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

CONTENTS.

1

Chap. Page. I. Ancestry 9

II. Boyhood 20

III. Early Recollections 30

IV. Other Reminiscences 40

V. Abroad 49

VI. Change in the Home 60

VII. The Professor 67

VIII. The Lecturer 74

IX. Naming the new Magazine 83

X. Elsie Venner 92

XI. Further Acquaintance 107

XII. Favorites of Song 114

XIII. The Man of Science 136

XIV. The Holmes Breakfast 152

XV. Orations and Essays 171

XVI. The Home Circle 208

XVII. Love of Nature 227

XVIII. The Harvard Medical School 240

XIX. Tokens of Esteem 284

XX. In Later Years 302

XXI. Last Days 320

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. [9]

CHAPTER I. ANCESTRY.

IN a quaint old gambrel-roofed house that once stood on Cambridge Common, Oliver Wendell Holmes--poet, professor, "beloved physician"--was born, on the twenty-ninth of August, 1809. His father, the Rev. Abiel Holmes, was the pastor of the "First Church" in Cambridge--

That ancient church whose lofty tower, Beneath the loftier spire,

Is shadowed when the sunset hour

Clothes the tall shaft in fire.

Here, in Revolutionary times, General Washington frequently worshiped, and the old homestead itself was the headquarters of the

American army during the siege of Boston. [10]

"It was a great happiness," writes the Poet at the Breakfast-Table, "to have been born in an old house haunted by such recollections, with harmless ghosts walking its corridors, with fields of waving grass and trees and singing birds, and that vast territory of four or five acres around it, to give a child the sense that he was born to a noble principality....

"The gambrel-roofed house was not one of those old Tory, Episcopal church-goer's strongholds. One of its doors opens directly upon the Green, always called the Common; the other faces the south, a few steps from it, over a paved foot-walk on the other side of which is the miniature front yard, bordered with lilacs and syringas.

"The honest mansion makes no pretensions. Accessible, companionable, holding its hand out to all--comfortable, respectable, and even in its way dignified, but not imposing; not a house for his Majesty's Counsellor, or the Right Reverend successor of Him who had not where to lay his head, for something like a hundred and fifty years it has stood in its lot, and seen the generations of men come and go like the leaves of the forest."

[11]

2

The house was not originally built for a parsonage. It was first the residence of a well-to-do tailor, who sold it to Jonathan Hastings, a prosperous farmer whom the college students used to call "Yankee Jont.," and whose son was the college steward in 1775. It was long known in Cambridge as the "Hastings House," but about the year 1792 it was sold to Eliphalet Pearson, the Hebrew Professor at Harvard, and in 1807 it passed into the hands of the Rev. Abiel Holmes.

For forty years the father of Oliver Wendell Holmes ministered to his Cambridge parish, revered and loved by all who knew him. He was a man of marked literary ability, as his Annals of America shows--"full of learning," as some one has said, "but never distressing others by showing how learned he was."

Said T.W. Higginson, at the Holmes Breakfast:

"I should like to speak of that most delightful of sunny old men, the father of Doctor Holmes, whom I knew and loved when I

was a child. ... I was brought up in Cambridge, my father's house being next door to that of Doctor Holmes' gambrel-roofed house, and the library[12] I most enjoyed tumbling about in was the same in which his infant gambols had first disturbed the repose of the books. I shall always remember a certain winter evening, when we boys were playing before the fire, how the old man--gray, and gentle, and kindly as any old German professor, and never complaining of our loudest gambols--going to the frost-covered window, sketched with his pen-knife what seemed a cluster of brambles and a galaxy of glittering stars, and above that he wrote, Per aspera ad astra: 'Through difficulties to the stars.' He explained to us what it meant, and I have never forgotten that quiet winter evening and

the sweet talk of that old man."

The good pastor was a graduate of Yale College, and before coming to Cambridge had taught at his Alma Mater, and preached in Georgia. He was the son of Doctor David Holmes, a physician of Woodstock, Ct., who had served as captain in the French and Indian wars, and afterward as surgeon in the Revolutionary army. The grandfather of Doctor David Holmes was one of the original settlers of Woodstock.[1]

[13]

The genealogy of the Holmes family of Woodstock dates from Thomas Holmes, a lawyer of Gray's Inn, London. In 1686, John Holmes, one of his descendants, joined a colony from Roxbury, Mass., and settled in Woodstock, Conn. His son David married a certain "Bathsheba," who had a remarkable reputation as nurse and doctress.

In the great storm of 1717, when the settlers' houses were almost buried in the snow, it is said that she climbed out of an upper-story window and travelled on snow-shoes through almost impassable drifts to Dudley, Mass., to visit a sick woman. The son of this noble Bathsheba was "Dr. David," the grandfather of Oliver Wendell Holmes.

In 1790, Abiel Holmes was married to the daughter of President Stiles of Yale, who died without children. His second wife, and

the mother of Oliver Wendell Holmes, was a daughter of Hon. Oliver Wendell, an eminent lawyer. He was descended from various Wendells, Olivers, Quinceys, and Bradstreets--names that belonged to the best blue blood of New England--and his wife was Mary Jackson, a daughter of Dorothy Quincy, the "Dorothy[14] Q." whom Doctor Holmes has immortalized in his poem. And just here, lest some of my readers may have forgotten some parts of this delicious bit of family portraiture, I am tempted to give the entire poem:

Grandmother's mother, her age I guess, Thirteen summers or something less; Girlish bust, but womanly air,

Smooth square forehead, with uprolled hair, Lips that lover has never kissed,

Taper fingers and slender wrist, Hanging sleeves of stiff brocade-- So they painted the little maid.

On her hand a parrot green

Sits unmoving and broods serene; Hold up the canvas full in view--

Look, there's a rent the light shines through. Dark with a century's fringe of dust,

That was a Redcoat's rapier thrust! Such is the tale the lady old, Dorothy's daughter's daughter told.

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Who the painter was none may tell-- One whose best was not over well; Hard and dry, it must be confessed,

Flat as a rose that has long been pressed; Yet in her cheek the hues are bright, Dainty colors of red and white;

And in her slender shape are seen Hint and promise of stately mien. [15]

Look not on her with eyes of scorn-- Dorothy Q. was a lady born!

Ay, since the galloping Normans came, England's annals have known her name; And still to the three-hilled rebel town Dear 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 that I owe to you; Such a gift as never a king

Save to daughter or son might bring-- All my tenure of heart and hand,

All my title to house and land;

Mother and sister, and child and wife, And joy and sorrow, and death and life. What if a hundred years ago

Those close-shut lips had answered, no, When forth the tremulous question came That cost the maiden her Norman name; And under the folds that look so still

The bodice swelled with the bosom's thrill

Should I be I, or would it be

One tenth another to nine tenths me? Soft is the breath of a maiden's yes; Not the light gossamer stirs with less; But never a cable that holds so fast,

Through all the battles of wave and blast, And never an echo of speech or song That lives in the babbling air so long!

[16]

There were tones in the voice that whispered then

You may hear to-day in a hundred men. O lady and lover, how faint and far

Your images hover, and here we are, Solid and stirring in flesh and bone, Edward's and Dorothy's--all their own-- A goodly record for time to show

Of a syllable spoken so long ago! Shall I bless you, Dorothy, or forgive,

For the tender whisper that bade me live? It shall be a blessing, my little maid,

I will heal the stab of the Redcoat's blade, And freshen the gold of the tarnished frame, And gild with a rhyme your household name, So you shall smile on us, brave and bright,

As first you greeted the morning's light, And live untroubled by woes and fears, Through a second youth of a hundred years.

4

This Dorothy Quincy, it is interesting to note, was the aunt of a second Dorothy Quincy, who married Governor Hancock. The

Wendells were of Dutch descent.

Evert Jansen Wendell, who came from East Friesland in 1645, was the original settler in Albany. From the church records, we find that he was the Regerendo Dijaken in 1656, and upon one of the windows of the old Dutch church[17] in Albany, the arms of the Wendells--a ship riding at two anchors--were represented in stained glass. Very little is known of these early ancestors, but the name is still an influential one among the old Knickerbocker families.

Early in the eighteenth century, Abraham and Jacob Wendell left their Albany home and came to Boston. It is said that Jacob (the great-grandfather of Oliver Wendell Holmes) fell in love with his future wife, the daughter of Doctor James Oliver, when she was only nine years of age. Seeing her at play, he was so impressed by her beauty and grace that, like the Jacob of old, he willingly waited the flight of years. Twelve children blessed this happy union, and the youngest daughter married William Phillips, the first mayor of Boston, and the father of Wendell Phillips.

Fair cousin, Wendell P.,

says Doctor Holmes in his Phi Beta Kappa poem of 1881:

Our ancestors were dwellers beside the Zuyder Zee; Both Grotius and Erasmus were countrymen of we,

And Vondel was our namesake, though he spelt it with a v. [18]

Jacob Wendell became, eventually, one of the richest merchants of Boston; was a member of the City Council and colonel of the

Boston regiment. His son, Oliver (the grandfather of Doctor Holmes), was born in 1733, and after his graduation at Harvard, in

1753, he went into business with his father. He still continued his studies, however, and preferring a professional life to that of a business man, he afterwards graduated at the Law School, was admitted to the bar, and soon after appointed Judge of Probate for Suffolk County. In Drake's Old Landmarks of Boston, we find that Judge Wendell was a selectman during the siege of Boston, and was commissioned by General Washington to raise a company of men to watch the British after the evacuation, so that no spies might pass between the two armies.

The original Bradstreet was Simon, the old Charter Governor, who married Governor Dudley's daughter Anne.[2] This accomplished lady, the first New England poetess, and frequently [19]called by her contemporaries "The Tenth Muse," was Doctor Hol-mes' grandmother's great-great-grandmother.[3]

With such an ancestry, Oliver Wendell Holmes surely fulfils all the conditions of "a man of family," and who will not readily agree

with the Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, when he writes as follows:

"I go for the man with the family portraits against the one with the twenty-five cent daguerreotype, unless I find out that the last is the better of the two. I go for the man that inherits family traditions and the cumulative humanities of at least four or five generations. Above all things, as a child, he should have tumbled about in a library. All men are afraid of books that have not handled them from infancy."

[20] CHAPTER II. BOYHOOD.

IN a curious little almanac for 1809 may still be seen against the date of August 29, the simple record, "Son b." Twice before had good Parson Holmes recorded in similar manner the births of his children, for Oliver Wendell, who bore his grandfather's name, was his third child; but this was the first time he could write "son."

A few years later another son came--the "brother John" whose wit and talents have gladdened so many hearts--and, last of all,

another daughter came to brighten the family circle for a few brief years.

The little Oliver was a bright, sunny-tempered child, highly imaginative and extremely sensitive. Speaking of his childhood in after years, and of certain superstitious fancies that always clung to him, he says:

5

[21]

"I tell you it was not so pleasant for a little boy of impressible nature to go up to bed in an old gambrel-roofed house, with untenant-ed, locked upper chambers, and a most ghostly garret; ... There was a dark store-room, too, on looking through the keyhole of which I could dimly see a heap of chairs and tables and other four-footed things, which seemed to me to have rushed in there frightened, and in their fright to have huddled together and climbed up on each other's backs--as the people did in that awful crush where

so many were killed at the execution of Holloway and Haggerty. Then the lady's portrait up-stairs with the sword-thrusts through it--marks of the British officers' rapiers--and the tall mirror in which they used to look at their red coats--confound them for smashing its mate!--and the deep, cunningly-wrought armchair in which Lord Percy used to sit while his hair was dressing; he was a gentleman, and always had it covered with a large peignoir to save the silk covering my grandmother embroidered. Then the little

room down-stairs from which went the orders to throw up a bank of earth on the hill yonder where you may now observe a granite obe[22]lisk, the study in my father's time, but in those days the council-chamber of armed men, sometimes filled with soldiers. Come with me, and I will show you the 'dents' left by the butts of their muskets all over the floor. With all these suggestive objects round me, aided by the wild stories those awful country boys that came to live in our service brought with them--of contracts written in blood and left out over night not to be found the next morning (removed by the Evil One who takes his nightly round among our dwellings, and filed away for future use), of dreams coming true, of death-signs, of apparitions, no wonder that my imagination got excited, and I was liable to superstitious fancies."

What some of these fancies were, he tells us elsewhere:

"I was afraid of ships. Why, I could never tell. The masts looked frightfully tall, but they were not so tall as the steeple of our old yel-low meeting-house. At any rate, I used to hide my eyes from the sloops and schooners that were wont to lie at the end of the bridge, and I confess that traces of this undefined terror lasted very long. One other source of alarm had a still more fearful significance. There was[23] a great wooden hand, a glovemaker's sign, which used to swing and creak in the blast as it hung from a pillar before a certain shop a mile or two outside of the city. Oh, the dreadful hand! Always hanging there ready to catch up a little boy who would come home to supper no more, nor yet to bed, whose porringer would be laid away empty thenceforth, and his half-worn shoes wait until his small brother grew to fit them.

"As for all manner of superstitious observances, I used once to think I must have been peculiar in having such a list of them, but I now believe that half the children of the same age go through the same experiences. No Roman soothsayer ever had such a catalogue of omens as I found in the sibylline leaves of my childhood. That trick of throwing a stone at a tree and attaching some mighty issue to hitting or missing, which you will find mentioned in one or more biographies, I well remember. Stepping on or over certain particular things or spots--Doctor Johnson's special weakness--I got the habit of at a very early age.

"With these follies mingled sweet delusions which I loved so well I would not outgrow[24] them, even when it required a voluntary effort to put a momentary trust in them. Here is one which I cannot help telling you.

"The firing of the great guns at the Navy Yard is easily heard at the place where I was born and lived. 'There is a ship of war come in,' they used to say, when they heard them. Of course I supposed that such vessels came in unexpectedly, after indefinite years of absence, suddenly as falling stones, and that the great guns roared in their astonishment and delight at the sight of the old war-ship splitting the bay with her cut-water. Now, the sloop-of-war the Wasp, Captain Blakely, after gloriously capturing the Reindeer and

the Avon, had disappeared from the face of the ocean, and was supposed to be lost. But there was no proof of it, and of course for a time, hopes were entertained that she might be heard from. Long after the last real chance had utterly vanished, I pleased myself with the fond illusion that somewhere on the waste of waters she was still floating, and there were years during which I never heard the sound of the great guns booming inland from the Navy Yard without saying to myself, 'the Wasp has come!'[25] and almost thinking I could see her as she rolled in, crumpling the waters before her, weather-beaten, barnacled, with shattered spars and threadbare canvas, welcomed by the shouts and tears of thousands. This was one of those dreams that I mused and never told. Let me make a clean breast of it now, and say, that, so late as to have outgrown childhood, perhaps to have got far on towards manhood, when the roar of the cannon has struck suddenly on my ear, I have started with a thrill of vague expectation and tremulous delight, and the long unspoken words have articulated themselves in the mind's dumb whisper, The Wasp has come!

"Yes; children believe plenty of queer things. I suppose all of you have had the pocket-book fever when you were little? What do I mean? Why, ripping up old pocket-books in the firm belief that bank-bills to an immense amount were hidden in them. So, too, you must all remember some splendid unfulfilled promise of somebody or other, which fed you with hopes perhaps for years, and which left a blank in your life which nothing has ever filled up. O.T. quitted our household carrying with him[26] the passionate regrets of the more youthful members. He was an ingenious youngster; wrote wonderful copies, and carved the two initials given above with great skill on all available surfaces. I thought, by the way, they were all gone, but the other day, I found them on a certain door. How

it surprised me to find them so near the ground! I had thought the boy of no trivial dimensions. Well, O.T., when he went, made a

6

solemn promise to two of us. I was to have a ship, and the other a martin house (last syllable pronounced as in the word tin). Neither

ever came; but oh! how many and many a time I have stolen to the corner--the cars pass close by it at this time--and looked up that long avenue, thinking that he must be coming now, almost sure as I turned to look northward that there he would be, trudging toward me, the ship in one hand and the martin house in the other!"

At an early age the merry, restless little fellow was sent to a neighboring school, kept by Ma'am Prentiss, a good, motherly old dame, who ruled her little flock, not with a scourge of birches, but with a long willow rod that reached quite across the schoolroom, "re-mind[27]ing,[4] rather than chastening." Among her pupils was Alfred Lee, afterwards the beloved Bishop of Delaware.

"It is by little things," says the Autocrat, "that we know ourselves; a soul would very probably mistake itself for another, when once disembodied, were it not for individual experiences which differ from those of others only in details seemingly trivial. All of us have been thirsty thousands of times, and felt with Pindar, that water was the best of things. I alone, as I think, of all mankind, remember one particular pailful of water, flavored with the white-pine of which the pail was made, and the brown mug out of which one Ed-mund, a red-faced and curly-haired boy, was averred to have bitten a fragment in his haste to drink; it being then high summer, and little full-blooded boys feeling very warm and porous in the low studded schoolroom where Dame Prentiss, dead and gone, ruled

over young children. Thirst belongs to humanity everywhere, in all ages, but that white-pine pail and that brown mug belong to me in

particular."

The next school to which the Cambridge pas[28]tor sent his little son was kept by William Biglow, a man of considerable scholarship and much native wit. Five years were spent at a school in Cambridgeport, which was kept by several successive teachers, and it was here, as schoolmates, that Oliver Wendell Holmes first met Margaret Fuller and Richard Henry Dana.

"I was moderately studious," says Doctor Holmes, "and very fond of reading stories, which I sometimes did in school hours. I was fond also of whispering, and my desk bore sad witness to my passion for whittling. For these misdemeanors I sometimes had a visitation from the ferule, and once when a Gunter's scale was used for this purpose, it flew to pieces as it came down on my palm."[5]

It was about this time, doubtless, that the Autocrat learned that important fact about the "hat."

"I was once equipped," he says, "in a hat of Leghorn straw, having a brim of much wider dimensions than were usual at that time, and sent to school in that portion of my native town which lies nearest to the metropolis. On my way I was met by a 'Port-Chuck,' as we used to call the young gentlemen of that locality, and the following dialogue ensued:

[29]

"The Port-Chuck: 'Hullo, you sir, joo know th' wus goin' to be a race to-morrah?'

"Myself: 'No. Who's goin' to run, 'n' wher' 's't goin' to be?'

"The Port-Chuck: 'Squire Mico 'n' Doctor Williams, round the brim o' your hat.'

"These two much-respected gentlemen being the oldest inhabitants at that time, and the alleged race-course being out of the question, the Port-Chuck also winking and thrusting his tongue into his cheek, I perceived that I had been trifled with, and the effect has been to make me sensitive and observant respecting this article ever since. The hat is the vulnerable point of the artificial integument."

[30]

CHAPTER III.

EARLY RECOLLECTIONS.

OF the boyhood of Doctor Holmes we have many delightful glimpses.

"Like other boys in the country," he tells us, "I had my patch of ground to which in the springtime I intrusted the seeds furnished me with a confident trust in their resurrection and glorification in the better world of summer. But I soon found that my lines had fallen in a place where a vegetable growth had to run the gauntlet of as many foes and trials as a Christian pilgrim. Flowers would not blow; daffodils perished like criminals in their condemned caps, without their petals ever seeing daylight; roses were disfigured with monstrous protrusions through their very centres, something that looked like a second bud pushing through the middle of the

7

corolla; lettuces and cabbages would not head; radishes knotted[31] themselves until they looked like centenarians' fringes; and on every stem, on every leaf, and both sides of it, and at the root of everything that grew, was a professional specialist in the shape of grub, caterpillar, aphis, or other expert, whose business it was to devour that particular part, and help murder the whole attempt at vegetation.... Yet Nature is never wholly unkind. Economical as she was in my unparadised Eden, hard as it was to make some of my floral houris unveil, still the damask roses sweetened the June breezes, the bladed and plumed flower-de-luces unfolded their close-wrapped cones, and larkspurs, and lupins, lady's delights--plebeian manifestations of the pansy--self-sowing marigolds, hollyhocks; the forest flowers of two seasons, and the perennial lilacs and syringas, all whispered to the winds blowing over them that some caressing presence was around me.

"Beyond the garden was the field, a vast domain of four acres or thereabouts by the measurement of after years, bordered to the north by a fathomless chasm--the ditch the base-ball players of the present era jump over; on the east by unexplored territory; on the south by[32] a barren enclosure, where the red sorrel proclaimed liberty and equality under its drapeau rouge, and succeeded in establishing a vegetable commune where all were alike, poor, mean, sour, and uninteresting; and on the west by the Common, not then disgraced by jealous enclosures which make it look like a cattle-market.

"Beyond, as I looked round, were the colleges, the meeting-house, the little square market-house, long vanished, the burial ground where the dead presidents stretched their weary bones under epitaphs stretched out at as full length as their subjects; the pretty church where the gouty Tories used to kneel on their hassocks, the district schoolhouse, and hard by it Ma'am Hancock's cottage, never so called in those days, but rather 'ten-footer'; then houses scattered near and far, open spaces, the shadowy elms, round hill-tops in the distance, and over all the great bowl of the sky. Mind you, this was the WORLD, as I first knew it; terra veteribus cognita, as Mr. Arrowsmith would have called it, if he had mapped the universe of my infancy."

"When I was of smallest dimensions," he says at another time, "and wont to ride impacted[33] between the knees of fond parental

pair, we would sometimes cross the bridge to the next village town and stop opposite a low, brown, gambrel-roofed cottage. Out

of it would come one Sally, sister of its swarthy tenant, swarthy herself, shady-lipped, sad-voiced, and bending over her flower bed, would gather a 'posy,' as she called it, for the little boy. Sally lies in the churchyard, with a slab of blue slate at her head, lichen-crust- ed, and leaning a little within the last few years. Cottage, garden-bed, posies, grenadier-like rows of seeding-onions--stateliest of vegetables--all are gone, but the breath of a marigold brings them all back to me."

Of Cambridge at this time, James Russell Lowell, in his Fireside Travels, tells us: "It was still a country village with its own habits and traditions, not yet feeling too strongly the force of suburban gravitation. Approaching it from the west, by what was then called the New Road, you would pause on the brow of Symond's Hill to enjoy a view singularly soothing and placid. In front of you lay the town, tufted with elms, lindens, and horse-chestnuts, which had seen Massachusetts a colony, and[34] were fortunately unable to emigrate with the Tories by whom, or by whose fathers they were planted. Over it rose the noisy belfry of the College, the square, brown tower of the Episcopal Church, and the slim yellow spire of the parish meeting-house. On your right the Charles slipped

smoothly through green and purple salt meadows, darkened here and there with the blossoming black grass as with a stranded cloud-shadow. To your left upon the Old Road you saw some half-dozen dignified old houses of the colonial time, all comfortably fronting southward.... We called it 'the Village' then, and it was essentially an English village--quiet, unspeculative, without enterprise, sufficing to itself, and only showing such differences from the original type as the public school and the system of town government might superinduce. A few houses, chiefly old, stood around the bare common, with ample elbow-room, and old women, capped and spectacled, still peered through the same windows from which they had watched Lord Percy's artillery rumble by to Lexington, or caught a glimpse of the handsome Virginia general who had come to wield our homespun Saxon chivalry. The hooks were[35] to be seen from which had swung the hammocks of Burgoyne's captive red-coats. If memory does not deceive me, women still washed clothes in the town spring, clear as that of Bandusia. One coach sufficed for all the travel to the metropolis. Commencement had

not ceased to be the great holiday of the Boston commonwealth, and a fitting one it was. The students (scholars they were called then) wore their sober uniform, not ostentatiously distinctive, or capable of rousing democratic envy; and the old lines of caste were blurred rather than rubbed out, as servitor was softened into beneficiary. Was it possible for us in those days to conceive of a greater potentate than the president of the University, in his square doctor's cap, that still filially recalled Oxford and Cambridge?"

The father of Oliver Wendell Holmes was a Calvanist, not indeed of the severest cast, but still strictly "orthodox" in all his religious views, and when Oliver, his elder son, was fifteen years of age, he sent him to the Phillips Academy in Andover, thinking that the religious atmosphere there was less heretical than at Phillips Academy, Exeter, where Arminian[36] tendencies were just beginning to show themselves.

"I have some recollections of Andover, pleasant and other," says Doctor Holmes. "I wonder if the old Seminary clock strikes as slowly as it used to. My room-mate thought, when he first came, it was the bell tolling deaths, and people's ages, as they do in the country. He swore (ministers' sons get so familiar with good words that they are apt to handle them carelessly), that the children

were dying by the dozen of all ages, from one to twelve, and ran off next day in recess when it began to strike eleven, but was caught

8

before the clock got through striking. At the foot of the hill, down in town, is, or was, a tidy old elm, which was said to have been hooped with iron to protect it from Indian tomahawks (Credab Hahnucmannus), and to have grown round its hoops and buried them in its wood."

The extreme conscientiousness of the boy is strikingly depicted in the following revelation:

"The first unequivocal act of wrong that has left its trace in my memory was this: refusing a small favor asked of me--nothing more than telling what had happened at school one morn[37]ing. No matter who asked it; but there were circumstances which saddened and awed me. I had no heart to speak; I faltered some miserable, perhaps petulant excuse, stole away, and the first battle of life was lost.

"What remorse followed I need not tell. Then and there to the best of my knowledge, I first consciously took Sin by the hand and turned my back on Duty. Time has led me to look upon my offence more leniently; I do not believe it or any other childish wrong is infinite, as some have pretended, but infinitely finite. Yet, if I had but won that first battle!"

And what a charming picture he gives us of the peaceful, hallowing influences about him in that quiet old parsonage!

"The Puritan 'Sabbath,' as everybody knows, began at 'sundown' on Saturday evening. To such observances of it I was born and bred. As the large, round disk of day declined, a stillness, a solemnity, a somewhat melancholy hush came over us all. It was time for work to cease, and for playthings to be put away. The world of active life passed into the shadow of an eclipse, not to emerge until the sun should sink again beneath the horizon.

[38]

"It was in the stillness of the world without and of the soul within that the pulsating lullaby of the evening crickets used to make itself most distinctly heard--so that I well remember I used to think that the purring of these little creatures, which mingled with the batrachian hymns from the neighboring swamps, was peculiar to Saturday evenings. I don't know that anything could give a clearer idea of the quieting and subduing effect of the old habit of observance of what was considered holy time, than this strange, childish fancy."

Had all the clergymen who visited the parsonage been as true to their profession as his own dear father, the thoughtful, impressible boy might, very possibly, have devoted his brilliant talents to the ministry. "It was a real delight," he says, "to have one of those good, hearty, happy, benignant old clergymen pass the Sunday with us, and I can remember one whose advent made the day feel almost like

'Thanksgiving.' But now and then would come along a clerical visitor with a sad face and a wailing voice, which sounded exactly as if somebody must be lying dead up-stairs, who took no interest in us children, except a painful one, as being in a[39] bad way with our cheery looks, and did more to unchristianize us with his woebegone ways than all his sermons were like to accomplish in the other direction. I remember one in particular who twitted me so with my blessings as a Christian child, and whined so to me about the naked black children, that he did more in that one day to make me a heathen than he had ever done in a month to make a Christian out of an infant Hottentot. I might have been a minister myself for aught I know, if this clergyman had not looked and talked so like an undertaker."

An exercise written while at Andover, shows at what an early age he attempted versification. It is a translation from the first book of Virgil's AEneid, and reads as smoothly as any lines of Pope. The following extract shows the angry god giving his orders to Zephyrus and Eurus:

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. [40]

CHAPTER IV.

OTHER REMINISCENCES.

9

IN his 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 by Caelebs 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 the Lapis Philosophorum,[41] otherwise called Chaos, the Dragon, the Green Lion, the Quinta Essentia, the Soap of Sages, the vinegar of Heavenly Grace, the Egg, the Old Man, the Sun, the Moon, and by all manner of odd aliases, 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 the bonquiniste."

"I have never lost my taste for alchemy," he adds, "since I first got hold of the Palladium Spagyricum of 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 same[42] delightful 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 gravel[43] and 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 it[44] be 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 frigate Constitution, which the government purposed to break up as unfit

for service, thoughtless of the desecration:

There was an hour when patriots dared profane

The mast that Britain strove to bow in vain,

10

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 tides Thy glorious flag, our brave Old 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 see

That banner in the sky; [45]

Beneath it rung the battle shout, And burst the cannon's roar;

The meteor of the ocean air

Shall 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 pluck

The eagle of the sea.

Oh, better that her shattered hulk

Should 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 threadbare sail,

And give her to the god of storms

The 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 Chamber Stans pede in uno, pretty nearly," and was published in the Boston Advertiser. From these columns it was extensively copied by other newspapers throughout the country, and handbills containing the verses were circulated in[46] Washington. 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 of[47] these 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 that The 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 to The Collegian, and his [48]brother-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.

11

[49] CHAPTER V. ABROAD.

AFTER a 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.[50] 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 paleo-zoic 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 in undress often affects us more than one in full costume."

Is this the mighty ocean?--is this all? [51]

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 maenia Romae--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 inscrip-

tion 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),[52] 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 the

Te Deum. All the crowd gone but these two filles 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 Weinzapfli'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?[53] 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 night-mare, 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

12

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 Encyclopedique'--for l'an troiseme (1795), when I stumbled upon a[54] brief 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. [55]

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.

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 tide Brought back an exile to his cradle's side; And as my bark her time-worn flag unrolled To 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: [56]

"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,[57] 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.

13

"This intersusception of the ideas of inanimate objects, and their faithful storing away among the sentiments, are curiously prefig-ured 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 his Fable for Critics:

There's Holmes, who is matchless among you for wit,

A Leyden jar always full-charged, from which flit

The electrical tingles of hit after hit.

In long poems 'tis painful sometimes, and invites

A thought of the way the new telegraph writes,

Which pricks down its little sharp sentences spitefully, [58]

As if you got more than you'd title to rightfully.

And you find yourself hoping its wild father Lightning Would 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 praise

As the tribute of Holmes to the grand Marseillaise. You went crazy last year over Bulwer's New 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 lyric

Full of fancy, fun, feeling, or spiced with satyric

In a measure so kindly, you doubt if the toes

That 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 fell

On some high tower, of midnight sentinel. [59]

But one still watched; no self-encircled woes

Chased from his lids the angel of repose;

He watched, he wept, for thoughts of bitter years

Bowed his dark lashes, wet with burning tears; His country's sufferings and her children's shame Streamed 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 gales

Swept 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 dress

Relieves the statelier with its sprightliness,

14

the stirring verses on Old Ironsides are 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."

[60]

CHAPTER VI.

CHANGE IN THE HOME.

IN 1836, 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.

[61]

The Poet at the Breakfast-Table thus 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 of[62] lath, 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 conchoi-dal 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 gra[63]ciously, 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 military[64] consultations 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

15

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.

[65]

"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 whose liaison with 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."

[66]

"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."

[67]

CHAPTER VII. THE PROFESSOR.

IN 1839, Doctor Holmes was appointed Professor of Anatomy and Physiology in Dartmouth College, and pleasantly describes in The 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 Path[68] that 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, [69]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."

16

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, Jacob[70] Wendell, 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 his Hall 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 mem[71]bers 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 wives Will declare it's all nonsense insuring your lives.

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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 decline Your feats in the rhubarb and ipecac line;

While you shut up your turnpike, your neighbors can go

The 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 still As a featherless biped, in spite of your quill. Poor drudge of the city! how happy he feels

With the burrs on his legs and the grass at his heels! No dodger behind, his bandannas to share,

No constable grumbling "You mustn't walk there!"

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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 church That 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. [73]

At the annual dinner of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, in 1843, Doctor Holmes read the fine poem entitled Terpsichore.

Three years later he delivered Urania, A Rhyme Lesson before 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."

[74]

CHAPTER VIII. THE LECTURER.

WHEN Doctor 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 is[75] also 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 the English 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 my[76] pocket, and seen myself everywhere announced as the most desperate of buffos. 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 even[77] the 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

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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 dull people, 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."

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"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 time[79] I 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,[80] 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 the Boylston Prize Dissertation, and in 1842, Homoeopothy and its kindred Delusions. The Boylston prizes were established in 1803, by Ward Nicholas Boylston. Doctor Holmes gained three of these prizes, and the Dissertations, 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

the[81] distinguished visitor in the following beautiful song:

The stars their early vigils keep, The silent hours are near,

When drooping eyes forget to weep-- Yet still we linger here;

And what--the passing churl may ask-- Can claim such wondrous power,

That Toil forgets his wonted task, And Love his promised hour?

The Irish harp no longer thrills, Or breathes a fainter tone;

The clarion blast from Scotland's hills

Alas! no more is blown.

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And Passion's burning lip bewails

Her Harold's wasted fire,

Still lingering o'er the dust that veils

The Lord of England's lyre.

But grieve not o'er its broken strings, Nor think its soul hath died,

While yet the lark at heaven's gate sings, As once o'er Avon's side;--

While gentle summer sheds her bloom, And dewy blossoms wave,

Alike o'er Juliet's storied tomb And Nelly's nameless grave. Thou glorious island of the sea! Though wide the wasting flood

That parts our distant land from thee, We claim thy generous blood.

Nor o'er thy far horizon springs

One hallowed star of fame.

But kindles, like an angel's wings,

Our western skies in flame!

[83]

CHAPTER IX.

NAMING THE NEW MAGAZINE.

IN the year 1857, Mr. Phillips, of the firm of Phillips & Sampson, undertook the publication in Boston, of a new literary magazine. They were fortunate in securing James Russell Lowell as editor, and one condition he made upon accepting the office was, that his friend, Doctor Holmes, should be one of the chief contributors.

It was the latter, also, who was called upon to name the new magazine. Thus was the Atlantic Monthly launched upon the great sea

of literature--a periodical that has never lost its first high prestige.

When Doctor Holmes sat down to write his first article for the new magazine, he remembered that some twenty-five years before, he had begun a series of papers for a certain New England Magazine, published in Boston, by J. T. & E. Buckingham, with the title of Autocrat[84] of the Breakfast-Table. Curious, as he says, to try the experiment of shaking the same bough again and finding out if

the ripe fruit were better or worse than the early wind-falls, he took the same title for his new articles.

"The man is father to the boy that was," he adds, "and I am my own son, as it seems to me, in those papers of the New England

Magazine."

To show the reader some family traits of this "young autocrat," we quote from these earlier articles the following fine extracts:

"When I feel inclined to read poetry, I take down my dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. The author may arrange the gems effectively, but their shape and lustre have been given by the attrition of ages. Bring me the finest simile from the whole range of imaginative writing, and I will show you a single word which conveys a more profound, a more accurate,

and a more eloquent analogy.

"Once on a time, a notion was started that if all the people in the world would shout at once, it might be heard in the moon. So the projectors agreed it should be done in just ten[85] years. Some thousand shiploads of chronometers were distributed to the select-men and other great folks of all the different nations. For a year beforehand, nothing else was talked about but the awful noise that was to be made on the great occasion. When the time came everybody had their ears so wide open to hear the universal ejaculation of boo--the word agreed upon--that nobody spoke except a deaf man in one of the Fejee Islands, and a woman in Pekin, so that the world was never so still since the creation."

At the close of the year when the twelve numbers of The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table were completed in the Atlantic Monthly and published in book form, the British Review wrote of the illustrious author as follows:

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"Oliver Wendell Holmes has been long known in this country as the author of some poems written in stately classic verse, abounding in happy thoughts and bright bird-peeps of fancy, such as this, for example:

The punch-bowl's sounding depths were stirred, Its silver cherubs smiling as they heard.

And this first glint of spring[86]--

The spendthrift Crocus, bursting through the mould, Naked and shivering with his cup of gold.

He is also known as the writer of many pieces which wear a serious look until they break out into a laugh at the end, perhaps in the last line, as with those on Lending a Punch Bowl, a cunning way of the writer's; just as the knot is tied in the whip cord at the end of the lash to enhance the smack.

"But neither of these kinds of verse prepared us for anything so good, so sustained, so national, and yet so akin to our finest humorists, as The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table; a very delightful book--a handy book for the breakfast table. A book to conjure up a cosey winter picture of a ruddy fire and singing kettle, soft hearth-rug, warm slippers, and easy chair; a musical chime of cups and saucers, fragrance of tea and toast within, and those flowers of frost fading on the windows without as though old Winter

just looked in, but his cold breath was melted, and so he passed by. A book to possess two copies of; one to be read and marked, thumbed and dog-eared; and one to stand up in its pride of place with the rest on the shelves, all ranged in shining rows,[87] as dear old friends, and not merely as nodding acquaintances.

"Not at all like that ponderous and overbearing autocrat, Doctor Johnson, is our Yankee friend. He has more of Goldsmith's sweetness and lovability. He is as true a lover of elegance and high bred grace, dainty fancies, and all pleasurable things, as was Leigh Hunt; he has more wordly sense without the moral languor; but there is the same boy-heart beating in a manly breast, beneath the poet's singing robe. For he is a poet as well as a humorist. Indeed, although this book is written in prose, it is full of poetry, with the

'beaded bubbles' of humor dancing up through the true hippocrene and 'winking at the brim' with a winning look of invitation shining in their merry eyes.

"The humor and the poetry of the book do not lie in tangible nuggets for extraction, but they are there; they pervade it from beginning to end. We cannot spoon out the sparkles of sunshine as they shimmer on the wavelets of water; but they are there, moving in all their golden life and evanescent grace.

"Holmes may not be so recognizably national[88] as Lowell; his prominent characteristics are not so exceptionally Yankee; the traits are not so peculiar as those delineated in the Biglow Papers. But he is national. One of the most hopeful literary signs of this book