Читать книгу Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes - E. E. Brown - Страница 9

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 corolla; lettuces and cabbages would not head; radishes knotted 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 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 hilltops 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 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-crusted, 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 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 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 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 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 morning. 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.

"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 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 Æneid, and reads as smoothly as any lines of Pope. The following extract shows the angry god giving his orders to Zephyrus and Eurus: