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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes, by E. E. Brown
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes
+
+Author: E. E. Brown
+
+Release Date: October 30, 2011 [EBook #37878]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIFE OF OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Tor Martin Kristiansen, Ron Stephens, Carol
+Brown and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+    [Illustration: 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.
+
+
+    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.
+
+
+
+
+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.
+
+"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."
+
+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 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]
+
+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 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.
+
+    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.
+
+    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!
+    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.
+
+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 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.
+
+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 called by her
+contemporaries "The Tenth Muse," was Doctor Holmes' 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."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] From notes furnished the writer by Dr. Holmes.
+
+[2] In the Harvard College Library may be seen a copy of Anne
+Bradstreet's poems, which passed through eight editions. The
+extraordinary title of her world-renowned book reads as follows:
+"Several poems compiled with great variety of wit and learning, full of
+delight, wherein especially is contained a complete discourse and
+description of the four elements, constitutions, ages of man, seasons of
+the year, together with an exact epitome of the three first monarchies,
+viz., the Assyrian, Persian, Grecian, and beginning of the Roman
+Commonweal to the end of their last king: with diverse other pleasant
+and serious poems. By a gentlewoman in New England." This talented lady
+was the ancestress not only of Oliver Wendell Holmes, but also of the
+Channings, Danas and Phillipses.
+
+[3] From notes furnished by Doctor Holmes.
+
+
+
+
+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:
+
+"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 untenanted,
+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 arm-chair 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
+obelisk, 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
+yellow 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
+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 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!' 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 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 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 mar_tin_ 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,
+"reminding,[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 Edmund, 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 pastor 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:
+
+"_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."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[4] From notes furnished by Doctor Holmes.
+
+[5] From notes furnished by Doctor Holmes.
+
+
+
+
+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 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 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+OTHER REMINISCENCES.
+
+
+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_, 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 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 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 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,
+    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!_
+    From 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;
+        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 thread-bare 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 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 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 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.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[6] From notes furnished by Dr. Holmes.
+
+
+
+
+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. Vast, simple, awful in dimensions and height, just beginning
+to grow tall at the point where our proudest steeples taper out, it
+fills the whole soul, pervades the vast landscape over which it reigns,
+and, like Niagara and the Alps, abolishes that five or six foot
+personality in the beholder which is fostered by keeping company with
+the little life of the day in its little dwellings. In the Alps your
+voice is as the piping of a cricket. Under the sheet of Niagara the
+beating of your heart seems too trivial a movement to take reckoning of.
+In the buttressed hollow of one of these paleozoic cathedrals you are
+ashamed of your ribs, and blush for the exiguous pillars of bone on
+which your breathing structure reposes.... These old cathedrals are
+beyond all comparison, what are best worth seeing of man's handiwork in
+Europe."
+
+"Lively emotions very commonly do not strike us full in front, but
+obliquely from the side," he says at another time. "A scene or incident
+in _undress_ often affects us more than one in full costume."
+
+    Is this the mighty ocean?--is this all?
+
+Says the Princess in Gebir. The rush that should have flooded my soul in
+the Coliseum did not come. But walking one day in the fields about the
+city, I stumbled over a fragment of broken masonry, and lo! the World's
+Mistress in her stone girdle--_alta 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 inscription on a small slab of marble fixed
+in one of the walls. It told how this Church of St. Stephen was repaired
+and beautified in the 16--, and how during the celebration of its
+re-opening, two girls of the parish (_filles de la paroisse_), fell
+from the gallery, carrying a part of the balustrade with them, to the
+pavement, but by miracle escaped uninjured. Two young girls, nameless,
+but real presences to my imagination, as much as when they came
+fluttering down on the tiles with a cry that outscreamed the sharpest
+treble in 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 Weinzaepfli's restive horse sprang with him and landed
+him more than a hundred feet beneath in the lower town, not dead, but
+sorely broken, and no longer a wild youth, but God's servant from that
+day forward. I have forgotten the famous bears and all else. I remember
+the Percy lion on the bridge over the little river at Alnwick--the
+leaden lion with his tail stretched out straight like a pump-handle--and
+why? Because of the story of the village boy who must fain bestride the
+leaden tail, standing out over the water--which breaking, he dropped
+into the stream far below, and was taken out an idiot for the rest of
+his life."
+
+Again he says: "I once ascended the spire of Strasburg Cathedral, which
+is the highest, I think, in Europe. It is a shaft of stone
+filigree-work, frightfully open, so that the guide puts his arms behind
+you to keep you from falling. To climb it is a noonday nightmare, and to
+think of having climbed it crisps all the fifty-six joints of one's
+twenty digits. While I was on it, 'pinnacled dim in the intense inane,'
+a strong wind was blowing, and I felt sure that the spire was rocking.
+It swayed back and forward like a stalk of rye, or a cat-o'-nine tails
+(bulrush) with a bobolink on it. I mentioned it to the guide, and he
+said that the spire did really swing back and forward, I think he said
+some feet.
+
+"Keep any line of knowledge ten years and some other line will intersect
+it. Long after I was hunting out a paper of Dumeril's in an old
+journal--the '_Magazin Encyclopedique_'--for _l'an troiseme_ (1795),
+when I stumbled upon a 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."
+
+[Illustration: THE BIRTHPLACE OF OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.]
+
+The ruins of a Roman aqueduct he describes in another place, and now and
+then some incident that happened in England or Scotland, may be found
+among his writings; but when, after three years' absence, he returns to
+Cambridge and delivers his poem before the "Phi Beta Kappa Society," he
+begs his classmates to--
+
+    Ask no garlands sought beyond the tide,
+    But take the leaflets gathered at your side.
+
+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:
+
+"To what small things our memory and our affections attach themselves! I
+remember when I was a child that one of the girls planted some Star of
+Bethlehem bulbs in the southwest corner of our front yard. Well, I left
+the paternal roof and wandered in other lands, and learned to think in
+the words of strange people. But after many years, as I looked in the
+little front yard again, it occurred to me that there used to be some
+Stars of Bethlehem in the southwest corner. The grass was tall there,
+and the blade of the plant is very much like grass, only thicker and
+glossier.
+
+"Even as Tully parted the briers and brambles when he hunted for the
+sphere-containing cylinder that marked the grave of Archimedes, so did I
+comb the grass with my fingers for my monumental memorial flower. Nature
+had stored my keepsake tenderly in her bosom. The glossy,
+faintly-streaked blades were there; they are there still, though they
+never flower, darkened as they are by the shade of the elms and rooted
+in the matted turf.
+
+"Our hearts are held down to our homes by innumerable fibres, trivial as
+that I have just recalled; but Gulliver was fixed to the soil, you
+remember, by pinning his head a hair at a time. Even a stone, with a
+whitish band crossing it, belonging to the pavement of the back yard,
+insisted on becoming one of the talismans of memory.
+
+"This intersusception of the ideas of inanimate objects, and their
+faithful storing away among the sentiments, are curiously prefigured in
+the material structure of the thinking centre itself. In the very core
+of the brain, in the part where Des Cartes placed the soul, is a small
+mineral deposit of grape-like masses of crystalline matter.
+
+"But the plants that come up every year in the same place, like the
+Stars of Bethlehem, of all the lesser objects, give me the liveliest
+home-feeling."
+
+To return to the Phi Beta Kappa poem, modestly termed by the author "A
+Metrical Essay," it is interesting to note Lowell's hearty appreciation
+of it in 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,
+    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.
+    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,
+
+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."
+
+
+
+
+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.
+
+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 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 conchoidal clippings of
+the broadaxes, showing the rude way in which the timber was shaped, as
+it came, full of sap, from the neighboring forest. It is a realm of
+darkness and thick dust, and shroudlike cobwebs and dead things they
+wrap in their gray folds. For a garret is like a seashore, where wrecks
+are thrown up and slowly go to pieces. There is the cradle which the old
+man you just remember was rocked in; there is the ruin of the bedstead
+he died on; that ugly slanting contrivance used to be put under his
+pillow in the days when his breath came hard; there is his old chair
+with both arms gone, symbol of the desolate time when he had nothing
+earthly left to lean on; there is the large wooden reel which the
+blear-eyed old deacon sent the minister's lady, who thanked him
+graciously, and twirled it smilingly, and in fitting season bowed it
+out decently to the limbo of troublesome conveniences. And there are old
+leather portmanteaus, like stranded porpoises, their mouths gaping in
+gaunt hunger for the food with which they used to be gorged to bulging
+repletion; and the empty churn with its idle dasher which the Nancys and
+Phebes, who have left their comfortable places to the Bridgets and
+Norahs, used to handle to good purpose; and the brown, shaky old
+spinningwheel, which was running, it may be, in the days when they were
+hanging the Salem witches.
+
+"Under the dark and haunted garret were attic chambers which themselves
+had histories.... The rooms of the second story, the chambers of birth
+and death, are sacred to silent memories.
+
+"Let us go down to the ground floor. I retain my doubts about those
+dents on the floor of the right-hand room, the study of successive
+occupants, said to have been made by the butts of the Continental
+militia's firelocks, but this was the cause the story told me in
+childhood, laid them to. That military 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 none of them need be doubted....
+
+"In the days of my earliest remembrance, a row of tall Lombardy poplars
+mounted guard on the western side of the old mansion. Whether like the
+cypress, these trees suggest the idea of the funeral torch or the
+monumental spire, whether their tremulous leaves make us afraid by
+sympathy with their nervous thrills, whether the faint balsamic smell of
+their leaves and their closely swathed limbs have in them vague hints of
+dead Pharaohs stiffened in their cerements, I will not guess; but they
+always seemed to me to give an air of sepulchral sadness to the house
+before which they stood sentries.
+
+"Not so with the row of elms you may see leading up towards the western
+entrance. I think the patriarch of them all went over in the great gale
+of 1815; I know I used to shake the youngest of them with my hands,
+stout as it is now, with a trunk that would defy the bully of Crotona,
+or the strong man 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."
+
+"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 and 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."
+
+
+
+
+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 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, faded away,
+threw themselves away; the whole drama of life was played in that stock
+company's theatre of a dozen houses, one of which was his, and no deep
+sorrow or severe calamity ever entered his dwelling in that little court
+where he lived in gay loneliness so long."
+
+In order to devote himself more strictly to his practice in Boston,
+Doctor Holmes resigned his professorship at Dartmouth College soon after
+his marriage. During the summer months, however, he delivered lectures
+before the Berkshire Medical School at Pittsfield, Mass., and
+established his summer residence "up among those hills that shut in the
+amber-flowing Housatonic, in the home overlooking the winding stream and
+the smooth, flat meadow; looked down upon by wild hills where the tracks
+of bears and catamounts may yet sometimes be seen upon the winter
+snow--a home," he adds, "where seven blessed summers were passed which
+stand in memory like the seven golden candlesticks in the beatific
+vision of the holy dreamer."
+
+The township of Pontoosuc, now Pittsfield, including some twenty-four
+thousand acres, was bought by Doctor Holmes' great-grandfather, Jacob
+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 members of the
+Massachusetts Historical Society, and after the death of Motley, Holmes
+became his biographer.
+
+Charles Sumner formed another of this pleasant literary coterie, and is
+described by Doctor Holmes, after a short acquaintance, as "an amiable,
+blameless young man; pleasant, affable and cheerful." Years after, when
+Sumner was assaulted in the Senate, Doctor Holmes, at a public dinner in
+Boston, denounced in strong language, the shameful outrage as an assault
+not only upon the man, but upon the Union.
+
+At the Berkshire festivals, the poet was often called upon to furnish a
+song, and brimful of wit and wisdom they always were, though often
+composed upon the spur of the moment. Here is a part of one of them:
+
+    Come back to your mother, ye children, for shame,
+    Who have wandered like truants, for riches or fame!
+    With a smile on her face, and a sprig in her cap,
+    She calls you to feast from her bountiful lap.
+
+    Come out from your alleys, your courts, and your lanes,
+    And breathe, like young eagles, the air of our plains,
+    Take a whiff from our fields, and your excellent wives
+    Will declare it's all nonsense insuring your lives.
+
+    Come you of the law, who can talk, if you please,
+    Till the Man in the Moon will declare it's a cheese,
+    And leave 'the old lady that never tell lies,'
+    To sleep with her handkerchief over her eyes.
+
+    Ye healers of men, for a moment 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!"
+
+    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.
+
+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."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[7] From notes furnished by Dr. Holmes.
+
+
+
+
+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
+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 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 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 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."
+
+"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 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, 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 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.
+    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!
+
+
+
+
+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 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 years. Some thousand
+shiploads of chronometers were distributed to the selectmen 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:
+
+"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--
+
+    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, 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 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 is its quiet
+nationality. The writer has made no straining and gasping efforts after
+that which is striking and peculiar, which has always been the bane of
+youth, whether in nations or individuals. He has been content to take
+the common, homespun, everyday humanity that he found ready to
+hand--people who do congregate around the breakfast table of an American
+boarding-house; and out of this material he has wrought with a vivid
+touch and truth of portraiture, and won the most legitimate triumph of a
+genuine book....
+
+"Holmes has the pleasantest possible way of saying things that many
+people don't like to hear. His tonics are bitter and bland. He does not
+spare the various foibles and vices of his countrymen and women. But it
+is done so good-naturedly, or with a sly puff of diamond dust in the
+eyes of the victims, who don't see the joke which is so apparent to us.
+As good old Isaak Walton advises respecting the worm, he impales them
+tenderly as though he loved them."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+How vividly every personage around that delightful "Breakfast-Table" is
+photographed upon the reader's mind! Can you not see the dear "Old
+Gentleman" just opposite the "Autocrat," as he suddenly surprises the
+company by repeating a beautiful hymn he learned in childhood? And the
+pale sweet "Schoolmistress" in her modest mourning dress? no wonder the
+eyes of the Autocrat frequently wandered to that part of the table and
+certain remarks are addressed to her alone! To tell the truth, we can't
+help falling in love with her ourselves! What a fine foil to this
+"soft-voiced little woman," is the landlady's daughter--that
+"tender-eyed blonde, with her long ringlets, cameo pin, gold pencil-case
+on a chain, locket, bracelet, album, autograph book, and accordion--who
+says 'Yes?' when you tell her anything, and reads Byron, Tupper, and
+Sylvanus Cobb Junior, while her mother makes the puddings!" Then there
+is the "poor relation" from the country--"a somewhat more than
+middle-aged female, with parchment forehead and a dry little frizette
+shingling it, a sallow neck with a necklace of gold beads, and a black
+dress too rusty for recent grief." Can you not hear the very tones of
+her high-pitched voice as she remarks that "Buckwheat is skerce and
+high."
+
+"The Professor" under chloroform--"the young man whom they call John,"
+appropriating the three peaches in illustration of the Autocrat's
+metaphysics--the boy, Benjamin Franklin, poring over his French
+exercises--the Poet, who had to leave town when the anniversaries came
+round--and the divinity student whose head the Autocrat tries
+occasionally, "as housewives try eggs," all these are so real to the
+reader that he can but feel they were something more than imaginary
+characters to the writer.
+
+Among the poems that close each number of the _Autocrat_, are some of
+the finest in our language. _The Chambered Nautilus_, _The Living
+Temple_, _The Voiceless_, and _The Two Armies_, are full of inspiring
+thought and deep pathos, while _The Deacon's Masterpiece_, _Parson
+Turell's Legacy_, _The Old Man's Dream_, and _Contentment_, sparkle with
+the Autocrat's own peculiar humor.
+
+"When we think of the familiar confidences of the Autocrat," says
+Underwood, "we might liken him to Montaigne. But when the parallel is
+being considered, we come upon passages so full of tingling hits or of
+rollicking fun, that we are sure we are mistaken, and that he resembles
+no one so much as Sidney Smith. But presently he sounds the depths of
+our consciousness, explores the concealed channels of feeling, flashes
+the light of genius upon our half-acknowledged thoughts, and we see that
+this is what neither the great Gascon nor the hearty and jovial
+Englishman could have attempted, ... when the world forgets the sallies
+that have set tables in a roar, and even the lyrics that have set a
+nation's heart on fire, Holmes' picture of the ship of pearl will
+preserve his name forever."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+ELSIE VENNER.
+
+
+The _Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table_ was followed in 1859 by _The
+Professor_, a series of similar essays, in which we are introduced to
+"Iris" and "Little Boston," and begin to realize Doctor Holmes'
+inimitable skill in dramatic effect as well as in character painting.
+_The Story of Iris_ has been printed by itself in Rossiter Johnson's
+_Little Classics_, and reads like an exquisite prose poem; but after
+all, we like best to follow the delicate thread of narrative just as the
+professor himself has introduced it--a dainty aria whose harmony runs
+under and over and all through the deep philosophy and sparkling table
+talk of the book.
+
+It prepares us, too, for _Elsie Venner_, the "Professor's Story"--a
+novel whose weird conception holds us spell-bound from beginning to
+end, in spite of the sadness--"the pity of it." At the very first
+introduction to Elsie we have a hint of the strange hereditary curse
+that throws its blight over her whole nature:
+
+"Who and what is that," asks the new master, "sitting a little apart
+there--that strange, wild-looking girl?"
+
+The lady teacher's face changed; one would have said she was frightened
+or troubled. She looked at the girl doubtfully, as if she might hear the
+master's question and its answer. But the girl did not look up; she was
+winding a gold chain about her wrist, and then uncoiling it, as if in a
+kind of reverie.
+
+Miss Dailey drew close to the master and placed her hand so as to hide
+her lips.
+
+"Don't look at her as if we were talking about her," she whispered
+softly, "that is Elsie Venner."
+
+The more we read of her, the more her sad beauty fascinates us.
+
+"She looked as if she might hate, but could not love. She hardly smiled
+at anything, spoke rarely, but seemed to feel that her natural power of
+expression lay all in her bright eyes, the force of which so many had
+felt, but none perhaps had tried to explain to themselves. A person
+accustomed to watch the faces of those who were ailing in body or mind,
+and to search in every line and tint for some underlying source of
+disorder, could hardly help analyzing the impression such a face
+produced upon him. The light of those beautiful eyes was like the lustre
+of ice; in all her features there was nothing of that human warmth which
+shows that sympathy has reached the soul beneath the mask of flesh it
+wears. The look was that of remoteness, of utter isolation. There was in
+its stony apathy the pathos which we find in the blind who show no film
+or speck over the organs of sight; for Nature had meant her to be
+lovely, and left out nothing but love."
+
+The mother of Elsie, some months before the birth of her child, had been
+bitten by a rattlesnake. The instant use of powerful antidotes seemed to
+arrest the fatal poison, but death ensued a few weeks after the birth of
+her little girl.
+
+"There was something not human looking out of Elsie's eyes.... There
+were two warring principles in that superb organization and proud soul.
+One made her a woman, with all a woman's powers and longings. The other
+chilled all the currents of outlets for her emotions. It made her
+tearless and mute, when another woman would have wept and pleaded. And
+it infused into her soul something--it was cruel to call it
+malice--which was still and watchful and dangerous--which waited its
+opportunity, and then shot like an arrow from its bow out of the coil of
+brooding premeditation."
+
+But the cloud--"the ante-natal impression which had mingled an alien
+element in Elsie's nature"--is mercifully lifted just before her death.
+
+She had fallen into a light slumber, and when she awoke and looked up
+into her father's face, she seemed to realize his tenderness and
+affection as never before.
+
+"Elsie dear," he said, "we were thinking how much your expression was,
+sometimes, like that of your sweet mother. If you could but have seen
+her so as to remember her!"
+
+The tender look and tone, the yearning of the daughter's heart
+for the mother she had never seen, save only with the unfixed,
+undistinguishable eyes of earliest infancy, perhaps the understanding
+that she might soon rejoin her in another state of being,--all came upon
+her with a sudden overflow of feeling which broke through all the
+barriers between her heart and her eyes, and Elsie wept. It seemed to
+her father as if the malign influence--evil spirit it might almost be
+called--which had pervaded her being, had at least been driven forth or
+exorcised, and that these tears were at once the sign and pledge of her
+redeemed nature. But now she was to be soothed and not excited. After
+her tears she slept again, and the look her face wore was peaceful as
+never before.
+
+While "Elsie Venner" is a purely imaginary conception, the author tells
+us that after beginning the story he received the most striking
+confirmation of the possibility of the existence of such a character.
+The reader is awakened to new views of human responsibility in the
+perusal of Elsie's life, and with good old pastor Honeywood learns a
+lesson of patience with his fellow creatures in their inborn
+peculiarities and of charity in judging what seem to him wilful faults
+of character.
+
+The Professor's story while centring the interest upon Elsie, gives
+numerous side glances of New England village life; and old Sophy, Helen
+Darley, Silas Peckham, Bernard Langdon, Dick Venner, and the good Doctor
+are portrayed in vivid colors. There is a deal of psychology throughout
+the book, and not a little theology--good wholesome theology too, as the
+following brief extract shows:
+
+"The good minister was as kind-hearted as if he had never groped in the
+dust and ashes of those cruel old abstractions which have killed out so
+much of the world's life and happiness. 'With the heart man believeth
+unto righteousness;' a man's love is the measure of his fitness for good
+or bad company here or elsewhere. Men are tattooed with their special
+beliefs like so many South Sea Islanders; but a real human heart, with
+divine love in it, beats with the same glow under all the patterns of
+all earth's thousand tribes!"
+
+The pathos of poor Elsie's story is relieved now and then by humorous
+descriptions of country manners and customs. The Sprowles' party and the
+Widow Rowen's "tea-fight" give a vein of light comedy that rests the
+sympathetic reader as a sudden merry smile upon a grave and troubled
+face.
+
+_The Guardian Angel_, the second novel of Doctor Holmes, was not
+published until 1867, but it is interesting to compare the two stories,
+for there is a strong family likeness between them. Both show the power
+of inherited tendencies, though Myrtle Hazard, the heroine of _The
+Guardian Angel_, has no alien element in her blood like that which
+tormented poor Elsie. With Myrtle "it was as when several grafts,
+bearing fruit that ripens at different times, are growing upon the same
+stock. Her earlier impulses may have been derived directly from her
+father and mother, but various ancestors came uppermost in their time
+before the absolute and total result of their several forces had found
+its equilibrium in the character by which she was to be known as an
+individual. These inherited impulses were therefore many, conflicting,
+some of them dangerous. The World, the Flesh, and the Devil held
+mortgages on her life before its deed was put in her hands; but sweet
+and gracious influences were also born with her; and the battle of life
+was to be fought between them, God helping her in her need, and her own
+free choice siding with one or the other."
+
+The scene opens in a quiet New England village which is roused from its
+usual lethargy by the startling announcement in the weekly paper of a
+lost child. This is none other than the little orphan, Myrtle Hazard,
+who after a few dreary years in the dismal Wither's homestead, escapes
+by night in her little boat, is rescued by a young student from a
+frightful death at the rapids, and brought back to her distressed Aunt
+Silence by good old Byles Gridley--the true "Guardian Angel" of her
+life.
+
+When old Doctor Hurlbut "ninety-two, very deaf, very feeble, yet a wise
+counsellor in doubtful and difficult cases," comes to prescribe for the
+young girl, he says to his son:
+
+"I've seen that look on another face of the same blood--it's a great
+many years ago, and she was dead before you were born, my boy,--but I've
+seen that look, and it meant trouble then, and I'm afraid it means
+trouble now. I see some danger of a brain fever. And if she doesn't
+have that, then look out for some hysteric fits that will make
+mischief.... I've been through it all before in that same house. Live
+folks are only dead folks warmed over. I can see 'em all in that girl's
+face.--Handsome Judith to begin with. And that queer woman, the Deacon's
+mother--there's where she gets that hystericky look. Yes, and the
+black-eyed woman with the Indian blood in her--look out for that--look
+out for that.
+
+... Four generations--four generations, man and wife--yes, five
+generations before this Hazard child I've looked on with these old eyes.
+And it seems to me that I can see something of almost every one of 'em
+in this child's face--it's the forehead of this one, and it's the eyes
+of that one, and it's that other's mouth, and the look that I remember
+in another, and when she speaks, why, I've heard that same voice
+before--yes, yes--as long ago as when I was first married."
+
+Aside from the interest of the story there is a strange fascination in
+tracing the development of these various ancestral traits.
+
+"This body in which we journey across the isthmus between the two oceans
+is not a private carriage, but an omnibus," says old Byles Gridley in
+his _Thoughts on the Universe_--dead book that was destined to so grand
+a resurrection! Surely no one can deny the successive development of
+inherited bodily aspects and habitudes, and the same thing happens, the
+author avers, "in the mental and moral nature, though the latter may be
+less obvious to common observation."
+
+_The Guardian Angel_ while a deep study of the Reflex Function in its
+higher sphere, is not without its lighter, more mirthful side. Says _The
+London News_, "the story is exceedingly humorous and comic in the less
+serious chapters. There is no such minor poet in the whole range of
+fiction as the immortal Gifted Hopkins. In the character of Hopkins all
+the foibles and vanities of the literary nature are exemplified in the
+most mirthful manner. If Doctor Holmes has more characters like Gifted
+Hopkins in his mind, the hilarity of two continents is not in much
+danger of being extinguished."
+
+Here is a glimpse of the young poet when racked with jealousy:
+
+"He retired pensive from the interview, and flinging himself at his
+desk, attempted wreaking his thoughts upon expression, to borrow the
+language of one of his brother bards, in a passionate lyric which he
+began thus:
+
+                Another's!
+    Another's! O the pang, the smart!
+      Fate owes to Love a deathless grudge--
+    The barbed fang has rent a heart
+      Which--which--
+
+judge--judge--no, not judge. Budge, drudge, fudge--what a disgusting
+language English is! Nothing fit to couple with such a word as grudge!
+And an impassioned moment arrested in full flow, stopped short,
+corked up, for want of a paltry rhyme! Judge--budge--drudge
+nudge--oh!--smudge--misery!--fudge. In vain--futile--no use--all
+up for to-night!'"
+
+The next day the dejected poet "wandered about with a dreadfully
+disconsolate look upon his countenance. He showed a falling-off in his
+appetite at tea-time, which surprised and disturbed his mother.... The
+most touching evidence of his unhappiness--whether intentional on the
+result of accident was not evident--was a _broken heart_, which he left
+upon his plate, the meaning of which was as plain as anything in the
+language of flowers. His thoughts were gloomy, running a good deal on
+the more picturesque and impressive methods of bidding a voluntary
+farewell to a world which had allured him with visions of beauty only to
+snatch them from his impassioned gaze. His mother saw something of this,
+and got from him a few disjointed words, which led her to lock up the
+clothes-line and hide her late husband's razors--an affectionate, yet
+perhaps unnecessary precaution, for self-elimination contemplated from
+this point of view by those who have the natural outlet of verse to
+relieve them is rarely followed by a casualty. It may be considered as
+implying a more than average chance for longevity; as those who meditate
+an imposing finish naturally save themselves for it, and are therefore
+careful of their health until the time comes, and this is apt to be
+indefinitely postponed so long as there is a poem to write or a proof to
+be corrected."
+
+Gifted Hopkins survives the ordeal, and completes his volume of poems,
+_Blossoms of the Soul_. Good old master Gridley, who foresees what the
+end will be, offers to accompany the young poet in his visit to the city
+publisher. What a world of pathos there is in the fond mother's
+preparations for the momentous journey: She brings down from the garret
+"a capacious trunk, of solid wood, but covered with leather, and adorned
+with brass-headed nails, by the cunning disposition of which, also, the
+paternal initials stood out on the rounded lid, in the most conspicuous
+manner. It was his father's trunk, and the first thing that went into
+it, as the widow lifted the cover, and the smothering shut-up smell
+struck an old chord of associations, was a single tear-drop. How well
+she remembered the time when she first unpacked it for her young
+husband, and the white shirt bosoms showed their snowy plaits! O dear,
+dear!
+
+"But women decant their affections, sweet and sound, out of the old
+bottles into the new ones--off from the lees of the past generation,
+clear and bright, into the clean vessels just made ready to receive it.
+Gifted Hopkins was his mother's idol, and no wonder. She had not only
+the common attachment of a parent for him, as her offspring, but she
+felt that her race was to be rendered illustrious by his genius, and
+thought proudly of the time when some future biographer would mention
+her own humble name, to be held in lasting remembrance as that of the
+mother of Hopkins."
+
+The description of the various articles that went into the trunk is
+humorous enough.
+
+"Best clothes and common clothes, thick clothes and thin clothes,
+flannels and linens, socks and collars, with handkerchiefs enough to
+keep the pickpockets busy for a week, with a paper of gingerbread and
+some lozenges for gastralgia, and 'hot drops,' and ruled paper to write
+letters on, and a little Bible and a phial with _hiera piera_, and
+another with paregoric, and another with 'camphire' for sprains and
+bruises. Gifted went forth equipped for every climate from the tropic to
+the pole, and armed against every malady from ague to zoster."
+
+The poet's interview with the publisher is one of the best things in the
+book, but to be thoroughly enjoyed, it must be read entire.
+
+The genial, kindly nature of Doctor Holmes is strikingly shown
+throughout the whole volume. Good, quaint Byles Gridley endears himself
+more and more to the reader, Gifted Hopkins finds in his heart's choice
+an appreciative, admiring audience of at least one, Cyprian Eveleth and
+young Doctor Hurlbut are most happily disposed of, Clement Lindsay
+receives his reward, Myrtle Hazard emerges from the conflict of mingled
+lives in her blood with the dross of her nature burned away, aunt
+Silence throws off her melancholy, Miss Cynthia Badlam repents of her
+evil manoeuvrings and dies "with the comfortable assurance that she is
+going to a better world," the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker learns to
+appreciate his patient wife--even Murray Bradshaw, the acknowledged
+villain of the book, is not without a few redeeming traits, and we close
+the volume with a sense of hearty goodwill and fervent charity toward
+all mankind.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+FURTHER ACQUAINTANCE.
+
+
+Between the writing of _Elsie Venner_ and _The Guardian Angel_, Doctor
+Holmes wrote a number of essays for the _Atlantic Monthly_, some of
+which were afterwards collected in the volume entitled _Soundings from
+the Atlantic_.
+
+_Currents and Counter-currents_ was published in 1861, and _Border-lines
+of Knowledge_ in 1862. The two latter books deal with scientific
+subjects, but are written in such an attractive style that they have
+been extremely popular not only with students but with the whole reading
+public. _Songs in many Keys_, a volume of poems dedicated to his mother,
+was published by Doctor Holmes in 1862. _Mechanism in Thoughts and
+Morals_ appeared in 1871, the same year that _The Poet at the
+Breakfast-Table_ was running as a serial in the _Atlantic Monthly_,
+and numerous stray poems were also written in this prolific decade. In
+1872 the poet's breakfast talk was published in book form. It is
+interesting to compare these three volumes--The Autocrat, the Professor,
+and the Poet. As a series they are as necessary to one another as the
+three strands of a cable, and yet each volume is, in a certain way,
+completed in itself. Where in the whole range of the English language,
+or indeed, of any language, will you find such an overflow of
+spontaneous wit and humor? While in no sense a story or even a
+narrative, the breakfast talk is enlivened by wonderfully life-like
+characters. We can easily imagine ourselves sitting beside them at the
+social table, and just as it is in real life, these chance acquaintances
+touch us at different points, awaken various degrees of interest, and
+are at all times quite distinct from the observer's own individuality.
+
+There is not a page without its sparkle of humor, and nugget of sound
+philosophy beneath, which the reader appropriates to himself in a
+delightfully unconscious manner--for the time being, it is he who is the
+Autocrat, the Professor, the Poet! As some one has truly said, "It is
+our thoughts which Doctor Holmes speaks; it is our humor to which he
+gives expression; it is the pictures of our own fancy that he clothes in
+words, and shows us what we ourselves thought, and only lacked the means
+of expressing. We never realized until he taught us by his magic power
+over us, how much each of us had of genius and invention and
+expression."
+
+Each book has its little romance, and the "Poet" introduces a poor
+gentlewoman whose story interests us quite as much as does that of the
+two lovers.
+
+"In a little chamber," he says, "into which a small thread of sunshine
+finds its way for half an hour or so every day during a month or six
+weeks of the spring or autumn, at all other times obliged to content
+itself with ungilded daylight, lives this boarder, whom, without
+wronging any others of our company, I may call, as she is very generally
+called in the household, the Lady....
+
+"From an aspect of dignified but undisguised economy which showed itself
+in her dress as well as in her limited quarters, I suspected a story of
+shipwrecked fortune, and determined to question our Landlady. That
+worthy woman was delighted to tell the history of her most distinguished
+boarder. She was, as I had supposed, a gentlewoman whom a change of
+circumstances had brought down from her high estate.--Did I know the
+Goldenrod family?--Of course I did.--Well, the lady was first cousin to
+Mrs. Midas Goldenrod. She had been here in her carriage to call upon
+her--not very often.--Were her rich relations kind and helpful to
+her?--Well, yes; at least they made her presents now and then. Three or
+four years ago they sent her a silver waiter, and every Christmas they
+sent her a bouquet--it must cost as much as five dollars, the Landlady
+thought.
+
+"And how did the Lady receive these valuable and useful things?
+
+"Every Christmas she got out the silver waiter and borrowed a glass
+tumbler and filled it with water, and put the bouquet in it and set it
+on the waiter. It smelt sweet enough and looked pretty for a day or two,
+but the Landlady thought it wouldn't have hurt 'em if they'd sent a
+piece of goods for a dress, or at least a pocket handkercher or two, or
+something or other that she could 'a' made use of....
+
+"What did she do?--Why, she read, and she drew pictures, and she did
+needlework patterns, and played on an old harp she had; the gilt was
+mostly off, but it sounded very sweet, and she sung to it, sometimes,
+those old songs that used to be in fashion twenty or thirty years ago,
+with words to 'em that folks could understand....
+
+"Poor Lady! She seems to me like a picture that has fallen face downward
+on the dusty floor. The picture never was as needful as a window or a
+door, but it was pleasant to see it in its place, and it would be
+pleasant to see it there again, and I for one, should be thankful to
+have the Lady restored by some turn of fortune to the position from
+which she has been so cruelly cast down."
+
+Before the Poet closes his breakfast talk, the poor Lady has, through
+the efforts of another boarder, the Register of Deeds, recovered her
+property. Mrs. Midas Goldenrod makes frequent and longer calls--"the
+very moment her relative, the Lady of our breakfast table, began to find
+herself in a streak of sunshine she came forward with a lighted candle
+to show her which way her path lay before her.
+
+"The Lady saw all this, how plainly, how painfully! yet she exercised a
+true charity for the weakness of her relative. Sensible people have as
+much consideration for the frailties of the rich as for those of the
+poor.
+
+"The Lady that's been so long with me is going to a house of her own,"
+said the Landlady, "one she has bought back again, for it used to belong
+to her folks. It's a beautiful house, and the sun shines in at the front
+windows all day long. She's going to be wealthy again, but it doesn't
+make any difference in her ways. I've had boarders complain when I was
+doing as well as I knowed how for them, but I never heerd a word from
+her that wasn't as pleasant as if she'd been talking to the Governor's
+lady."
+
+The strange little man, denominated "Scarabee," who had grown to look so
+much like the beetles he studied; the "Member of the House" with his
+Down East phrases; the little "Scheherazade" who furnishes a new story
+each week for the newspapers;--the good looking, rosy-cheeked salesman
+"of very polite manners, only a little more brisk than the approved
+style of carriage permits, as one in the habit of springing with a
+certain alacrity at the call of a customer;" the good old Master of Arts
+who makes so many sage remarks;--the young Astronomer with his heart
+confessions in the _Wind-clouds and Star-drifts_--all these are new
+acquaintances whom we are loth to part with, when the Landlady announces
+her intention of giving up the famous boarding-house, and the Poet drops
+the curtain. Would that the Old Master could yet be induced to give to
+the public those "notes and reflections and new suggestions" of his
+marvellous "interleaved volume!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+FAVORITES OF SONG.
+
+
+When we come to consider Doctor Holmes on the poet side of his
+many-sided nature, his own words at the famous Breakfast-Table are
+vividly brought to mind:
+
+"The works of other men live, but their personality dies out of their
+labors; the poet, who reproduces himself in his creation, as no other
+artist does or can, goes down to posterity with all his personality
+blended with whatever is imperishable in his song.... A single lyric is
+enough, if one can only find in his soul and finish in his intellect one
+of those jewels fit to sparkle on the stretched forefinger of all time."
+
+In the poems of Doctor Holmes we are quite sure there are many just such
+lyrics that the world will not willingly let die. _The Last Leaf, The
+Voiceless, The Chambered Nautilus, The Two Armies, The Old Man's Dream,
+Under the Violets, Dorothy Q._--but where shall we stop in the long
+enumeration of popular favorites like these?
+
+Oliver Wendell Holmes touches the heart as well as the intellect, and
+that aside from his power as a humorist, is one great secret of his
+success.
+
+Listen, for instance, to this exquisite bit:
+
+    Yes, dear departed, cherished days
+      Could Memory's hand restore
+    Your Morning light, your evening rays
+      From Time's gray urn once more,--
+    Then might this restless heart be still,
+      This straining eye might close,
+    And Hope her fainting pinions fold,
+      While the fair phantoms rose.
+
+    But, like a child in ocean's arms,
+      We strive against the stream,
+    Each moment farther from the shore
+      Where life's young fountains gleam;--
+    Each moment fainter wave the fields,
+      And wider rolls the sea;
+    The mist grows dark,--the sun goes down,--
+      Day breaks,--and where are we?
+
+And what a dainty touch is given to this _Song of the Sun-Worshipper's
+Daughter_!
+
+    Kiss mine eyelids, beauteous Morn
+      Blushing into life new born!
+    Send me violets for my hair
+      And thy russet robe to wear,
+    And thy ring of rosiest hue
+      Set in drops of diamond dew!
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    Kiss my lips, thou Lord of light,
+      Kiss my lips a soft good-night!
+    Westward sinks thy golden car;
+      Leave me but the evening star
+    And my solace that shall be
+      Borrowing all its light from thee.
+
+And where will you find a more pathetic picture than that of the old
+musician in _The Silent Melody_?
+
+    Bring me my broken harp, he said;
+      We both are wrecks--but as ye will--
+    Though all its ringing tones have fled,
+      Their echoes linger round it still;
+        It had some golden strings, I know,
+        But that was long--how long!--ago.
+
+    I cannot see its tarnished gold;
+      I cannot hear its vanished tone;
+    Scarce can my trembling fingers hold
+      The pillared frame so long their own;
+        We both are wrecks--a while ago
+        It had some silver strings, I know.
+
+    But on them Time too long has played
+      The solemn strain that knows no change,
+    And where of old my fingers strayed
+      The chords they find are new and strange--
+        Yes; iron strings--I know--I know--
+        We both are wrecks of long ago.
+
+With pitying smiles the broken harp is brought to him. Not a single
+string remains.
+
+    But see! like children overjoyed,
+    His fingers rambling through the void!
+
+They gather softly around the old musician.
+
+    Rapt in his tuneful trance he seems;
+    His fingers move; but not a sound!
+    A silence like the song of dreams....
+    "There! ye have heard the air," he cries,
+    "That brought the tears from Marian's eyes!"
+
+The poem closes with these fine stanzas:
+
+    Ah, smile not at his fond conceit,
+      Nor deem his fancy wrought in vain;
+    To him the unreal sounds are sweet,
+      No discord mars the silent strain
+        Scored on life's latest, starlit page
+        The voiceless melody of age.
+
+    Sweet are the lips of all that sing,
+      When Nature's music breathes unsought,
+    But never yet could voice or string
+      So truly shape our tenderest thought,
+        As when by life's decaying fire
+        Our fingers sweep the stringless lyre!
+
+Though entirely different in style, _Bill and Joe_ is another of those
+heart-reaching, tear-starting poems.
+
+Listen, for instance, to these few verses:
+
+    Come, dear old comrade, you and I
+    Will steal an hour from days gone by;
+    The shining days when life was new,
+    And all was bright with morning dew,
+    The lusty days of long ago
+    When you were Bill and I was Joe.
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    You've won the judge's ermined robe,
+    You've taught your name to half the globe,
+    You've sung mankind a deathless strain;
+    You've made the dead past live again;
+    The world may call you what it will,
+    But you and I are Joe and Bill.
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    How Bill forgets his hour of pride,
+    While Joe sits smiling at his side;
+    How Joe, in spite of time's disguise
+    Finds the old schoolmate in his eyes,--
+    Those calm, stern eyes that melt and fill,
+    As Joe looks fondly up at Bill.
+
+    Ah, pensive scholar, what is fame?
+    A fitful tongue of leaping flame;
+    A giddy whirlwind's fickle gust
+    That lifts a pinch of mortal dust;
+    A few swift years and who can show
+    Which dust was Bill, and which was Joe?
+
+    The weary idol takes his stand,
+    Holds out his bruised and aching hand,
+    While gaping thousands come and go,--
+    How vain it seems, his empty show!
+    Till all at once his pulses thrill:
+    'Tis poor old Joe's God bless you, Bill!
+
+The earlier poems of Doctor Holmes are frequently written in the
+favorite measures of Pope and Hood. This is not at all strange when we
+remember that in the boyhood of Doctor Holmes these two poets were the
+most popular of all the English bards. In his later poems, however, we
+find an endless variety of rhythms, and the careful reader will notice
+in every instance, a wonderful adaptation of the various poetical forms
+to the particular thought the poet wishes to convey.
+
+How well Doctor Holmes understands the "mechanism" of verse may be seen
+from his _Physiology of Versification and the Harmonies of Organic and
+Animal Life_, a valuable article published in the _Boston Medical and
+Surgical Journal_ of January 7, 1875.
+
+"Respiration," he says, "has an intimate relation to the structure of
+metrical compositions, and the reason why octosyllabic verse is so easy
+to read aloud is because it follows more exactly than any other measure
+the natural rhythm of the respiration....
+
+"The ten syllable, or heroic line has a peculiar majesty from the very
+fact that its pronunciation requires a longer respiration than is
+ordinary.
+
+"The caesura, it is true, comes in at irregular intervals and serves as a
+breathing place, but its management requires care in reading, and
+entirely breaks up the natural rhythm of breathing. The reason why the
+'common metre' of our hymn books and the fourteen syllable line of
+Chapman's Homer is such easy reading is because of the short alternate
+lines of six and eight syllables. One of the most irksome of all
+measures is the twelve-syllable line in which Drayton's Polyolbion is
+written. While the fourteen syllable line can be easily divided in half
+in reading, the twelve syllable one is too much for one expiration and
+not enough for two, and for this reason has been avoided by poets.
+
+"There is, however, the personal equation to be taken into account. A
+person of quiet temperament and ample chest may habitually breathe but
+fourteen times in a minute, and the heroic measure will therefore be
+very easy reading to him; a narrow-chested, nervous person, on the
+contrary, who breathes oftener than twenty times a minute, may prefer
+the seven-syllable verse, like that of Dyer's _Grongar Hill_, to the
+heroic measure, and quick-breathing children will recite Mother Goose
+melodies with delight, when long metres would weary and distract them.
+
+"Nothing in poetry or in vocal music is widely popular that is not
+calculated with strict reference to the respiratory function. All the
+early ballad poetry shows how instinctively the reciters accommodated
+their rhythm to their breathing: _Chevy Chace_, or _The Babes in the
+Wood_ may be taken as an example for verse. _God save the King_, which
+has a compass of some half a dozen notes, and takes one expiration,
+economically used, to each line, may be referred to as the musical
+illustration.
+
+"The unconscious adaptation of voluntary life to the organic rhythm is
+perhaps a more pervading fact than we have been in the habit of
+considering it. One can hardly doubt that Spenser breathed habitually
+more slowly than Prior, and that Anacreon had a quicker respiration than
+Homer. And this difference, which we conjecture from their rhythmical
+instincts, if our conjecture is true, probably, almost certainly,
+characterized all their vital movements."
+
+So much for the bare _vehicle_ of verse, but the poet himself, as Doctor
+Holmes says in his review of "Exotics," is a medium, a clairvoyant. "The
+will is first called in requisition to exclude interfering outward
+impressions and alien trains of thought. After a certain time the second
+state or adjustment of the poet's double consciousness (for he has two
+states, just as the somnambulists have) sets up its own automatic
+movement, with its special trains of ideas and feelings in the thinking
+and emotional centres. As soon as the fine frenzy, or _quasi_
+trance-state, is fairly established, the consciousness watches the
+torrent of thoughts and arrests the ones wanted, singly with their
+fitting expression, or in groups of fortunate sequences which he cannot
+better by after treatment. As the poetical vocabulary is limited, and
+its plasticity lends itself only to certain moulds, the mind works under
+great difficulty, at least until it has acquired by practice such
+handling of language that every possibility of rhythm or rhyme offers
+itself actually or potentially to the clairvoyant perception
+simultaneously with the thought it is to embody. Thus poetical
+composition is the most intense, the most exciting, and therefore the
+most exhausting of mental exercises. It is exciting because its mental
+states are a series of revelations and surprises; intense on account of
+the double strain upon the attention. The poet is not the same man who
+seated himself an hour ago at his desk with the dust-cart and the
+gutter, or the duck-pond and the hay-stack, and the barnyard fowls
+beneath his window. He is in the forest with the song-birds; he is on
+the mountain-top with the eagles. He sat down in rusty broadcloth, he is
+arrayed in the imperial purple of his singing robes. Let him alone, now,
+if you are wise, for you might as well have pushed the arm that was
+finishing the smile of a Madonna, or laid a veil before a train that had
+a queen on board, as thrust your untimely question on this
+half-cataleptic child of the Muse, who hardly knows whether he is in the
+body or out of the body. And do not wonder if, when the fit is over, he
+is in some respects like one who is recovering after an excess of the
+baser stimulants."
+
+As a writer of humorous poetry, it is safe to say that Oliver Wendell
+Holmes is without a peer.
+
+_The Height of the Ridiculous_, _The September Gale_, _The Hot Season_,
+_The Deacon's Master-piece_, _Nux Postcoenatica_, _The Stethoscope
+Song_, how many a "cobweb" have they shaken from the tired brain!
+
+And where in the whole range of humorous literature will you find a more
+delightful morsel than the "_Parting Word_," that follows?--
+
+    I must leave thee, lady sweet!
+    Months shall waste before we meet;
+    Winds are fair and sails are spread,
+    Anchors leave their ocean bed;
+    Ere this shining day grows dark,
+    Skies shall guide my shoreless bark;
+    Through thy tears, O lady mine,
+    Read thy lover's parting line.
+
+    When the first sad sun shall set,
+    Thou shalt tear thy locks of jet;
+    When the morning star shall rise
+    Thou shalt wake with weeping eyes;
+    When the second sun goes down
+    Thou more tranquil shalt be grown,
+    Taught too well that wild despair
+    Dims thine eyes, and spoils thy hair.
+
+    All the first unquiet week
+    Thou shalt wear a smileless cheek;
+    In the first month's second half
+    Thou shalt once attempt to laugh;
+    Then in _Pickwick_ thou shalt dip,
+    Lightly puckering round the lip,
+    Till at last, in sorrow's spite,
+    Samuel makes thee laugh outright.
+
+    While the first seven mornings last,
+    Round thy chamber bolted fast
+    Many a youth shall fume and pout,
+    "Hang the girl, she's always out!"
+    While the second week goes round,
+    Vainly shall they sing and pound;
+    When the third week shall begin,
+    "Martha, let the creature in!"
+
+    Now once more the flattering throng
+    Round thee flock with smile and song,
+    But thy lips unweaned as yet,
+    Lisp, "O, how can I forget!"
+    Men and devils both contrive
+    Traps for catching girls alive;
+    Eve was duped, and Helen kissed,
+    How, O how can you resist?
+
+    First, be careful of your fan,
+    Trust it not to youth or man;
+    Love has filled a pirate's sail
+    Often with its perfumed gale.
+    Mind your kerchief most of all,
+    Fingers touch when kerchiefs fall;
+    Shorter ell than mercers clip
+    Is the space from hand to lip.
+
+    Trust not such as talk in tropes
+    Full of pistols, daggers, ropes;
+    All the hemp that Russia bears
+    Scarce would answer lovers' prayers;
+    Never thread was spun so fine,
+    Never spider stretched the line,
+    Would not hold the lovers true
+    That would really swing for you.
+
+    Fiercely some shall storm and swear,
+    Beating breasts in black despair;
+    Others murmur with a sigh
+    You must melt or they will die;
+    Painted words on empty lies,
+    Grubs with wings like butterflies;
+    Let them die, and welcome, too;
+    Pray what better could they do?
+
+    Fare thee well, if years efface
+    From thy heart love's burning trace,
+    Keep, O keep that hallowed seat
+    From the tread of vulgar feet;
+    If the blue lips of the sea
+    Wait with icy kiss for me,
+    Let not thine forget that vow,
+    Sealed how often, love, as now!
+
+In his _Mechanism in Thought and Morals_, Doctor Holmes reveals one of
+the secrets of humorous writing. "The poet," he says, "sits down to his
+desk with an odd conceit in his brain; and presently his eyes filled
+with tears, his thought slides into the minor key, and his heart is full
+of sad and plaintive melodies. Or he goes to his work, saying--
+
+"'To-night I would have tears;' and before he rises from his table he
+has written a burlesque, such as he might think fit to send to one of
+the comic papers, if these were not so commonly cemeteries of hilarity
+interspersed with cenotaphs of wit and humor. These strange hysterics of
+the intelligence which make us pass from weeping to laughter, and from
+laughter back again to weeping, must be familiar to every impressible
+nature; and all this is as automatic, involuntary, as entirely
+self-evolved by a hidden, organic process, as are the changing moods of
+the laughing and crying woman. The poet always recognizes a dictation
+_ab extra_; and we hardly think it a figure of speech when we talk of
+his inspiration."
+
+Of Doctor Holmes' inimitable _vers d'occasion_ we select the following:
+
+At the reception given to Harriet Beecher Stowe on her seventieth
+birthday, at Governor Claflin's beautiful summer residence in
+Newtonville, Doctor Holmes read the following witty and characteristic
+poem:
+
+    If every tongue that speaks her praise
+    For whom I shape my tinkling phrase
+      Were summoned to the table,
+    The vocal chorus that would meet
+    Of mingling accents harsh or sweet
+    From every land and tribe would beat
+      The polyglots of Babel.
+
+    Briton and Frenchman, Swede and Dane,
+    Turk, Spaniard, Tartar of Ukraine,
+      Hidalgo, Cossack, Cadi,
+    High Dutchman and Low Dutchman, too,
+    The Russian serf, the Polish Jew,
+    Arab, Armenian and Mantchoo
+      Would shout, "We know the lady."
+
+    Know her! Who knows not Uncle Tom
+    And her he learned his gospel from
+      Has never heard of Moses;
+    Full well the brave black hand we know
+    That gave to freedom's grasp the hoe
+    That killed the weed that used to grow
+      Among the Southern roses.
+
+    When Archimedes, long ago,
+    Spoke out so grandly "_dos pou sto_,--
+      Give me a place to stand on,
+    I'll move your planet for you, now,"
+    He little dreamed or fancied how
+    The _sto_ at last should find its _pou_
+      For woman's faith to land on.
+
+    Her lever was the wand of art,
+    Her fulcrum was the human heart
+      Whence all unfailing aid is;
+    She moved the earth! its thunders pealed,
+    Its mountains shook, its temples reeled,
+    The blood-red fountains were unsealed,
+      And Moloch sunk to Hades.
+
+    All through the conflict, up and down
+    Marched Uncle Tom and Old John Brown,
+      One ghost, one form ideal,
+    And which was false and which was true.
+    And which was mightier of the two,
+    The wisest sibyl never knew,
+      For both alike were real.
+
+    Sister, the holy maid does well
+    Who counts her beads in convent cell,
+      Where pale devotion lingers;
+    But she who serves the sufferer's needs,
+    Whose prayers are spelt in loving deeds
+    May trust the Lord will count her beads
+      As well as human fingers.
+
+    When Truth herself was Slavery's slave
+    Thy hand the prisoned suppliant gave
+      The rainbow wings of fiction.
+    And Truth who soared descends to-day
+    Bearing an angel's wreath away,
+    Its lilies at thy feet to lay
+      With heaven's own benediction.
+
+The following poem was read by Doctor Holmes at the Unitarian Festival,
+June 2, 1882.
+
+    The waves upbuild the wasting shore:
+      Where mountains towered the billows sweep:
+    Yet still their borrowed spoils restore
+      And raise new empires from the deep.
+    So, while the floods of thought lay waste
+      The old domain of chartered creeds,
+    The heaven-appointed tides will haste
+      To shape new homes for human needs.
+    Be ours to mark with hearts unchilled
+      The change an outworn age deplores;
+    The legend sinks, but Faith shall build
+      A fairer throne on new-found shores,
+    The star shall glow in western skies,
+      That shone o'er Bethlehem's hallowed shrine,
+    And once again the temple rise
+      That crowned the rock of Palestine.
+    Not when the wondering shepherds bowed
+      Did angels sing their latest song,
+    Nor yet to Israel's kneeling crowd
+      Did heaven's one sacred dome belong--
+    Let priest and prophet have their dues,
+      The Levite counts but half a man,
+    Whose proud "salvation of the Jews"
+      Shuts out the good Samaritan!
+    Though scattered far the flock may stray,
+      His own the shepherd still shall claim,--
+    The saints who never learned to pray,--
+      The friends who never spoke his name.
+    Dear Master, while we hear thy voice,
+      That says, "The truth shall make you free,"
+    Thy servant still, by loving choice,
+      O keep us faithful unto Thee!
+
+Doctor Holmes being unable to attend the annual reunion of the Harvard
+Club in New York City, February 21, 1882, sent the following letter and
+sonnet which were read at the banquet:
+
+    DEAR BROTHERS ALUMNI:
+
+    As I am obliged to deny myself the pleasure of being with you, I do
+    not feel at liberty to ask many minutes of your time and attention.
+    I have compressed into the limits of a sonnet the feelings I am sure
+    we all share that, besides the roof that shelters us we have need of
+    some wider house where we can visit and find ourselves in a more
+    extended circle of sympathy than the narrow ring of a family, and
+    nowhere can we seek a truer and purer bond of fellowship than under
+    the benignant smile of our _Alma Mater_. Let me thank you for the
+    kindness which has signified to me that I should be welcome at your
+    festival.
+
+    In all the rewards of a literary life none is more precious than the
+    kindly recognition of those who have clung to the heart of the same
+    nursing mother, and will always flee to each other in the widest
+    distances of space, and let us hope in those unbounded realms in
+    which we may not utterly forget our earthly pilgrimage and its dear
+    companions.
+
+                                        Very sincerely yours,
+                                                  OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.
+
+SONNET.
+
+    Yes, home is sweet! and yet we needs must sigh,
+      Restless until our longing souls have found
+      Some realm beyond the fireside's narrow bound,
+    Where slippered ease and sleepy comfort lie,
+    Some fair ideal form that cannot die,
+      By age dismantled and by change uncrowned,
+      Else life creeps circling in the self-same round,
+    And the low ceiling hides the lofty sky.
+    Ah, then to thee our truant hearts return,
+      Dear mother, Alma, Casta--spotless, kind!
+      Thy sacred walls a larger home we find,
+    And still for thee thy wandering children yearn,
+    While with undying fires thine altars burn,
+      Where all our holiest memories rest enshrined.
+
+POEM READ BY DOCTOR HOLMES AT THE WHITTIER CELEBRATION.
+
+    I believe that the copies of verses I've spun,
+    Like Scheherazade's tales, are a thousand and one,
+    You remember the story--those mornings in bed--
+    'Twas the turn of a copper--a tale or a head.
+
+    A doom like Scheherazade's falls upon me
+    In a mandate as stern as the Sultan's decree;
+    I'm a florist in verse, and what _would_ people say
+    If I came to a banquet without my bouquet?
+
+    It is trying, no doubt, when the company knows
+    Just the look and the smell of each lily and rose,
+    The green of each leaf in the sprigs that I bring,
+    And the shape of the bunch and the knot of the string.
+
+    Yes, 'the style is the man,' and the nib of one's pen
+    Makes the same mark at twenty, and threescore and ten;
+    It is so in all matters, if truth may be told;
+    Let one look at the cast he can tell you the mould.
+
+    How we all know each other! No use in disguise;
+    Through the holes in the mask comes the flash of the eyes;
+    We can tell by his--somewhat--each one of our tribe,
+    As we know the old hat which we cannot describe.
+
+    Though in Hebrew, in Sanscrit, in Choctaw, you write,
+    Sweet singer who gave us the Voices of Night,
+    Though in buskin or slipper your song may be shod,
+    Or the velvety verse that Evangeline trod.
+
+    We shall say, 'You can't cheat us--we know it is you--
+    There is one voice like that, but there cannot be two.
+    _Maestro_, whose chant like the dulcimer rings;
+    And the woods will be hushed when the nightingale sings.
+
+    And he, so serene, so majestic, so true,
+    Whose temple hypaethral the planets shine through,
+    Let us catch but five words from that mystical pen
+    We should know our one sage from all children of men.
+
+    And he whose bright image no distance can dim,
+    Through a hundred disguises we can't mistake him,
+    Whose play is all earnest, whose wit is the edge
+    (With a beetle behind) of a sham-splitting wedge.
+
+    Do you know whom we send you, Hidalgos of Spain?
+    Do you know your old friends when you see them again?
+    Hosea was Sancho! you Dons of Madrid,
+    But Sancho that wielded the lance of the Cid!
+
+    And the wood-thrush of Essex--you know whom I mean,
+    Whose song echoes round us when he sits unseen,
+    Whose heart-throbs of verse through our memories thrill
+    Like a breath from the wood, like a breeze from the hill.
+
+    So fervid, so simple, so loving, so pure,
+    We hear but one strain and our verdict is sure--
+    Thee cannot elude us--no further we search--
+    'Tis Holy George Herbert cut loose from his church!
+
+    We think it the voice of a cherub that sings--
+    Alas! we remember that angels have wings--
+    What story is this of the day of his birth?
+    Let him live to a hundred! we want him on earth!
+
+    One life has been paid him (in gold) by the sun;
+    One account has been squared and another begun;
+    But he never will die if he lingers below
+    Till we've paid him in love half the balance we owe!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+THE MAN OF SCIENCE.
+
+
+"What decided me," says Doctor Holmes, "to give up Law and apply myself
+to Medicine, I can hardly say, but I had from the first looked upon my
+law studies as an experiment. At any rate, I made the change, and soon
+found myself introduced to new scenes and new companionships.
+
+"I can scarcely credit my memory when I recall the first impressions
+produced upon me by sights afterwards become so familiar that they could
+no more disturb a pulse-beat than the commonest of every-day
+experiences. The skeleton, hung aloft like a gibbeted criminal, looked
+grimly at me as I entered the room devoted to the students of the school
+I had joined, just as the fleshless figure of Time, with the hour-glass
+and scythe, used to glare upon me in my childhood from the _New England
+Primer_. The white faces in the beds at the Hospital found their
+reflection in my own cheeks which lost their color as I looked upon
+them. All this had to pass away in a little time; I had chosen my
+profession, and must meet all its aspects until they lost their power
+over my sensibility....
+
+"After attending two courses of lectures in the School of the
+University, I went to Europe to continue my studies. I can hardly
+believe my own memory when I recall the old practitioners and professors
+who were still going round the hospitals when I mingled with the train
+of students in the Ecole de Medicine."
+
+Of the famous Baron Boyer, author of a nine-volumed book on surgery,
+Doctor Holmes says, "I never saw him do more than look as if he wanted
+to cut a good collop out of a patient he was examining." Baron Larrey,
+the favorite surgeon of Napoleon, he describes as a short, square,
+substantial man, with iron-gray hair, red face, and white apron. To go
+round the Hotel des Invalides with Larrey was to live over the campaign
+of Napoleon, to look on the sun of Austerlitz, to hear the cannon of
+Marengo, to struggle through the icy waters of the Beresina, to shiver
+in the snows of the Russian retreat, and to gaze through the battle
+smoke upon the last charge of the red lancers on the redder field of
+Waterloo.
+
+Then there was Baron Dupuytren, "_ce grand homme de lautre cote de la
+riviere_,--with his high, full-doomed head and oracular utterances;
+Lisfrance, the great drawer of blood and hewer of members; Velpeau, who,
+coming to Paris in wooden shoes, and starving, almost, at first, raised
+himself to great eminence as surgeon and author; Broussais, the
+knotty-featured, savage old man who reminded one of a volcano, which had
+well-nigh used up its fire and brimstone, and Gabriel Audral, the rapid,
+fluent, fervid and imaginative speaker.
+
+"The object of our reverence, however, I might almost say idolatry,"
+adds Doctor Holmes, "was Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis, a tall, rather
+spare, dignified personage, of serene and grave aspect, but with a
+pleasant smile and kindly voice for the student with whom he came into
+personal relations.
+
+"If I summed up the lessons of Louis in two expressions, they would be
+these: First, always make sure that you form a distinct and clear idea
+of the matter you are considering. Second, always avoid vague
+approximations where exact estimates are possible....
+
+"Yes, as I say, I look back on the long hours of the many days I spent
+in the wards and in the autopsy room of La Pitie, where Louis was one
+of the attending physicians--yes, Louis did a great work for practical
+medicine. Modest in the presence of nature, fearless in the face of
+authority, unwearying in the pursuit of truth, he was a man whom any
+student might be happy and proud to claim as his teacher and his friend.
+And yet, as I look back on the days when I followed his teachings, I
+feel that I gave myself up too exclusively to his methods of thought and
+study. There is one part of their business that certain medical
+practitioners are too apt to forget; namely, that what they should most
+of all try to do is to ward off disease, to alleviate suffering, to
+preserve life, or at least to prolong it if possible. It is not of the
+slightest interest to the patient to know whether three or three and a
+quarter inches of his lungs are hepatized. His mind is not occupied with
+thinking of the curious problems which are to be solved by his own
+autopsy, whether this or that strand of the spinal marrow is the seat of
+this or that form of degeneration. He wants something to relieve his
+pain, to mitigate the anguish of dyspnaea, to bring back motion and
+sensibility to the dead limb, to still the tortures of neuralgia. What
+is it to him that you can localize and name by some uncouth term, the
+disease which you could not prevent and which you can not cure? an old
+woman who knows how to make a poultice and how to put it on, and does it
+_tuto_, _cito_, _jucunde_, just when and where it is wanted, is
+better--a thousand times better in many cases--than a staring
+pathologist who explores and thumps and doubts and guesses and tells his
+patient he will be better to-morrow, and so goes home to tumble his
+books over and make out a diagnosis.
+
+"But in those days I, like most of my fellow students, was thinking much
+more of 'science' than of practical medicine, and I believe if we had
+not clung so closely to the skirts of Louis, and had followed some of
+the courses of men like Rousseau,--therapeutists, who gave special
+attention to curative methods, and not chiefly to diagnosis--it would
+have been better for me and others. One thing, at any rate, we did learn
+in the wards of Louis. We learned that a very large proportion of
+diseases get well of themselves, without any special medication--the
+great fact formulated, enforced and popularized by Doctor Jacob
+Bigelow."
+
+It is well known that Doctor Holmes detests the habit of drugging
+practised by so many physicians of the "old school," and in his address
+before the Massachusetts Medical Society, entitled Currents and Counter
+Currents in Medical Science, he makes a severe attack upon the
+inordinate use of medicines.
+
+"What is the honest truth," he says at another time, "about the medical
+art? By far the largest number of diseases which physicians are called
+to treat will get well at any rate, even in spite of reasonably bad
+treatment. Of the other fraction, a certain number will inevitably die,
+whatever is done: there remains a small margin of cases where the life
+of the patient depends on the skill of the physician. Drugs now and then
+save life; they often shorten disease and remove symptoms; but they are
+second in importance to food, air, temperature, and the other hygienic
+influences. That was a shrewd trick of Alexander's physician on the
+occasion of his attack after bathing. He asked three days to prepare his
+medicine. Time is the great physician as well as the great consoler.
+Sensible men in all ages have trusted most to nature."
+
+Of quacks and other humbugs, Doctor Holmes had an undisguised, wholesome
+contempt.
+
+"Shall we try," he says, "the medicines advertised with the certificates
+of justices of the peace, of clergymen, or even members of Congress?
+Certainly, it may be answered, any one of them which makes a good case
+for itself. But the difficulty is, that the whole class of commercial
+remedies are shown by long experience, with the rarest exceptions, to be
+very sovereign cures for empty pockets, and of no peculiar efficacy for
+anything else. You may be well assured that if any really convincing
+evidence was brought forward in behalf of the most vulgar nostrum, the
+chemists would go at once to work to analyze it, the physiologists to
+experiment with it, and the young doctors would all be trying it on
+their own bodies, if not on their patients. But we do not think it worth
+while, as a general rule, to send a Cheap Jack's gilt chains and lockets
+to be tested for gold. We know they are made to sell, and so with the
+pills and potions.... Think how rapidly any real discovery is
+appropriated and comes into universal use. Take anaesthetics, take the
+use of bromide of potassium, and see how easily they obtained
+acceptance. If you are disposed to think any of the fancy systems has
+brought forward any new remedy of value which the medical profession has
+been slow to accept, ask any fancy practitioner to name it. Let him
+name one,--the best his system claims,--not a hundred, but one. A single
+new, efficient, trustworthy remedy which the medical profession can test
+as they are ready to test before any scientific tribunal, opium,
+quinine, ether, the bromide of potassium. There is no such remedy on
+which any of the fancy practitioners dare stake his reputation. If there
+were, it would long ago have been accepted, though it had been flowers
+of brimstone from the borders of Styx or Cocytus."
+
+Homoeopathy is classed by Doctor Holmes among such "Kindred Delusions"
+as the Royal Cure for the King's Evil, the Weapon Ointment, the
+Sympathetic Powder, the Tar-water mania of Bishop Berkeley, and the
+Metallic Tractors, or Perkinsism.
+
+In making a direct attack upon the pretentions of Homoeopathy, Doctor
+Holmes declares at the outset that he shall treat it not by ridicule,
+but by argument; with great freedom, but with good temper and in
+peaceable language.
+
+_Similia similibus curantur._ Like cures like, is one of the fundamental
+principles of Homoeopathy, and "improbable though it may seem to
+some," says Doctor Holmes with his usual impartial fairness, "there is
+no essential absurdity involved in the proposition that diseases yield
+to remedies capable of producing like symptoms. There are, on the other
+hand, some analogies which lend a degree of plausibility to the
+statement. There are well-ascertained facts, known from the earliest
+periods of medicine, showing that under certain circumstances, the very
+medicine which from its known effects, one would expect to aggravate the
+disease, may contribute to its relief. I may be permitted to allude, in
+the most general way, to the case in which the spontaneous efforts of an
+over-tasked stomach are quieted by the agency of a drug which that organ
+refuses to entertain upon any terms. But that _every_ cure ever
+performed by medicine should have been founded upon this principle,
+although without the knowledge of a physician, that the Homoeopathy
+axiom is, as Hahnemann asserts, "the _sole_ law of nature in
+therapeutics," a law of which nothing more than a transient glimpse ever
+presented itself to the innumerable host of medical observers, is a
+dogma of such sweeping extent and pregnant novelty, that it demands a
+corresponding breath and depth of unquestionable facts to cover its vast
+pretensions."
+
+Among the many facts of which great use has been made by the
+Homoeopathists, is that found in the precept given for the treatment
+of parts which have been frozen, by friction with snow, etc.
+
+"But," says Doctor Holmes, "we deceive ourselves by names, if we suppose
+the frozen part to be treated by cold, and not by heat. The snow may
+even be actually _warmer_ than the part to which it is applied. But even
+if it were at the same temperature when applied, it never did and never
+could do the least good to a frozen part, except as a mode of regulating
+the application of what? of _heat_. But the heat must be applied
+_gradually_, just as food must be given a little at a time to those
+perishing with hunger. If the patient were brought into a warm room,
+heat would be applied _very rapidly_, were not something interposed to
+prevent this, and allow its gradual admission. Snow or iced water is
+exactly what is wanted; it is not cold to the part; it is very possibly
+warm, on the contrary, for these terms are relative, and if it does not
+melt and let the heat in, or is not taken away, the part will remain
+frozen up until doomsday. Now the treatment of a frozen limb by heat, in
+large or small quantities, is not Homoeopathy."
+
+Another supposed illustration of the Homoeopathic law is the alleged
+successful management of burns, by holding them to the fire. "This is a
+popular mode of treating those burns which are of too little consequence
+to require any more efficacious remedy, and would inevitably get well of
+themselves, without any trouble being bestowed upon them. It produces a
+most acute pain in the part, which is followed by some loss of
+sensibility, as happens with the eye after exposure to strong light, and
+the ear after being subjected to very intense sounds. This is all it is
+capable of doing, and all further notions of its efficacy must be
+attributed merely to the vulgar love of paradox. If this example affords
+any comfort to the Homoeopathist, it seems as cruel to deprive him of
+it as it would be to convince the mistress of the smoke-jack or the
+flatiron that the fire does not literally draw the fire out, which is
+her hypothesis.
+
+"But if it were true that frost-bites were cured by cold and burns by
+heat, it would be subversive, so far as it went, of the great principle
+of Homoeopathy. For you will remember that this principle is that
+_Like_ cures _Like_, and not that _Same_ cures _Same_; that there is
+_resemblance_ and not _identity_ between the symptoms of the disease and
+those produced by the drug which cures it, and none have been readier to
+insist upon this distinction than the Homoeopathists themselves. For
+if _Same_ cures _Same_, then every poison must be its own
+antidote,--which is neither a part of their theory nor their so-called
+experience. They have been asked often enough, why it was that arsenic
+could not cure the mischief which arsenic had caused, and why the
+infectious cause of small-pox did not remedy the disease it had
+produced, and then they were ready enough to see the distinction I have
+pointed out. "O no! it was not the hair of the same dog, but only of one
+very much like him!"
+
+The belief in and employment of the "Infinitesimal doses," Doctor Holmes
+handles with the same fairness and acumen; but the absurd idea affirmed
+by Hahnemann that Psora is the cause of the great majority of chronic
+diseases, he treats as it deserves, with unqualified contempt.
+
+In conclusion, he says, "As one humble member of a profession which for
+more than two thousand years has devoted itself to the pursuit of the
+best earthly interests of mankind always assailed and insulted from
+without by such as are ignorant of its infinite perplexities and labors,
+always striving in unequal contest with the hundred armed giants who
+walk in the noonday and sleep not in the midnight, yet still toiling not
+merely for itself and the present moment, but for the race and the
+future, I have lifted up my voice against this lifeless delusion,
+rolling its shapeless bulk into the path of a noble science it is too
+weak to strike or to injure."
+
+Upon the contagiousness of Puerperal Fever, Doctor Holmes wrote an able
+treatise some forty years ago. This was reprinted with some additions,
+in 1855, and in an introductory note which accompanies the still later
+addition (1883), Doctor Holmes says, "The subject of this Paper has the
+same profound interest for me at the present moment as it had when I
+was first collecting the terrible evidence out of which, as it seems to
+me, the commonest exercise of reason could not help shaping the truth it
+involved. It is not merely on account of the bearing of the question--if
+there is a question--on all that is most sacred in human life and
+happiness that the subject cannot lose its interest. It is because it
+seems evident that a fair statement of the facts must produce its
+proportion of well-constituted and unprejudiced minds."
+
+The essay, a most valuable one, is republished without the change of a
+word or syllable, as the author upon reviewing finds that it anticipates
+and eliminates those secondary questions which cannot be for a moment
+entertained until the one great point of fact is peremptorily settled.
+
+There are but very few subjects, indeed, in medical science, that Doctor
+Holmes has not investigated, and investigated, too, most thoroughly....
+
+In his article on "Reflex Vision," published in Volume IV. of the
+Proceedings of the American Academy, will be found a very interesting
+account of his experiments in optics. One, indeed, that will both
+interest and instruct.
+
+To him, as is well known, we are indebted for numerous improvements in
+the stereoscope; and in microscopes also, he has done some original and
+important work.
+
+Said an admirer of Doctor Holmes in referring to his career as a medical
+professor:
+
+"He always makes people attentive, and I have been told that there is no
+professor whom the students so much like to listen to. In one of his
+books he says that every one of us is three persons, and I think that if
+the statement is true in regard to ordinary men and women, Doctor Holmes
+himself is at least half a dozen persons. He lectures so well on anatomy
+that his students never suspect him to be a poet, and he writes verses
+so well that most people do not suspect him of being an authority among
+scientific men. Though he illustrates his medical lectures by quotations
+of the most appropriate and interesting sort, from a wonderful variety
+of authors, he has never been known to refer to his own writings in that
+way."
+
+In celebrating the silver anniversary year of his wedding with the Muse
+of the monthlies--meaning his reappearance in the _Atlantic_--he
+observed that during the larger part of his absence, his time had been
+in a great measure occupied with other duties. "I never forgot the
+advice of Coleridge," he said, "that a literary man should have a
+regular calling. I may say, in passing, that I have often given the
+advice to others, and too often wished that I could supplement it with
+the words, "And confine himself to it.'"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+THE HOLMES BREAKFAST.
+
+
+As the seventieth birthday of Doctor Holmes drew near, the publishers of
+the _Atlantic Monthly_ resolved to give a "Breakfast" in his honor. The
+twenty-ninth of August, 1879, was, of course, the true anniversary, but
+knowing it would be difficult to bring together at that season of the
+year the friends and literary associates of Doctor Holmes, Mr. Houghton
+decided to postpone the invitations until the thirteenth of November.
+Upon that day a brilliant company assembled at noon in the spacious
+parlors of the Hotel Brunswick, in Boston.
+
+Doctor Holmes and his daughter, Mrs. Sargent, received the guests, who
+numbered in all about one hundred. Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mrs.
+Julia Ward Howe, Ralph Waldo Emerson and John G. Whittier assisted in
+this ceremony, and after a couple of hours spent in sparkling converse,
+the company adjourned to the dining-room, where a sumptuous "Breakfast"
+was served to the "Autocrat" and his friends.
+
+At the six tables were seated writers of eminence in every department of
+literature. Grace was said by the Rev. Phillips Brooks, D.D., and after
+the cloth was removed, Mr. H.O. Houghton introduced the guest of the day
+in a few happily-chosen words.
+
+The company then rose and drank the health of the poet, after which
+Doctor Holmes read the following beautiful poem:
+
+THE IRON GATE.
+
+    Where is the patriarch you are kindly greeting?
+      Not unfamiliar to my ear his name,
+    Not yet unknown to many a joyous meeting
+      In days long vanished,--is he still the same,
+
+    Or changed by years forgotten and forgetting,
+      Dull-eared, dim-sighted, slow of speech and thought,
+    Still o'er the sad, degenerate present fretting,
+      Where all goes wrong and nothing as it ought?
+
+    Old age, the gray-beard! Well, indeed, I know him,--
+      Shrunk, tottering, bent, of aches and ills the prey;
+    In sermon, story, fable, picture, poem,
+      Oft have I met him from my earliest day.
+
+    In my old AEsop, toiling with his bundle,--
+      His load of sticks,--politely asking Death,
+    Who comes when called for,--would he lug or trundle
+      His fagot for him?--he was scant of breath.
+
+    And sad "Ecclesiastes, or the Preacher,"
+      Has he not stamped the image on my soul,
+    In that last chapter, where the worn-out Teacher
+      Sighs o'er the loosened cord, the broken bowl?
+
+    Yes, long, indeed, I've known him at a distance,
+      And now my lifted door-latch shows him here;
+    I take his shrivelled hand without resistance,
+      And find him smiling as his step draws near.
+
+    What though of gilded baubles he bereaves us,
+      Dear to the heart of youth, to manhood's prime,
+    Think of the calm he brings, the wealth he leaves us,
+      The hoarded spoils, the legacies of time!
+
+    Altars once flaming, still with incense fragrant,
+      Passion's uneasy nurslings rocked asleep,
+    Hope's anchor faster, wild desire less vagrant,
+      Life's flow less noisy, but the stream how deep!
+
+    Still as the silver cord gets worn and slender,
+      Its lightened task-work tugs with lessening strain,
+    Hands get more helpful, voices grown more tender,
+      Soothe with their softened tones the slumberous brain.
+
+    Youth longs and manhood strives, but age remembers,
+      Sits by the raked-up ashes of the past,
+    Spreads its thin hands above the whitening embers
+      That warm its creeping life-blood till the last.
+
+    Dear to its heart is every loving token
+      That comes unbidden ere its pulse grows cold,
+    Ere the last lingering ties of life are broken,
+      Its labors ended, and its story told.
+
+    Ah, while around us rosy youth rejoices,
+      For us the sorrow-laden breezes sigh,
+    And through the chorus of its jocund voices
+      Throbs the sharp note of misery's hopeless cry.
+
+    As on the gauzy wings of fancy flying
+      From some far orb I track our watery sphere,
+    Home of the struggling, suffering, doubting, dying,
+      The silvered globule seems a glistening tear.
+
+    But Nature lends her mirror of illusion
+      To win from saddening scenes our age-dimmed eyes,
+    And misty day-dreams blend in sweet confusion
+      The wintery landscape and the summer skies.
+
+    So when the iron portal shuts behind us,
+      And life forgets us in its noise and whirl,
+    Visions that shunned the glaring noonday find us,
+      And glimmering starlight shows the gates of pearl.
+
+    I come not here your morning hour to sadden
+      A limping pilgrim leaning on his staff,--
+    I, who have never deemed it sin to gladden
+      This vale of sorrows with a wholesome laugh.
+
+    If word of mine another's gloom has brightened,
+      Through my dumb lips the heaven-sent message came;
+    If hand of mine another's task has lightened,
+      It felt the guidance that it dares not claim.
+
+    But, O my gentle sisters, O my brothers,
+      These thick-sown snow-flakes hint of toil's release;
+    These feebler pulses bid me leave to others
+      The tasks once welcome; evening asks for peace.
+
+    Time claims his tribute; silence now is golden;
+      Let me not vex the too long suffering lyre;
+    Though to your love untiring still beholden,
+      The curfew tells me--cover up the fire.
+
+    And now with grateful smile and accents cheerful,
+      And warmer heart than look or word can tell,
+    In simplest phrase--these traitorous eyes are tearful--
+      Thanks, Brothers, Sisters,--Children, and farewell!
+
+After the reading of the poem, the following reminiscence from Doctor
+Holmes' pen, was read by Mr. Houghton:--
+
+"The establishment of the _Atlantic Monthly_ was due to the liberal
+enterprise of the then flourishing firm of Phillips & Sampson. Mr.
+Phillips, more especially, was most active and sanguine. The publishers
+were fortunate enough to secure the services of Mr. Lowell as editor.
+Mr. Lowell had a fancy that I could be useful as a contributor, and woke
+me from a kind of literary lethargy in which I was half slumbering, to
+call me to active service. Remembering some crude contributions of mine
+to an old magazine, it occurred to me that their title might serve for
+some fresh papers, and so I sat down and wrote off what came into my
+head under the title _The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table_. This series
+of papers was not the result of an express premeditation, but was, as I
+may say, dipped from the running stream of my thoughts. Its very kind
+reception encouraged me, and you know the consequences, which have
+lasted from that day to this.
+
+"But what I want especially to say here is, that I owe the impulse which
+started my second growth, to the urgent hint of my friend Mr. Lowell,
+and that you have him to thank, not only for his own noble contributions
+to our literature, but for the spur which moved me to action, to which
+you owe any pleasure I may have given, and I am indebted for the
+crowning happiness of this occasion. His absence I most deeply regret
+for your and my own sake, while I congratulate the country to which in
+his eminent station he is devoting his services."
+
+As Mr. Whittier had been obliged to leave the company before this, Mr.
+James T. Fields read his fine poem entitled "Our Autocrat," from which
+we quote the last verses:
+
+    What shapes and fancies, grave or gay,
+      Before us at his bidding come!
+    The Treadmill tramp, the "One Hoss Shay,"
+      The dumb despair of Elsie's doom!
+
+    The tale of Aris and the Maid,
+      The plea for lips that cannot speak,
+    The holy kiss that Iris laid
+      On Little Boston's pallid cheek!
+
+    Long may he live to sing for us
+      His sweetest songs at evening time,
+    And like his Chambered Nautilus
+      To holier heights of beauty climb!
+
+    Though now unnumbered guests surround
+      The table that he rules at will,
+    Its Autocrat, however crowned,
+      Is but our friend and comrade still.
+
+    The world may keep his honored name,
+      The wealth of all his varied powers;
+    A stronger claim has love than fame
+      And he himself is only ours!
+
+Mr W.D. Howells then took the chair and was introduced to the company as
+the representative of the "mythical editor."
+
+In his remarks, Mr. Howells paid the following tribute to the Autocrat:
+
+"The fact is known to you all, and I will not insist upon it, but it was
+Oliver Wendell Holmes who not only named, but who made the _Atlantic_.
+How did he do this? Oh, very simply! He merely invented a new kind of
+literature, something so beautiful and rare and fine that while you were
+trying to determine its character as monologue or colloquy, prose or
+poetry, philosophy or humor, it was gradually penetrating your
+consciousness with a sense that the best of all these had been fused in
+one--a perfect form, an exquisite wisdom, an unsurpassable grace. This,
+and much more than any poor words of mine can say, was the Autocrat,
+followed by the Professor, and then by the Poet, at the same
+Breakfast-Table. We pledge him by all these names to-day, not only with
+the wine in our cups, but with the pride and love in our hearts, where
+we have enshrined him immortally young, in spite of the birthdays that
+come and go, and where we defy the future that lies in wait for our
+precious things, to know his quality better, or value his genius more
+highly than we."
+
+Mrs. Julia Ward Howe was then called upon to respond to the toast, "The
+girls we have _not_ left behind us," and after a few words in reply, she
+read a fine poem in honor of the illustrious guest.
+
+Charles Dudley Warner was then introduced, and after a short speech,
+read a poem by H. H., "To Oliver Wendell Holmes, on his seventieth
+birthday." In these charming lines almost every poem of Doctor Holmes is
+mentioned with rare tact and skill.
+
+At the close of the poem, President Eliot of Harvard, rose and said:
+
+"It seems to me that it is my duty to remind all these poets, essayists
+and story-tellers who are gathered here, that the main work of our
+friend's life has been of an altogether different nature. I know him as
+the professor of anatomy and physiology in the Medical School of Harvard
+University for the last thirty-two years, and I know him to-day as one
+of the most active and hard-working of our lecturers. Some of you
+gentlemen, I observe, are lecturers by profession, at least during the
+winter months. Doctor Holmes delivers four lectures every week for eight
+months of the year. I am sure the lecturers by profession will
+understand that this task requires an extraordinary amount of mental and
+physical vigor. And I congratulate our friend on the weekly
+demonstration of that vigor which he gives in our medical school. Most
+of you have perhaps the impression that Doctor Holmes chiefly enjoys a
+pretty couplet, a beautiful verse, an elegant sentence. It has fallen to
+me to observe that he has other great enjoyments. I never heard any
+other mortal exhibit such enthusiasm over an elegant dissection. And
+perhaps you think it is the pen with which Doctor Holmes is chiefly
+skilful. I assure you that he is equally skilful with scalpel and with
+microscope. And I think that none of us can understand the meaning and
+scope of Doctor Holmes' writing, unless we have observed that the daily
+work of his life has been to study and teach a natural science, the
+noble science of anatomy. It is his to know with absolute exactness the
+form of every bone in this wonderful body of ours, the course of every
+artery, and vein, and nerve, the form and function of every muscle, and
+not only to know it, but to describe it with a fascinating precision and
+enthusiasm. When I read his writings I find the traces of this life-work
+of his on every page. There are three thousand men scattered through New
+England at this moment who will remember Doctor Holmes through their
+lives, and transmit to their children the memory of him, as student and
+teacher of exact science. And let us honor him to-day, not
+forgetting--they can never be forgotten--his poems and essays, as a
+noble representative of the profession of the scientific student and
+teacher."
+
+Mr. S.L. Clemens (Mark Twain) followed President Eliot.
+
+"I would have travelled," he began, "a much greater distance than I have
+come to witness the paying of honors to Doctor Holmes, for my feeling
+toward him has always been one of peculiar warmth. When one receives a
+letter from a great man for the first time in his life, it is a large
+event to him, as all of you know by your own experience. Well, the first
+great man who ever wrote me a letter was our guest--Oliver Wendell
+Holmes. He was also the first great literary man I ever stole anything
+from, and that is how I came to write to him and he to me. When my first
+book was new, a friend of mine said, 'The dedication is very neat.'
+'Yes,' I said, 'I thought it was.' My friend said, 'I always admired it
+even before I saw it in _The Innocents Abroad_.' I naturally said, 'What
+do you mean? Where did you ever see it before?' 'Well, I saw it some
+years ago, as Doctor Holmes' dedication to his _Songs in Many Keys_.' Of
+course my first impulse was to prepare this man's remains for burial,
+but upon reflection I said I would reprieve him for a moment or two and
+give him a chance to prove his assertion if he could. We stepped into a
+bookstore and he did prove it. I had really stolen that dedication
+almost word for word. I could not imagine how this curious thing
+happened, for I knew one thing for a dead certainty--that a certain
+amount of pride always goes along with a teaspoonful of brains, and that
+this pride protects a man from deliberately stealing other people's
+ideas. That is what a teaspoonful of brains will do for a man, and
+admirers had often told me I had nearly a basketful, though they were
+rather reserved as to the size of the basket. However, I thought the
+thing out and solved the mystery. Two years before I had been laid up a
+couple of weeks in the Sandwich Islands, and had read and re-read Doctor
+Holmes's poems till my mental reservoir was filled with them to the
+brim. The dedication lay on top and handy, so by and by I unconsciously
+stole it. Perhaps I unconsciously stole the rest of the volume, too, for
+many people have told me that my book was pretty poetical in one way or
+another. Well, of course I wrote Doctor Holmes and told him I hadn't
+meant to steal, and he wrote back and said in the kindest way that it
+was all right and no harm done; and added that he believed we all
+unconsciously worked over ideas gathered in reading and hearing,
+imagining they were original with ourselves. He stated a truth and did
+it in such a pleasant way, and salved over my sore spot so gently and so
+healingly that I was rather glad I had committed the crime, for the sake
+of the letter. I afterward called on him and told him to make perfectly
+free with any ideas of mine that struck him as being good protoplasm
+for poetry. He could see by that that there wasn't anything mean about
+me; so we got along right from the start.
+
+"I have met Doctor Holmes many times since; and lately he said--however,
+I am wandering away from the one thing which I got on my feet to do,
+that is, to make my compliments to you, my fellow-teachers of the great
+public, and likewise to say I am right glad to see that Doctor Holmes is
+still in his prime and full of generous life; and as age is not
+determined by years, but by trouble and by infirmities of mind and body,
+I hope it may be a very long time yet before any one can truthfully say,
+'He is growing old.'"
+
+Mr. Howells then introduced Mr. J.W. Harper of New York, who gave in his
+remarks a delightful pen portrait of Doctor Holmes, the lyceum lecturer,
+which we have elsewhere quoted. Mr. E.C. Stedman followed Mr. Harper
+with a brief speech and graceful poem. Mr. T.B. Aldrich spoke of the
+"inexhaustible kindness of Doctor Holmes to his younger brothers in
+literature," and Mr. William Winter paid his tribute to the honored
+guest by "The Chieftain," a poem which he named for the occasion _Hearts
+and Holmes_.
+
+Mr. J.T. Trowbridge then read a poem entitled "Filling an Order," in
+which Nature compounds for Miss Columbia "three geniuses A 1.," to grace
+her favorite city. She concludes her mixture as follows:
+
+    Says she, "The fault I'm well aware, with genius is the presence
+    Of altogether too much clay with quite too little essence,
+    And sluggish atoms that obstruct the spiritual solution;
+    So now instead of spoiling these by over-much dilution
+    With their fine elements I'll make a single rare phenomenon,
+    And of three common geniuses concoct a most uncommon one,
+    So that the world shall smile to see a soul so universal,
+    Such poesy and pleasantry, packed in so small a parcel.
+
+    So said, so done; the three in one she wrapped, and stuck the label
+    _Poet, Professor, Autocrat of Wit's own Breakfast-Table._"
+
+C.P. Cranch then read a fine sonnet, and Colonel T.W. Higginson followed
+with felicitous remarks, a portion of which referring to the father of
+Doctor Holmes we have quoted elsewhere in the book.
+
+Letters of regrets were then read from R. B. Hayes, John Holmes, the
+poet's brother, George William Curtis and George Bancroft.
+
+Among others unable to be present, but who sent regrets, were Rebecca
+Harding Davis, Carl Schurz, Edwin P. Whipple, Noah Porter, George
+Ripley, Henry Watterson, George H. Boker, Frances Hodgson Burnett, L.
+Maria Child, Gail Hamilton, Parke Godwin, Donald G. Mitchell, John J.
+Piatt, Richard Grant White, D.C. Gilman, J.W. DeForest, Frederick
+Douglass, J.G. Holland, George W. Childs, John Hay and W.W. Story.
+
+Mr. James T. Fields was obliged to fulfil a lecture engagement soon
+after the speaking began, else he would have read the following fairy
+tale:--
+
+Once upon a time a company of good-natured fairies assembled for a
+summer moonlight dance on a green lawn in front of a certain picturesque
+old house in Cambridge. They had come out for a midnight lark, and as
+their twinkling feet flew about among the musical dewdrops they were
+suddenly interrupted by the well-known figure of the village doctor,
+which, emerging from the old mansion, rapidly made its way homeward.
+
+"Another new mortal has alighted on our happy planet," whispered a fairy
+gossip to her near companion.
+
+"Evidently so," replied the tiny creature, smiling good-naturedly on the
+doctor's footprints in the grass.
+
+"That is the minister's house," said another small personage, with a
+wink of satisfaction.
+
+"Perhaps it is a boy," ejaculated Fairy Number One.
+
+"I _know_ it is a boy!" said Fairy Number Two. I read it in the Doctor's
+face when the moon lighted up his countenance as he shut the door so
+softly behind him.
+
+"It _is_ a boy!" responded the Fairy Queen, who always knew everything,
+and that settled the question.
+
+"If that is the case," cried all the fairies at once, "let us try what
+magic still remains to us in this busy, bustling New England. Let us
+make that child's life a happy and a famous one if we can."
+
+"Agreed," replied the queen; "and I will lead off with a substantial
+gift to the little new-comer. I will crown him with Cheerfulness, a
+sunny temperament, brimming over with mirth and happiness."
+
+"And I will second your Majesty's gift to the little man," said a
+sweet-voiced creature, "and tender him the ever-abiding gift of Song. He
+shall be a perpetual minstrel to gladden the hearts of all his
+fellow-mortals."
+
+"And I," said another, "will shower upon him the subtle power of Pathos
+and Romance, and he shall take unto himself the spell of a sorcerer
+whenever he chooses to scatter abroad his wise and beautiful fancies."
+
+"And I," said a very astute-looking fairy, "will touch his lips with
+Persuasion; he shall be a teacher of knowledge, and the divine gift of
+eloquence shall be at his command, to uplift and instruct the people."
+
+"And I," said a quaint, energetic little body, "will endow him with a
+passionate desire to help forward the less favored sons and daughters of
+earth, who are struggling for recognition and success in their various
+avocations."
+
+"And I," said a motherly-looking, amiable fairy, "will see that in due
+time he finds the best among women for his companionship, a helpmeet
+indeed, whose life shall be happily bound up in _his_ life."
+
+"Do give me a chance," cried a beautiful young fairy "and I will answer
+for his children, that they may be worthy of their father, and all a
+mother's heart may pray that Heaven will vouchsafe to her."
+
+And after seventy years have rolled away into space, the same fairies
+assembled on the same lawn at the same season of the year, to compare
+notes with reference to their now famous _protege_. And they declared
+that their magic had been thoroughly successful, and that their charms
+had all worked without a single flaw.
+
+Then they took hands, and dancing slowly around the time-honored
+mansion, sang this roundelay, framed in the words of their own beloved
+poet:--
+
+    Strength to his hours of manly toil!
+      Peace to his star-lit dreams!
+    He loves alike the furrowed soil,
+      The music-haunted streams!
+
+    Sweet smiles to keep forever bright
+      The sunshine on his lips,
+    And faith that sees the ring of light
+      Round Nature's last eclipse!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+ORATIONS AND ESSAYS.
+
+
+In _Pages from an old Volume of Life_, one of the latest books published
+by Doctor Holmes, we have a collection of most delightful orations and
+essays. Some of them we recognize as old, familiar friends. "Bread and
+the Newspaper," for instance, recalls vividly those sad, terribly
+earnest days when the civil war was rending not only our land but our
+hearts. Something to eat, and the daily papers to read--these we must
+have, no matter what else we had to give up!
+
+War taught us, as nothing else could, what we really were. It exalted
+our manhood and our womanhood, and showed us our substantial human
+qualities for a long time kept out of sight, it may be, by the spirit of
+commerce, the love of art, science, or literature. Those who had called
+Doctor Holmes "an aristocrat," "a Tory," forgot all their bitter
+feelings when he said, "We are finding out that not only 'patriotism is
+eloquence,' but that heroism is gentility. All ranks are wonderfully
+equalized under the fire of a masked battery. The plain artisan, or the
+rough fireman, who faces the lead and iron like a man, is the truest
+representative we can show of the heroes of Crecy and Agincourt. And if
+one of our fine gentlemen puts off his straw-colored kids and stands by
+the other, shoulder to shoulder, or leads him on to the attack, he is as
+honorable in our eyes and in theirs as if he were ill-dressed and his
+hands were soiled with labor.
+
+In _The Inevitable Trial_, an oration delivered on the 4th of July,
+1863, before the City Authorities of Boston, Doctor Holmes who had been
+falsely classed among the enemies of the Anti-slavery movement, spoke as
+follows:--
+
+"Long before the accents of our famous statesmen resounded in the halls
+of the Capitol, long before the _Liberator_ opened its batteries, the
+controversy now working itself out by trial of battle was foreseen and
+predicted. Washington warned his countrymen of the danger of sectional
+divisions, well knowing the line of clearage that ran through the
+seemingly solid fabric. Jefferson foreshadowed the judgment to fall upon
+the land for its sins against a just God. Andrew Jackson announced a
+quarter of a century beforehand that the next pretext of revolution
+would be slavery. De Tocqueville recognized with that penetrating
+insight which analyzed our institutions and conditions so keenly, that
+the Union was to be endangered by slavery not through its interests, but
+through the change of character it was bringing about in the people of
+the two sections, the same fatal change which George Mason, more than
+half a century before, had declared to be the most pernicious effect of
+the system, adding the solemn warning, now fearfully justifying itself
+in the sight of his descendants, that 'by an inevitable chain of causes
+and effects, Providence punishes national sins by national calamities.'
+
+"The Virginian romancer pictured the far-off scenes of the conflict
+which he saw approaching as the prophets of Israel painted the coming
+woes of Jerusalem, and the strong iconoclast of Boston announced the
+very year when the curtain should rise on the yet unopened drama.
+
+"The wise men of the past, and the shrewd men of our own time, who
+warned us of the calamities in store for our nation, never doubted what
+was the cause which was to produce first alienation and finally rupture.
+The descendants of the men, 'daily exercised in tyranny,' the 'petty
+tyrants,' as their own leading statesmen called them long ago, came at
+length to love the institution which their fathers had condemned while
+they tolerated. It is the fearful realization of that vision of the poet
+where the lost angels snuff up with eager nostrils the sulphurous
+emanations of the bottomless abyss,--so have their natures become
+changed by long breathing the atmosphere of the realm of darkness."
+
+In this same grand oration occur also these eloquent words:--
+
+"Whether we know it or not, whether we mean it or not, we cannot help
+fighting against the system that has proved the source of all those
+miseries which the author of the Declaration of Independence trembled to
+anticipate. And this ought to make us willing to do and to suffer
+cheerfully. There were Holy Wars of old, in which it was glory enough
+to die; wars in which the one aim was to rescue the sepulchre of Christ
+from the hands of infidels. The sepulchre of Christ is not in Palestine!
+He rose from that burial-place more than eighteen hundred years ago. He
+is crucified wherever his brothers are slain without cause; he lies
+buried wherever man, made in his Maker's image, is entombed in ignorance
+lest he should learn the rights which his Divine Master gave him! This
+is our Holy War, and we must bring to it all the power with which he
+fought against the Almighty before he was cast from heaven."
+
+In his _Hunt after the Captain_, we realize how near the "dull dead
+ghastliness of War" came to the fond father's heart as he sought his
+wounded hero through those dreary hospital wards! He knew of what he
+spake when appealing so eloquently to his fellow-patriots:--
+
+"Sons and daughters of New England, men and women of the North, brothers
+and sisters in the bond of the American Union, you have among you the
+scarred and wasted soldiers who have shed their blood for your temporal
+salvation. They bore your nation's emblems bravely through the fire and
+smoke of the battle-field; nay, their own bodies are starred with
+bullet-wounds and striped with sabre-cuts, as if to mark them as
+belonging to their country until their dust becomes a portion of the
+soil which they defended. In every Northern graveyard slumber the
+victims of this destroying struggle. Many whom you remember playing as
+children amidst the clover blossoms of our Northern fields, sleep under
+nameless mounds with strange Southern wild flowers blooming over them.
+By those wounds of living heroes, by those graves of fallen martyrs, by
+the hopes of your children, and the claims of your children's children
+yet unborn, in the name of outraged honor, in the interest of violated
+sovereignty, for the life of an imperilled nation, for the sake of men
+everywhere, and of our common humanity, for the glory of God and the
+advancement of his kingdom on earth, your country calls upon you to
+stand by her through good report and through evil report, in triumph and
+in defeat, until she emerges from the great war of Western civilization,
+Queen of the broad continent, Arbitress in the councils of earth's
+emancipated peoples."
+
+It will be remembered that this heart-stirring oration, _The Inevitable
+Trial_, from which the above is quoted, was delivered at one of the most
+discouraging periods of the war; when Lee was in Pennsylvania, and just
+before the capture of Vicksburg.
+
+Among the other essays and orations in _Pages from an old Volume of
+Life_, we find the _Physiology of Walking_, which contains many
+interesting facts concerning the human wheel, with its spokes and
+felloes.
+
+"Walking," says Doctor Holmes, "is a perpetual falling with a perpetual
+self-recovery. It is a most complex, violent, and perilous operation,
+which we divest of its extreme danger only by continual practice from a
+very early period of life. We find how complex it is when we attempt to
+analyze it, and we see that we never understood it thoroughly until the
+time of the instantaneous photograph. We learn how violent it is, when
+we walk against a post or a door in the dark. We discover how dangerous
+it is when we slip or trip and come down, perhaps breaking or
+dislocating our limbs, or overlook the last step of a flight of stairs,
+and discover with what headlong violence we have been hurling ourselves
+forward.
+
+"Two curious facts are easily proved. First, a man is shorter when he is
+walking than when at rest. We have found a very simple way of showing
+this by having a rod or stick placed horizontally, so as to touch the
+top of the head forcibly, as we stand under it. In walking rapidly
+beneath it, even if the eyes are shut, the top of the head will not even
+graze the rod. The other fact is, that one side of a man always tends to
+outwalk the other side, so that no person can walk far in a straight
+line, if he is blindfolded. _The Seasons_, and _The Human Body and its
+Management_, were originally published in the Atlantic Almanac. _Cinders
+from the Ashes_ gives some exceedingly interesting reminiscences.
+
+Richard Henry Dana, the schoolboy, is described by Doctor Holmes as
+ruddy, sturdy, quiet and reserved; and of Margaret Fuller he says,
+"Sitting on the girls' benches, conspicuous among the schoolgirls of
+unlettered origin, by that look which rarely fails to betray hereditary
+and congenital culture, was a young person very nearly of my own age.
+She came with the reputation of being 'smart,' as we should have called
+it; clever, as we say nowadays. Her air to her schoolmates was marked by
+a certain stateliness and distance; as if she had other thoughts than
+theirs, and was not of them. She was a great student and a great reader
+of what she used to call 'naw-vels;' I remember her so well as she
+appeared at school and later, that I regret that she had not been
+faithfully given to canvas or marble in the day of her best looks. None
+know her aspect who have not seen her living. Margaret, as I remember
+her at school and afterwards, was tall, fair complexioned, with a
+watery, aquamarine lustre in her light eyes, which she used to make
+small, as one does who looks at the sunshine.
+
+"A remarkable point about her was that long, flexile neck, arching and
+undulating in strange, sinuous movements, which one who loved her would
+compare to those of a swan, and one who loved her not, to those of the
+ophidian who tempted our common mother. Her talk was affluent,
+magisterial, _de haut en bas_, some would say euphuistic, but surpassing
+the talk of women in breadth and audacity. Her face kindled and
+reddened and dilated in every feature as she spoke, and, as I once saw
+her in a fine storm of indignation at the supposed ill treatment of a
+relative, showed itself capable of something resembling what Milton
+calls the Viraginian aspect."
+
+A composition of Margaret's was one day taken up by the boy Oliver.
+
+"It is a trite remark," she began.
+
+Alas! the embryo-poet did not know the meaning of the word trite.
+
+"How could I ever judge Margaret fairly," he exclaims, "after such a
+crushing discovery of her superiority?"
+
+Of his instructors and schoolmates at Andover, Doctor Holmes has given
+us numerous pen portraits. The old Academy building had a dreary look to
+the homesick boy, but he soon recovered from his "slightly nostalgic"
+state, and found not a few congenial spirits in his new surroundings.
+
+One fine, rosy-faced boy with whom he had a school discussion upon Mary,
+Queen of Scots, and for whom he has always cherished a lasting
+friendship, is now the well-known Phinehas Barnes. Another little
+fellow, with black hair and very black eyes, studying with head between
+his hands, and eyes fastened to his book as if reading a will that made
+him heir to a million, was the future professor, Greek scholar and Bible
+Commentator, Horatio Balch Hackett. One of the masters was the late Rev.
+Samuel Horatio Stearns, "an excellent and lovable man," says Doctor
+Holmes, "who looked kindly on me, and for whom I always cherished a
+sincere regard." Professor Moses Stuart he describes as "tall, lean,
+with strong, bold features, a keen, scholarly, accipitrine nose, thin,
+expressive lips, and great solemnity and impressiveness of voice and
+manner. His air was Roman, his neck long and bare, like Cicero's, and
+his toga,--that is, his broadcloth cloak,--was carried on his arm,
+whatever might have been the weather, with such a statue-like, rigid
+grace that he might have been turned into marble as he stood, and looked
+noble by the side of the antiques of the Vatican." Then, there was
+Doctor Porter, an invalid, with the prophetic handkerchief bundling his
+throat; and Doctor Woods, who looked his creed decidedly, and had the
+firm fibre of a theological athlete. But none of the preceptors, it may
+be presumed, was so closely watched as the one to whom a dream had come
+that he should drop dead when praying. "More than one boy kept his eye
+on him during his public devotions, possessed by the same feeling the
+man had who followed Van Amburgh about, with the expectation, let us not
+say hope, of seeing the lion bite his head off sooner or later."
+
+In _Mechanism in Thought and Morals_, we find a deal of psychology as
+well as science.
+
+"It is in the moral world," says Doctor Holmes, "that materialism has
+worked the strangest confusion. In various forms, under imposing names
+and aspects, it has thrust itself into the moral relations, until one
+hardly knows where to look for any first principles without upsetting
+everything in searching for them.
+
+"The moral universe includes nothing but the exercise of choice: all
+else is machinery. What we can help and what we cannot help are on two
+sides of a line which separates the sphere of human responsibility from
+that of the Being who has arranged and controls the order of things.
+
+"The question of the freedom of the will has been an open one, from the
+days of Milton's demons in conclave to the noteworthy essay of Mr.
+Hazard, our Rhode Island neighbor. It still hangs suspended between the
+seemingly exhaustive strongest motive argument and certain residual
+convictions. The sense that we are, to a limited extent,
+self-determining; the sense of effort in willing; the sense of
+responsibility in view of the future, and the verdict of conscience in
+review of the past,--all of these are open to the accusation of fallacy;
+but they all leave a certain undischarged balance in most minds. We can
+invoke the strong arm of the _Deus in machina_, as Mr. Hazard, and Kant
+and others, before him have done. Our will may be a primary initiating
+cause or force, as unexplainable, as unreducible, as indecomposable, as
+impossible if you choose, but as real to our belief as the _oeternitas
+a parte ante_. The divine foreknowledge is no more in the way of
+delegated choice than the divine omnipotence is in the way of delegated
+power. The Infinite can surely slip the cable of the finite if it choose
+so to do."
+
+With outspoken braveness Doctor Holmes rejects "the mechanical doctrine
+which makes me," he says, "the slave of outside influences, whether it
+work with the logic of Edwards, or the averages of Buckle; whether it
+come in the shape of the Greek's destiny, or the Mahometan's fatalism."
+
+But he claims, too, the right to eliminate all mechanical ideas which
+have crowded into the sphere of intelligent choice between right and
+wrong. "The pound of flesh," he declares, "I will grant to Nemesis; but
+in the name of human nature, not one drop of blood,--not one drop."
+
+And this leads us to speak of Doctor Holmes' religious views. He
+attended King's Chapel, and is classed among the most liberal-minded of
+the Unitarian creed.
+
+When chairman of the Boston Unitarian Festival, in 1877, he gave the
+following list of certain theological beliefs that he has always
+delighted to combat.
+
+"May I," he begins, "without committing any one but myself, enumerate a
+few of the stumbling blocks which still stand in the way of some who
+have many sympathies with what is called the liberal school of thinkers?
+
+"The notion of sin as a transferable object. As philanthropy has ridded
+us of chattel slavery, so philosophy must rid us of chattel sin and all
+its logical consequences.
+
+"The notion that what we call sin is anything else than inevitable,
+unless the Deity had seen fit to give every human being a perfect
+nature, and develop it by a perfect education.
+
+"The oversight of the fact that all moral relations between man and his
+Maker are reciprocal, and must meet the approval of man's enlightened
+conscience before he can render true and heartfelt homage to the power
+that called him into being, and is not the greatest obligation to all
+eternity on the side of the greatest wisdom and the greatest power?
+
+"The notion that the Father of mankind is subject to the absolute
+control of a certain malignant entity known under the false name of
+justice, or subject to any law such as would have made the father of the
+prodigal son meet him with an account-book and pack him off to jail,
+instead of welcoming him back and treating him to the fatted calf.
+
+"The notion that useless suffering is in any sense a satisfaction for
+sin, and not simply an evil added to a previous one."
+
+In reviewing the life and the writings of Jonathan Edwards, Doctor
+Holmes with his usual fairness and kindly spirit toward all mankind,
+declares that the spiritual nature seems to be a natural endowment, like
+a musical ear.
+
+"Those who have no ear for music must be very careful how they speak
+about that mysterious world of thrilling vibrations which are idle
+noises to them. And so the true saint can be appreciated only by saintly
+natures. Yet the least spiritual man can hardly read the remarkable
+'Resolutions' of Edwards without a reverence akin to awe for his purity
+and elevation. His beliefs and his conduct we need not hesitate to
+handle freely. The spiritual nature is no safeguard against error of
+doctrine or practice; indeed it may be doubted whether a majority of all
+the spiritual natures in the world would be found in Christian
+countries. Edwards' system seems, in the light of to-day, to the last
+degree barbaric, mechanical, materialistic, pessimistic. If he had lived
+a hundred years later, and breathed the air of freedom, he could not
+have written with such old-world barbarism as we find in his volcanic
+sermons....
+
+"There is no sufficient reason for attacking the motives of a man so
+saintly in life, so holy in aspirations, so patient, so meek, so
+laborious, so thoroughly in earnest in the work to which his life was
+given. But after long smothering in the sulphurous atmosphere of his
+thought, one cannot help asking, is this,--or anything like this,--the
+accepted belief of any considerable part of Protestantism? If so, we
+must say with Bacon, 'It were better to have no opinion of God than such
+an opinion as is unworthy of him.'"
+
+In speaking of the old reproach against physicians, that where there
+were three of them together there were two atheists, Doctor Holmes
+pertinently remarks: "There is, undoubtedly, a strong tendency in the
+pursuits of the medical profession to produce disbelief in that figment
+of tradition and diseased human imagination which has been installed in
+the seat of divinity by the priesthood of cruel and ignorant ages. It is
+impossible, or, at least, very difficult, for a physician who has seen
+the perpetual efforts of Nature--whose diary is the book he reads
+oftenest--to heal wounds, to expel poisons, to do the best that can be
+done under the given conditions,--it is very difficult for him to
+believe in a world where wounds cannot heal, where opiates cannot give a
+respite from pain, where sleep never comes with its sweet oblivion of
+suffering, where the art of torture is the only faculty which remains to
+the children of that same Father who cares for the falling sparrow. The
+Deity has often been pictured as Moloch, and the physician has, no
+doubt, frequently repudiated him as a monstrosity.
+
+"On the other hand, the physician has often been renounced for piety as
+well as for his peculiarly professional virtue of charity, led upward by
+what he sees the source of all the daily marvels wrought before his own
+eyes. So it was that Galen gave utterance to that song of praise which
+the sweet singer of Israel need not have been ashamed of; and if this
+heathen could be lifted into such a strain of devotion, we need not be
+surprised to find so many devout Christian worshippers among the crowd
+of medical 'atheists.'"
+
+In coming back again as a regular contributor to the magazine which
+Doctor Holmes was so prominently identified with a quarter of a century
+ago, he indulges in a few entertaining reflections. "When I sat down to
+write the first paper I sent to the _Atlantic Monthly_," he says, "I
+felt somewhat as a maiden of more than mature effloresence may be
+supposed to feel as she passes down the broad aisle in her bridal veil
+and wealth of orange blossoms. I had written little of late years. I was
+at that time older than Goldsmith was when he died, and Goldsmith, as
+Doctor Johnson says, was a plant that flowered late. A new generation
+had grown up since I had written the verses by which, if remembered at
+all, I was best known. I honestly feared that I might prove the
+superfluous veteran who has no business behind the footlights. I can as
+honestly say that it turned out otherwise. I was most kindly welcomed,
+and now I am looking back on that far-off time as the period--I will not
+say of youth--for I was close upon the five-barred gate of the
+_cinquantaine_, though I had not yet taken the leap--but of marrowy and
+vigorous manhood. Those were the days of unaided vision, of acute
+hearing, of alert movements, of feelings almost boyish in their
+vivacity. It is a long cry from the end of a second quarter of a century
+in a man's life to the end of the third quarter. His companions have
+fallen all around him, and he finds himself in a newly peopled world.
+His mental furnishing looks old-fashioned and faded to the generation
+which is crowding about him with its new patterns and fresh colors.
+Shall he throw open his apartments to visitors, or is it not wiser to
+live on his memories in a decorous privacy, and not risk himself before
+the keen young eyes and relentless judgment of the new-comers, who have
+grown up in strength and self-reliance while he has been losing force
+and confidence. If that feeling came over me a quarter of a century ago,
+it is not strange that it comes back upon me now. Having laid down the
+burden, which for more than thirty-five years I have carried cheerfully,
+I might naturally seek the quiet of my chimney corner, and purr away the
+twilight of my life, unheard beyond the circle of my own fireplace. But
+when I see what my living contemporaries are doing, I am shamed out of
+absolute inertness and silence. The men of my birth year are so
+painfully industrious at this very time that one of the same date hardly
+dares to be idle. I look across the Atlantic and see Mr. Gladstone,
+only four months younger than myself, and standing erect with patriots'
+grievances on one shoulder, and Pharaoh's pyramids on the other--an
+Atlas whose intervals of repose are paroxysms of learned labor; I listen
+to Tennyson, another birth of the same year, filling the air with melody
+long after the singing months of life are over; I come nearer home, and
+here is my very dear friend and college classmate, so certain to be in
+every good movement with voice or pen, or both, that, where two or three
+are gathered together for useful ends, if James Freeman Clarke is not
+with them, it is because he is busy with a book or a discourse meant for
+a larger audience; I glance at the placards on the blank walls that I am
+passing, and there I see the colossal head of Barnum, the untiring,
+inexhaustible, insuperable, ever-triumphant and jubilant Barnum, who
+came to his atmospheric life less than a year before I began to breathe
+the fatal mixture, and still wages his Titanic battle with his own past
+superlatives. How can one dare to sit down inactive with such examples
+before him? One must do something, were it nothing more profitable than
+the work of that dear old Penelope, of almost ninety years, whom I so
+well remember hemming over and over again the same piece of linen, her
+attendant scissors removing each day's work at evening; herself meantime
+being kindly nursed in the illusion that she was still the useful martyr
+of the household."
+
+An author, in Doctor Holmes' opinion, should know that the very
+characteristics which make him the object of admiration to many, and
+endear him to some among them, will render him an object of dislike to a
+certain number of individuals of equal, it may be of superior,
+intelligence. The converse of all this is very true.
+
+"There will be individuals--they may be few, they may be many--who will
+so instantly recognize, so eagerly accept, so warmly adopt, even so
+devoutly idolize, the writer in question, that self-love itself, dulled
+as its palate is by the hot spices of praise, draws back overcome by the
+burning stimulants of adoration. I was told, not long since, by one of
+our most justly admired authoresses, that a correspondent wrote to her
+that she had read one of her stories fourteen times in succession."
+
+There is a deep meaning in these elective affinities. Each personality
+is more or less completely the complement of some other. Doctor Holmes
+thinks it should never be forgotten by the critic that "every grade of
+mental development demands a literature of its own; a little above its
+level, that it may be lifted to a higher grade, but not too much above
+it, so that it requires too long a stride--a stairway, not a steep wall
+to climb. The true critic is not the sharp _captator verborum_; not the
+brisk epigrammatist, showing off his own cleverness, always trying to
+outflank the author against whom he has arrayed his wits and his
+learning. He is a man who knows the real wants of the reading world, and
+can prize at their just value the writings which meet those wants."
+
+There is also another side of the picture. Doctor Holmes does not forget
+the trials of authorship. The writer who attains a certain measure of
+popularity "will be startled to find himself the object of an
+embarrassing devotion, and almost appropriation, by some of his parish
+of readers. He will blush at his lonely desk, as he reads the
+extravagances of expression which pour over him like the oil which ran
+down upon the beard of Aaron, and even down to the skirts of his
+garments--an extreme unction which seems hardly desirable. We ought to
+have his photograph as he reads one of those frequent missives, oftenest
+traced, we may guess, in the delicate, slanting hand which betrays the
+slender fingers of the sympathetic sisterhood.
+
+"A slight sense of the ridiculous at being made so much of qualifies the
+placid tolerance with which the rhymester or the essayist sees himself
+preferred to the great masters in prose and verse, and reads his name
+glowing in a halo of epithets which might belong to Bacon or Milton. We
+need not grudge him such pleasure as he may derive from the illusion of
+a momentary revery, in which he dreams of himself as clad in royal robes
+and exalted among the immortals. The next post will probably bring him
+some slip from a newspaper or critical journal, which will strip him of
+his regalia, as Thackeray, in one of his illustrations, has disrobed and
+denuded the grand monarque. He saw himself but a moment ago a colossal
+figure in a drapery of rhetorical purple, ample enough for an Emperor,
+as Bernini would clothe him. The image breaker has passed by, belittling
+him by comparison, jostling him off his pedestal, levelling his most
+prominent feature, or even breaking a whole ink bottle against him as
+the indignant moralist did on the figure in the vestibule of the opera
+house--the shortest and most effective satire that ever came from that
+fountain of approval and commendation. Such are some of the varied
+experiences of authorship."
+
+Out of his literary career as a successful writer, Doctor Holmes was
+able to formulate many rules for the self-protection of authors, which
+were adopted unanimously at an authors' association which was held in
+Washington last September, and the remainder of his "talk" is devoted to
+extracts from their proceedings. Appended are a few of them:
+
+Of visits of strangers to authors. These are not always distinguishable
+from each other, and may justly be considered together. The stranger
+should send up his card if he has one; if he has none, he should, if
+admitted, at once announce himself and his object, without
+circumlocution, as thus; "My name is M. or N., from X. or Y. I wish to
+see and take the hand of a writer whom I have long admired for his,"
+etc., etc. Here the author should extend his hand, and reply in
+substance as follows: "I am pleased to see you, my dear sir, and very
+glad that anything I have written has been a source of pleasure or
+profit to you." The visitor has now had what he says he came for, and,
+after making a brief polite acknowledgment, should retire, unless, for
+special reasons, he is urged to stay longer.
+
+Of autograph-seekers. The increase in the number of applicants for
+autographs is so great that it has become necessary to adopt positive
+regulations to protect the author from the exorbitant claims of this
+class of virtuosos. The following propositions were adopted without
+discussion:
+
+No author is under any obligation to answer any letter from an unknown
+person applying for his autograph. If he sees fit to do so, it is a
+gratuitous concession on his part.
+
+No stranger should ask for more than one autograph.
+
+No stranger should request an author to copy a poem, or even a verse. He
+should remember that he is one of many thousands; that one thousand
+fleas are worse than one hornet, and that a mob of mosquitoes will draw
+more blood than a single horse leech.
+
+Every correspondent applying for an autograph should send a card or
+blank paper, in a stamped envelope, directed to himself (or herself). If
+he will not take the trouble to attend to all this, which he can just as
+well as to make the author do it, he must not expect the author to make
+good his deficiencies. [Accepted by acclamation].
+
+Sending a stamp does not constitute a claim on an author for answer.
+[Received with loud applause]. The stamp may be retained by the author,
+or, what is better, devoted to the use of some appropriate charity, as
+for instance, the asylum for idiots and feeble-minded persons.
+
+Albums. An album of decent external aspect may, without impropriety, be
+offered to an author, with the request that he will write his name
+therein. It is not proper, as a general rule, to ask for anything more
+than the name. The author may, of course, add a quotation from his
+writings, or a sentiment, if so disposed; but this must be considered as
+a work of supererogation, and an exceptional manifestation of courtesy.
+
+Bed-quilt autographs. It should be a source of gratification to an
+author to contribute to the soundness of his reader's slumbers, if he
+cannot keep him awake by his writings. He should therefore cheerfully
+inscribe his name on the scrap of satin or other stuff (provided always
+that it be sent him in a stamped and directed envelope), that it may
+take its place in the patchwork mosaic for which it is intended.
+
+Letters of admiration. These may be accepted as genuine, unless they
+contain specimens of the writer's own composition, upon which a critical
+opinion is requested, in which case they are to be regarded in the same
+light as medicated sweetmeats, namely, as meaning more than their looks
+imply. Genuine letters of admiration, being usually considered by the
+recipient as proofs of good taste and sound judgment on the part of his
+unknown correspondent, may be safely left to his decision as to whether
+they shall be answered or not.
+
+The author of _Elsie Venner_ thus excuses himself for opening the budget
+of the grievances of authors. "In obtaining and giving to the public
+this abstract of the proceedings of the association, I have been
+impelled by the same feelings of humanity which led me to join the
+Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, believing that the
+sufferings of authors are as much entitled to sympathy and relief as
+those of the brute creation."
+
+The birthday of the Emperor of Japan is the principal holiday of the
+year among his subjects, and as Saturday, November 3d, 1883, was the
+thirty-third anniversary of the birthday of Mutsuhito Tenno, the
+reigning Emperor, it was appropriately celebrated by the Japanese
+gentlemen in Boston. The Japanese department at the Foreign Exhibition
+was closed, and in the evening a banquet was given at the Parker House,
+about sixty gentlemen assembling in response to the invitation of Mr.
+S.R. Takahashi, chief of the imperial Japanese commission to the Boston
+Foreign Exhibition. The entrance to the banquet rooms was decorated with
+the Japanese and American colors, and at the head of the hall were
+portraits of the Emperor and Empress of Japan, with the colors of that
+country between them. The occasion was a very enjoyable one, and was
+especially interesting as it was a departure from the custom at ordinary
+dinners here, several gentlemen dividing with the presiding officer the
+duty of proposing the toasts. One of the most delightful orations of the
+evening given by Oliver Wendell Holmes, was as follows:
+
+"I have heard of 'English' as she is spoke," being taught in ten
+lessons, but I never heard that a nation's literature could have justice
+done to it in ten minutes. An ancestress of mine--one of my thirty-two
+great-great-great-great-grandmothers--a noted poetess in her day, thus
+addressed her little brood of children:
+
+    Alas! my birds, you wisdom want
+    Of perils you are ignorant;
+    Ofttimes in grass, on trees, in flight,
+    Sore accidents on you may light;
+    Oh, to your safety have an eye,
+    So happy may you live and die.
+
+"In accepting your kind invitation, I confess that I was ignorant of my
+perils. I did not follow the counsel of my grandmamma with the four g's
+in having an eye to my own safety. For I fear that if I had dreamed of
+being called on to answer for American literature, one of those
+'previous engagements,' which crop out so opportunely, would have stood
+between me and my present trying position. I had meant, if called upon,
+to say a few words about a Japanese youth who studied law in Boston, a
+very cultivated and singularly charming young person, who died not very
+long after his return to his native country. Some of you may remember
+young Enouie--I am not sure that I spell it rightly, and I know that I
+cannot pronounce it properly; for from his own lips it was as soft as an
+angel's whisper. His intelligence, his delicate breeding, the loveliness
+of his character, captivated all who knew him. We loved him, and we
+mourned for him as if he had been a child of our own soil. But of him I
+must say no more.
+
+"In speaking of American literature we naturally think first of our
+historical efforts. We see that books hold but a small part of American
+history. The axe and the ploughshare are the two pens with which our New
+World annals have been principally written, with schoolhouses as notes
+of interrogation, and steeples as exclamation points of pious adoration
+and gratitude. Within half a century the railroad has ruled our broad
+page all over, and rewritten the story, with States for new chapters and
+cities for paragraphs. This is the kind of history which he who runs may
+read, and he must run fast and far if he means to read any considerable
+part of it.
+
+"But we must not forget our political history, perishable in great
+measure as to its form, long enduring in its results. This literature is
+the index of our progress--in both directions--forward and the contrary.
+From the days of Washington and Franklin to the times still fresh in our
+memory, from the Declaration of Independence to the proclamation which
+enfranchised the colored race, our political literature, with all its
+terrible blunders and short-comings, has been, after all, the fairest
+expression the world has yet seen of what a free people and a free press
+have to say and to show for themselves.
+
+"But besides 'Congressional Documents' and the like, the terror of
+librarians and the delight of paper-makers, we do a good deal of other
+printing. We make some books, a good many books, a great many books, so
+many that the hyperbole at the end of St. John's gospel would hardly be
+an extravagance in speaking of them. And among these are a number of
+histories which hold an honorable place on the shelves of all the great
+libraries of Christendom. Why should I enumerate them? For history is a
+Boston specialty. From the days of Prescott and Ticknor to those of
+Motley and Parkman, we have always had an historian or two on hand, as
+they used always to have a lion or two in the Tower of London.
+
+"Next to the historians naturally come the story-tellers and romancers.
+The essential difference is--I would not apply the rough side of the
+remark to historians like the best of our own, but it is very often the
+fact--that history tells lies about real persons and fiction tells truth
+through the mouths of unreal ones. England threw open the side doors of
+its library to Irving. The continent flung wide its folding doors to
+Cooper. Laplace was once asked who was the greatest mathematician of
+Germany. 'Pfaff is the greatest,' he answered. 'I thought Gauss was,'
+the questioner said. 'You asked me,' rejoined Laplace, 'who was the
+greatest mathematician of Germany. Gauss was the greatest mathematician
+of Europe.' So, I suppose we might say _The Pilot_ is or was the most
+popular book ever written in America, but _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ is the
+most popular story ever published in the world. And if _The Heart of Mid
+Lothian_ added a new glory of romance to the traditions of Auld Reekie,
+_The Scarlet Letter_ did as much for the memories of our own New
+England. I need not speak of the living writers, some of whom are among
+us, who have changed the old scornful question into 'Who _does not_ read
+an American book?'
+
+"As to poetical literature, I must confess that, except a line or two of
+Philip Freneau's, I know little worthy of special remembrance before the
+beginning of this century, always excepting, as in duty bound, the
+verses of my manifold grandmother. The conditions of the country were
+unfavorable to the poetical habit of mind. The voice that broke the
+silence was that of Bryant, a clear and smooth baritone, if I may borrow
+a musical term, with a gamut of a few notes of a grave and manly
+quality. Then came Longfellow, the poet of the fireside, of the library,
+of all gentle souls and cultivated tastes, whose Muse breathed a soft
+contralto that was melody itself, and Emerson, with notes that reached
+an octave higher than any American poet--a singer whose
+
+    Voice fell like a falling star.
+
+Like that of the bird addressed by Wordsworth--
+
+    At once far off and near,
+
+it was a
+
+                              Cry
+    Which made [us] look a thousand ways,
+      In bush and tree and sky;
+
+for whether it soared from the earth or dropped from heaven, it was next
+to impossible to divine.
+
+"I will not speak of the living poets of the old or the new generation.
+It belongs to the young to give the heartiest welcome to the new brood
+of singers. Samuel Rogers said that when he heard a new book praised, he
+read an old one. Mr. Emerson, in one of his later essays, advises us
+never to read a book that is not a year old. This I will say, that every
+month shows us in the magazines, and even in the newspapers, verse that
+would have made a reputation in the early days of the _North American
+Review_, but which attracts little more notice than a breaking bubble.
+
+"A great improvement is noticeable in the character of criticism, which
+is leaving the hands of the 'general utility' writers and passing into
+the hands of experts. The true critic is the last product of literary
+civilization. It costs as great an effort to humanize the being known by
+that name as it does to make a good church-member of a scalping savage.
+Criticism is a noble function, but only so in noble hands. We have just
+welcomed Mr. Arnold as its worthy English representative; we could not
+secure our creditors more handsomely than we have done by leaving Mr.
+Lowell in pledge for our visitor's safe return.
+
+"One more hopeful mark of literary progress is seen in our cyclopaedias,
+our periodicals, our newspapers, and I may add our indexes. I would
+commend to the attention of our enlightened friends such works as Mr.
+Pool's great _Index to Periodical Literature_, Mr. Alibone's _Dictionary
+of Authors_, and the _Index Medicus_, now publishing at Washington--a
+wonderful achievement of organized industry, still carried on under the
+superintendence of Doctor Billings, and well deserving examination by
+all scholars, whatever their calling.
+
+"We have learned so much from our Japanese friends, that we should be
+thankful to pay them back something in return. With art such as they
+have, they must also have a literature showing the same originality,
+grace, facility and simple effectiveness. Let us hope they will carry
+away something of our intellectual products, as well as those good
+wishes which follow them wherever they show their beautiful works of art
+and their pleasant and always welcome faces."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+THE HOME CIRCLE.
+
+
+Doctor Holmes has two sons and one daughter. Oliver Wendell Holmes
+Junior, his eldest child, was born in 1841. When a young lad, he
+attended the school of Mr. E.S. Dixwell, in Boston, and it was here that
+he met his future wife, Miss Fannie Dixwell. In his graduating year at
+Harvard College (1861), he joined the Fourth Battalion of Infantry,
+commanded by Major Thomas G. Stevenson. The company was at that time
+stationed at Fort Independence, Boston Harbor, and it was there that
+young Holmes wrote his poem for Class Day. He served three years in the
+war, and was wounded first in the breast at Ball's Bluff, and then in
+the neck at the Battle of Antietam.
+
+In Doctor Holmes' _Hunt after the Captain_, we have not only a vivid
+picture of war times, but a most touching revelation of fatherly love
+and solicitude. The young captain was wounded yet again at Sharpsburgh,
+and was afterwards brevetted as Lieutenant-Colonel. During General
+Grant's campaign of 1864 he served as aide-de-camp to Brigadier-General
+H.G. Wright. After the war he entered the Harvard Law School, and in
+1866 received the degree of LL. B. Since then he has practised law in
+Boston, and has written many valuable articles upon legal subjects.
+
+His edition of Kent's _Commentaries on American Law_, to which he
+devoted three years of careful labor, has received the highest
+encomiums, and his volume on _The Common Law_ forms an indispensable
+part of every law student's library.
+
+In 1882, he was appointed Professor in the Harvard Law School, and a few
+weeks later was elected Justice in the Supreme Court of Massachusetts.
+
+At the Lawyers' Banquet, given January 30th, 1883, at the Hotel Vendome,
+Honorable William G. Russell thus introduced the father of the
+newly-appointed judge:
+
+"We come now to a many-sided subject, and I know not on which side to
+attack him with any hope of capturing him. I might hail him as our poet,
+for he was born a poet; they are all born so. If he didn't lisp in
+numbers, it was because he spoke plainly at a very early age. I might
+hail him as physician, and a long and well-spent life in that profession
+would justify it; but I don't believe it will ever be known whether he
+has cured more cases of dyspepsia and blues by his poems or his powders
+and his pills. I might hail him as professor, and as professor
+_emeritus_ he has added a new wreath to his brow. I might hail him as
+Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, for there he had a long reign. He will
+defend himself with courage, for he never showed the white feather but
+once, and that is, that he does not dare to be as funny as he can. A
+tough subject, surely, and I must try him on the tender side, the
+paternal. I give you the father who went in search of a captain, and,
+finding him, presents to us now his son, the judge."
+
+On rising, Doctor Holmes held up a sheet of paper, and said, "You see
+before you" (referring to the paper) "all that you have to fear or
+hope. For thirty-five years I have taught anatomy. I have often heard of
+the roots of the tongue, but I never found them. The danger of a tongue
+let loose you have had opportunity to know before, but the danger of a
+scrap of paper like this is so trivial that I hardly need to apologize
+for it."
+
+    His Honor's father yet remains,
+      His proud paternal posture firm in;
+    But, while his right he still maintains
+    To wield the household rod and reins,
+      He bows before the filial ermine.
+
+    What curious tales has life in store,
+      With all its must-bes and its may-bes!
+    The sage of eighty years and more
+    Once crept a nursling on the floor,--
+      Kings, conquerors, judges, all were babies.
+
+    The fearless soldier, who has faced
+      The serried bayonets' gleam appalling,
+    For nothing save a pin misplaced
+    The peaceful nursery has disgraced
+      With hours of unheroic bawling.
+
+    The mighty monarch, whose renown
+      Fills up the stately page historic,
+    Has howled to waken half the town,
+    And finished off by gulping down
+      His castor oil or paregoric.
+
+    The justice, who, in gown and cap,
+      Condemns a wretch to strangulation,
+    Has scratched his nurse and spilled his pap,
+    And sprawled across his mother's lap
+      For wholesome law's administration.
+
+    Ah, life has many a reef to shun
+      Before in port we drop our anchor,
+    But when its course is nobly run
+    Look aft! for there the work was done.
+      Life owes its headway to the spanker!
+
+    Yon seat of justice well might awe
+      The fairest manhood's half-blown summer;
+    There Parsons scourged the laggard law,
+    There reigned and ruled majestic Shaw,--
+      What ghosts to hail the last new-comer!
+
+    One cause of fear I faintly name,--
+      The dread lest duty's dereliction
+    Shall give so rarely cause for blame
+    Our guileless voters will exclaim,
+      "No need of human jurisdiction!"
+
+    What keeps the doctor's trade alive?
+      Bad air, bad water; more's the pity!
+    But lawyers walk where doctors drive,
+    And starve in streets where surgeons thrive,
+      Our Boston is so pure a city.
+
+    What call for judge or court, indeed,
+      When righteousness prevails so through it
+    Our virtuous car-conductors need
+    Only a card whereon they read
+      "Do right; it's naughty not to do it!"
+
+    The whirligig of time goes round,
+      And changes all things but affection;
+    One blessed comfort may be found
+    In heaven's broad statute which has bound
+      Each household to its head's protection.
+
+    If e'er aggrieved, attacked, accused,
+      A sire may claim a son's devotion
+    To shield his innocence abused,
+    As old Anchises freely used
+      His offspring's legs for locomotion.
+
+    You smile. You did not come to weep,
+      Nor I my weakness to be showing;
+    And these gay stanzas, slight and cheap,
+    Have served their simple use,--to keep
+      A father's eyes from overflowing.
+
+Doctor Holmes' daughter, who bore her mother's name, Amelia Jackson,
+married the late John Turner Sargent. In her _Sketches and Reminiscences
+of the Radical Club_, we have some pithy remarks of Doctor Holmes'. To
+speak without premeditation, he says, on a carefully written essay, made
+him feel as he should if, at a chemical lecture, somebody should pass
+around a precipitate, and when the mixture had become turbid should
+request him to give his opinion concerning it. The fallacies continually
+rising in such a discussion from the want of a proper understanding of
+terms, always made him feel as if quicksilver had been substituted for
+the ordinary silver of speech. The only true way to criticize such an
+essay was to take it home, slowly assimilate it, and not talk about it
+until it had become a part of one's self.
+
+Edward, the youngest son of Doctor Holmes, had chosen the same
+profession as his brother.
+
+It was at Mrs. Sargent's home, at Beverly Farms, that Doctor Holmes
+passed most of his summers. The pretty, cream-colored house, with its
+broad veranda in front, can be easily seen from the station; but to
+appreciate the charms of this pleasant country home, one should catch a
+glimpse of the cosey interior.
+
+Robert Rantoul, John T. Morse and Henry Lee were neighbors of Doctor
+Holmes at Beverly Farms, and Lucy Larcom's home was not far distant.
+
+After eighteen years' residence at No. 8 Montgomery Place, Doctor Holmes
+moved to 164 Charles street, where he lived about twelve years. His home
+in Boston was at No. 296 Beacon street.
+
+"We die out of houses," says the poet, "just as we die out of our
+bodies.... The body has been called the house we live in; the house is
+quite as much the body we live in.... The soul of a man has a series of
+concentric envelopes around it, like the core of an onion, or the
+innermost of a nest of boxes. First, he has his natural garment of flesh
+and blood. Then his artificial integuments, with their true skin of
+solid stuffs, their cuticle of lighter tissues, and their
+variously-tinted pigments. Thirdly, his domicile, be it a single chamber
+or a stately mansion. And then the whole visible world, in which Time
+buttons him up as in a loose, outside wrapper.... Our houses shape
+themselves palpably on our inner and outer nature. See a householder
+breaking up and you will be sure of it. There is a shell fish which
+builds all manner of smaller shells into the walls of its own. A house
+is never a home until we have crusted it with the spoils of a hundred
+lives besides those of our own past. See what these are and you can tell
+what the occupant is."
+
+The poet's home on Beacon street well illustrates the above extract. I
+shall not soon forget the charming picture that greeted me, one gray
+winter day, as I was ushered into the poet's cheerful study. A blazing
+wood fire was crackling on the hearth, and the ruddy glow was reflected
+now on the stately features of "Dorothy Q.," now on the Copley portrait
+of old Doctor Cooper, and now with a peculiar Rembrandt effect upon the
+low rows of books, the orderly desk, and the kind, cordial face of the
+poet himself. An "Emerson Calendar" was hanging over the mantel, and
+after calling my attention to the excellent picture upon it of the old
+home at Concord, Doctor Holmes began to talk of his brother poet in
+terms of warmest affection.
+
+[Illustration: Hand written Poem signed by Oliver Wendell Holmes]
+
+As he afterwards remarked at the Nineteenth Century Club, the difference
+between Emerson's poetry and that of others with whom he might naturally
+be compared, was that of algebra and arithmetic. The fascination of his
+poems was in their spiritual depth and sincerity and their all pervading
+symbolism. Emerson's writings in prose and verse were worthy of all
+honor and admiration, but his manhood was the noblest of all his high
+endowments. A bigot here and there might have avoided meeting him, but
+if He who knew what was in men had wandered from door to door in New
+England, as of old in Palestine, one of the thresholds which "those
+blessed feet" would have crossed would have been that of the lovely and
+quiet home of Emerson.
+
+The view from the broad bay window in Doctor Holmes' study, recalled his
+own description:
+
+    Through my north window, in the wintry weather,
+      My airy oriel on the river shore,
+    I watch the sea-fowl as they flock together,
+      Where late the boatman flashed his dripping oar.
+
+    The gull, high floating, like a sloop unladen,
+      Lets the loose water waft him as it will;
+    The duck, round-breasted as a rustic maiden,
+      Paddles and plunges, busy, busy still.
+
+A microscopical apparatus placed under another window in the study,
+reminds the visitor of the "man of science," while the books--
+
+    A mingled race, the wreck of chance and time
+    That talk all tongues and breathe of every clime--
+
+speak in eloquent numbers of the "man of letters."
+
+There is the Plato on the lower shelf, with the inscription, Ezra
+Stiles, 1766, to which Doctor Holmes alludes in his tribute to the New
+England clergy. Here is the hand-lens imported by the Reverend John
+Prince, of Salem, and just before us, in the "unpretending row of local
+historians," is Jeremy Belknap's _History of New Hampshire_, "in the
+pages of which," says Doctor Holmes, "may be found a chapter contributed
+in part by the most remarkable man in many respects, among all the older
+clergymen,--preacher, lawyer, physician, astronomer, botanist,
+entomologist, explorer, colonist, legislator in State and national
+governments, and only not seated on the bench of the Supreme Court of a
+Territory because he declined the office when Washington offered it to
+him. This manifold individual," adds Doctor Holmes, "was the minister of
+Hamilton, a pleasant little town in Essex County, Massachusetts, the
+Reverend Manasseh Cutler."
+
+[Illustration: DR. HOLMES' LIBRARY, BEACON ST.]
+
+Here is the _Aetius_ found one never-to-be-forgotten rainy day, in that
+dingy bookshop in Lyons, and here the vellum-bound _Tulpius_, "my only
+reading," says Doctor Holmes, "when imprisoned in quarantine at
+Marseilles, so that the two hundred and twenty-eight cases he has
+recorded are, many of them, to this day still fresh in my memory."
+Here, too, is the _Schenckius_,--"the folio filled with _casus
+rariores_, which had strayed in among the rubbish of the bookstall on
+the boulevard--and here the noble old _Vesalius_, with its grand
+frontispiece not unworthy of Titian, and the fine old _Ambroise Parie_,
+long waited for even in Paris and long ago, and the colossal Spigelius,
+with his eviscerated beauties, and Dutch Bidloo with its miracles of
+fine engraving and bad dissection, and Italian Mascagni, the despair of
+all would-be imitators, and pre-Adamite John de Ketam, and antediluvian
+_Berengarius Carpensis_," and many other rare volumes, dear to the heart
+of every bibliophile.
+
+Glancing again from the window, I catch a glimpse of the West Boston
+Bridge, and recall the poet's description of the "crunching of ice at
+the edges of the river as the tide rises and falls, the little cluster
+of tent-like screens on the frozen desert, the excitement of watching
+the springy hoops, the mystery of drawing up life from silent, unseen
+depths." With his opera glass he watches the boys and men, black and
+white, fishing over the rails of the bridge "as hopefully as if the
+river were full of salmon." At certain seasons, he observes, there will
+now and then be captured a youthful and inexperienced codfish, always,
+however, of quite trivial dimensions. The fame of the exploit has no
+sooner gone abroad than the enthusiasts of the art come flocking down to
+the river and cast their lines in side by side, until they look like a
+row of harp-strings for number. "That a codfish is once in a while
+caught," says Doctor Holmes, "I have asserted to be a fact; but I have
+often watched the anglers, and do not remember ever seeing one drawn
+from the water, or even any unequivocal symptom of a bite. The spring
+sculpin and the flabby, muddy flounder are the common rewards of the
+angler's toil.
+
+The silhouette figures on the white background enliven the winter
+landscape, but now the blazing log on the hearthstone rolls over and the
+whole study is aglow with light! Truly "winter _is_ a cheerful season to
+people who have open fireplaces;" and who will not agree with our
+poet-philosopher when he says, "A house without these is like a face
+without eyes, and that never smiles. I have seen respectability and
+amiability grouped over the air-tight stove; I have seen virtue and
+intelligence hovering over the register; but I have never seen true
+happiness in a family circle where the faces were not illuminated by the
+blaze of an open fireplace."
+
+A well-known journalist writes as follows of Doctor Holmes "at home."
+
+"All who pay their respects to the distinguished Autocrat will find the
+genial, merry gentleman whose form and kindly greeting all admirers have
+anticipated while reading his sparkling poems. He is the perfect essence
+of wit and hospitality--courteous, amiable and entertaining to a degree
+which is more easily remembered than imparted or described. If the
+caller expects to find blue-blood snobbishness at 296 Beacon street, he
+will be disappointed. It is one of the most elegant and charming
+residences on that broad and fashionable thoroughfare, but far less
+pretentious, both inwardly and outwardly, than many of the others. For
+an uninterrupted period of forty-seven years, Doctor Holmes has lived in
+Boston, and for the last dozen years he has occupied his present
+residence on Beacon street.
+
+"The chief point of attraction in the present residence--for the
+visitor as well as the host--is the magnificent and spacious library,
+which may be more aptly termed the Autocrat's workshop. It is up one
+flight, and seemingly occupies the entire rear half of the whole
+building on this floor. It is a very inviting room in every respect, and
+from the spacious windows overlooking the broad expanse of the Charles
+River, there can be had an extensive view of the surrounding suburbs in
+the northerly, eastern and western directions. On a clear day there can
+be more or less distinctly described the cities and towns of Cambridge,
+Arlington, Medford, Somerville, Malden, Revere, Everett, Chelsea,
+Charlestown and East Boston. Even in the picture can be recognized the
+lofty tower of the Harvard Memorial Hall, which is but a few steps from
+the doctor's birthplace and first home. Arthur Gilman, in his admirable
+pen and pencil sketches of the homes of the American poets, makes a
+happy and appropriate allusion to the Autocrat's library. 'The ancient
+Hebrew,' he says, 'always had a window open toward Jerusalem, the city
+about which his most cherished hopes and memories clustered, and this
+window gives its owner the pleasure of looking straight to the place of
+his birth, and thus of freshening all the happy memories of a successful
+life.'
+
+"In renewing his old-time acquaintance with the _Atlantic_ family
+circle, the Autocrat recognized the modern invention of the journalistic
+interviewer, and submitted some plans for his regulation, to be
+considered by the various local governments. His idea is that the
+interviewer is a product of our civilization, one who does for the
+living what the undertaker does for the dead, taking such liberties as
+he chooses with the subject of his mental and conversational
+manipulations, whom he is to arrange for public inspection. 'The
+interview system has its legitimate use,' says Doctor Holmes, 'and is
+often a convenience to politicians, and may even gratify the vanity and
+serve the interests of an author.' He very properly believes, however,
+that in its abuse it is an infringement of the liberty of the private
+citizen to be ranked with the edicts of the council of ten, the decrees
+of the star chamber, the _lettres de cachet_, and the visits of the
+Inquisition. The interviewer, if excluded, becomes an enemy, and has the
+columns of a newspaper at his service in which to revenge himself. If
+admitted, the interviewed is at the mercy of the interviewer's memory,
+if he is the best meaning of men; of his accuracy, if he is careless; of
+his malevolence, if he is ill-disposed; of his prejudices, if he has
+any, and of his sense of propriety, at any rate.
+
+"Doctor Holmes humorously suggests the following restrictions: 'A
+licensed corps of interviewers, to be appointed by the municipal
+authorities, each interviewer to wear, in a conspicuous position, a
+number and a badge, for which the following emblems and inscriptions are
+suggested: Zephyrus, with his lips at the ear of Boreas, who holds a
+speaking trumpet, signifying that what is said by the interviewed in a
+whisper will be shouted to the world by the interviewer through that
+brazen instrument. For mottoes, either of the following: _Faenum halct in
+cornu_; _Hunc tu Romane caveto_. No person to be admitted to the corps
+of interviewers without a strict preliminary examination. The candidate
+to be proved free from color blindness and amblyopia, ocular and mental
+strabismus, double refraction of memory, kleptomania, mendacity of more
+than average dimensions, and tendency to alcholic endosmosis. His moral
+and religious character to be vouched for by three orthodox clergymen of
+the same belief, and as many deacons who agree with them and each other.
+All reports to be submitted to the interviewed, and the proofs thereof
+to be corrected and sanctioned by him before being given to the public.
+Until the above provisions are carried out no record of an alleged
+interview to be considered as anything more than the untrustworthy
+gossip of an irresponsible impersonality.'"
+
+"What business have young scribblers to send me their verses and ask my
+opinion of the stuff?" said Doctor Holmes one day, annoyed by the
+officiousness of certain would-be aspirants to literary fame. "They have
+no more right to ask than they have to stop me on the street, run out
+their tongues, and ask what the matter is with their stomachs, and what
+they shall take as a remedy." At another time he made the remark:
+"Everybody that writes a book must needs send me a copy. It's very good
+of them, of course, but they're not all successful attempts at
+bookmaking, and most of them are relegated to my hospital for sick books
+up-stairs."
+
+But once a young writer sent from California a sample of his poetry, and
+asked Holmes if it was worth while for him to keep on writing. It was
+evident that the doctor was impressed by something decidedly original in
+the style of the writer, for he wrote back that he should keep on, by
+all means.
+
+Some time afterward a gentleman called at the home of Professor Holmes
+in Boston and asked him if he remembered the incident. "I do, indeed,"
+replied Holmes. "Well," said his visitor, who was none other than Bret
+Harte, "I am the man."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+LOVE OF NATURE.
+
+
+It is city-life, Boston-life, in fact, that forms the fitting frame of
+any pen-picture one might draw of Oliver Wendell Holmes, and yet even
+his prose writings are full of all a poet's love for country sights and
+sounds. Listen, for instance, to this rich word-picture of the opening
+spring: "A flock of wild geese wedging their way northward, with
+strange, far-off clamor, are the heralds of April; the flowers are
+opening fast; the leaves are springing bright green upon the currant
+bushes; dark, almost livid, upon the lilacs; the grass is growing apace,
+the plants are coming up in the garden beds, and the children are
+thinking of May-day....
+
+"The birds come pouring in with May. Wrens, brown thrushes, the various
+kinds of swallows, orioles, cat-birds, golden robins, bobo'links,
+whippoorwills, cuckoos, yellow-birds, hummingbirds, are busy in
+establishing their new households. The bumble-bee comes in with his
+'mellow, breezy bass,' to swell the song of the busy minstrels.
+
+"And now June comes in with roses in her hand ... the azalea--wild
+honeysuckle--is sweetening the road-sides; the laurels are beginning to
+blow, the white lilies are getting ready to open, the fireflies are seen
+now and then flitting across the darkness; the katydids, the
+grasshoppers, the crickets, make themselves heard; the bull-frogs utter
+their tremendous voices, and the full chorus of birds makes the air
+vocal with melody."
+
+How like Thoreau the following passage reads:
+
+"O, for a huckleberry pasture to wander in, with labyrinths of taller
+bushes, with bayberry leaves at hand to pluck and press and smell of,
+and sweet fern, its fragrant rival, growing near!... I wonder if others
+have noticed what an imitative fruit the blackberry is. I have tasted
+the strawberry, the pine-apple, and I do not know how many other flavors
+in it--if you think a little, and have read Darwin, and Huxley, perhaps
+you will believe that it, and all the fruits it tastes of, may have
+come from a common progenitor."
+
+And there is the poet's beautiful picture of Indian summer.
+
+"It is the time to be in the woods or on the seashore,--a sweet season
+that should be given to lonely walks, to stumbling about in old
+churchyards, plucking on the way the aromatic silvery herb everlasting,
+and smelling at its dry flower until it etherizes the soul into aimless
+reveries outside of space and time. There is little need of painting the
+still, warm, misty, dreamy Indian summer in words; there are many states
+that have no articulate vocabulary, and are only to be reproduced by
+music, and the mood this season produces is of that nature. By and by,
+when the white man is thoroughly Indianized (if he can bear the
+process), some native Hayden will perhaps turn the Indian summer into
+the loveliest _andante_ of the new 'Creation.'"
+
+And again: "To those who know the Indian summer of our Northern States,
+it is needless to describe the influence it exerts on the senses and the
+soul. The stillness of the landscape in that beautiful time is as if the
+planet were _sleeping_ like a top, before it begins to rock with the
+storms of autumn. All natures seem to find themselves more truly in its
+light; love grows more tender, religion more spiritual, memory sees
+farther back into the past, grief revisits its mossy marbles, the poet
+harvests the ripe thoughts which he will tie in sheaves of verse by his
+winter fireside."
+
+At another time, when revisiting the scenes of his old schooldays at
+Andover, he gives us the following vivid description of mountain
+scenery:
+
+"Far to the north and west the mountains of New Hampshire lifted their
+summits in a long encircling ridge of pale-blue waves. The day was
+clear, and every mound and peak traced its outline with perfect
+definition against the sky.
+
+I have been by the seaside now and then, but the sea is constantly
+busy with its own affairs, running here and there, listening to
+what the winds have to say, and getting angry with them, always
+indifferent, often insolent, and ready to do a mischief to those
+who seek its companionship. But these still, serene, unchanging
+mountains,--Monadnock, Kearsarge,--what memories that name recalls! and
+the others, the dateless Pyramids of New England, the eternal monuments
+of her ancient race, around which cluster the homes of so many of her
+bravest and hardiest children, I can never look at them without feeling
+that, vast and remote and awful as they are, there is a kind of inward
+heat and muffled throb in their stony cores, that brings them into a
+vague sort of sympathy with human hearts. How delightful all those
+reminiscences, as he wanders, "the ghost of a boy" by his side, now by
+the old elm that held, buried in it by growth, iron rings to keep the
+Indians from destroying it with their tomahawks; and now through the old
+playground sown with memories of the time when he was young.
+
+"A kind of romance gilds for me," he says, "the sober tableland of that
+cold New England hill where I came a slight, immature boy, in contact
+with a world so strange to me, and destined to leave such mingled and
+lasting impressions. I looked across the valley to the hillside where
+Methuen hung suspended, and dreamed of its wooded seclusion as a village
+paradise. I tripped lightly down the long northern slope with _facilis
+descensus_ on my lips, and toiled up again, repeating _sed revocare
+gradum_. I wandered in the autumnal woods that crown the 'Indian Ridge,'
+much wondering at that vast embankment, which we young philosophers
+believed with the vulgar to be of aboriginal workmanship, not less
+curious, perhaps, since we call it an escar, and refer it to alluvial
+agencies. The little Shawsheen was our swimming-school, and the great
+Merrimac, the right arm of four toiling cities, was within reach of a
+morning stroll."
+
+Nor does he forget to recall a visit to Haverhill with his room-mate,
+when he saw the mighty bridge over the Merrimac that defied the
+ice-rafts of the river, and the old meeting-house door with the
+bullet-hole in it, through which the minister, Benjamin Rolfe, was shot
+by the Indians. "What a vision it was," he exclaims, "when I awoke in
+the morning to see the fog on the river seeming as if it wrapped the
+towers and spires of a great city! for such was my fancy, and whether it
+was a mirage of youth, or a fantastic natural effect, I hate to inquire
+too nicely."
+
+Like all poets, Doctor Holmes had a passionate love for flowers, and
+with a delight that is most heartily shared by the sympathetic reader,
+he thus recalls the old garden belonging to the gambrel-roofed house in
+Cambridge.
+
+"There were old lilac bushes, at the right of the entrance, and in the
+corner at the left that remarkable moral pear-tree, which gave me one of
+my first lessons in life. Its fruit never ripened but always rotted at
+the core just before it began to grow mellow. It was a vulgar plebeian
+specimen, at best, and was set there, no doubt, only to preach its
+annual sermon, a sort of 'Dudleian Lecture' by a country preacher of
+small parts. But in the northern border was a high-bred Saint Michael
+pear-tree, which taught a lesson that all of gentle blood might take to
+heart; for its fruit used to get hard and dark, and break into unseemly
+cracks, so that when the lord of the harvest came for it, it was like
+those rich men's sons we see too often, who have never ripened, but only
+rusted, hardened and shrunken. We had peaches, lovely nectarines, and
+sweet, white grapes, growing and coming to kindly maturity in those
+days; we should hardly expect them now, and yet there is no obvious
+change of climate. As for the garden-beds, they were cared for by the
+Jonathan or Ephraim of the household, sometimes assisted by one Rule, a
+little old Scotch gardener, with a stippled face and a lively temper.
+Nothing but old-fashioned flowers in them--hyacinths, pushing their
+green beaks through as soon as the snow was gone, or earlier tulips,
+coming up in the shape of sugar 'cockles,' or cornucopiae, one was almost
+tempted to look to see whether nature had not packed one of those
+two-line 'sentiments,' we remember so well in each of them; peonies,
+butting their way bluntly through the loosened earth; flower-de-luces
+(so I will call them, not otherwise); lilies; roses, damask, white,
+blush, cinnamon (these names served us then); larkspurs, lupins, and
+gorgeous holyhocks.
+
+"With these upper-class plants were blended, in republican fellowship,
+the useful vegetables of the working sort;--beets, handsome with
+dark-red leaves; carrots, with their elegant filigree foliage, parsnips
+that cling to the earth like mandrakes; radishes, illustrations of total
+depravity, a prey to every evil underground emissary of the powers of
+darkness; onions, never easy until they are out of bed, so to speak, a
+communicative and companionable vegetable, with a real genius for soups;
+squash vines with their generous fruits, the winter ones that will hang
+up 'ag'in the chimbly' by and by--the summer ones, vase like, as
+Hawthorne described them, with skins so white and delicate, when they
+are yet new-born, that one thinks of little sucking pigs turned
+vegetables, like Daphne into a laurel, and then of tender human infancy,
+which Charles Lamb's favorite so calls to mind;--these, with melons,
+promising as 'first scholars,' but apt to put off ripening until the
+frost came and blasted their vines and leaves, as if it had been a
+shower of boiling water, were among the customary growths of the
+Garden."
+
+Then follows, in these charming reminiscences, an account of the
+reconstruction of the dear old Garden.
+
+"Consuls Madisonius and Monrovious left the seat of office, and Consuls
+Johannes Quincius, and Andreas, and Martinus, and the rest, followed in
+their turn, until the good Abraham sat in the curule chair. In the
+meantime changes had been going on under our old gambrel roof, and the
+Garden had been suffered to relapse slowly into a state of wild nature.
+The haughty flower-de-luces, the curled hyacinths, the perfumed roses,
+had yielded their place to suckers from locust-trees, to milkweed,
+burdock, plantain, sorrel, purslane; the gravel walks, which were to
+nature as rents in her green garment, had been gradually darned over
+with the million threaded needles of her grasses until nothing was left
+to show that a garden had been there.
+
+"But the Garden still existed in my memory; the walks were all mapped
+out there, and the place of every herb and flower was laid down as if on
+a chart.
+
+"By that pattern I reconstructed the Garden, lost for a whole generation
+as much as Pompeii was lost, and in the consulate of our good Abraham it
+was once more as it had been in the days of my childhood. It was not
+much to look upon for a stranger; but when the flowers came up in their
+old places, the effect on me was something like what the widow of Nain
+may have felt when her dead son rose on his bier and smiled upon her.
+
+"Nature behaved admirably, and sent me back all the little tokens of her
+affection she had kept so long. The same delegates from the underground
+fauna ate up my early radishes; I think I should have been disappointed
+if they had not. The same buff-colored bugs devoured my roses that I
+remembered of old. The aphids and the caterpillar and the squash-bug
+were cordial as ever; just as if nothing had happened to produce a
+coolness or entire forgetfulness between us. But the butterflies came
+back too, and the bees and the birds."
+
+Says a well-known writer:
+
+"Though born and reared beneath the shadow of the great city, yet Doctor
+Holmes has ever found great delight in spending a portion of each year
+in the country. The last few summers he has made his home at Beverly
+Farms, but from 1849 to 1856, inclusive, his summer home was in
+Pittsfield, in Berkshire County. His recollections of the scenes and
+people in that charming town are pleasant and abundant. The villa which
+he built was upon a round knoll, commanding a fine view of the whole
+circle of Berkshire mountains, and of the Housatonic, winding in its
+serpentine way through the fertile meadows and valleys to the sound of
+Long Island. Yielding to his own good nature and the soft persuasion of
+a committee of Pittsfield ladies, Doctor Holmes once contributed a
+couple of poems to a fancy fair which was being held in the town during
+his residence there. They do not appear in any of the published
+collections, which is the one reason, above all others, why we print
+them now. Each of the poems was inclosed in an envelope bearing a motto;
+and the right to a second choice, guided by these, was disposed of in a
+raffle, to the no small emolument of the objects of the fair. The two
+pieces are even to this day represented by at least a square yard of the
+quaint ecclesiastical heraldry which illuminates the gorgeous chancel
+window of the St. Stephen's church in Pittsfield. The motto of the first
+envelope ran thus:
+
+    Faith is the conquering angels' crown;
+      Who hopes for grace must ask it;
+    Look shrewdly ere you lay me down;
+      I'm Portia's leaden casket.
+
+The following verses were found within:
+
+    Fair lady, whosoe'er thou art,
+      Turn this poor leaf with tenderest care,
+    And--hush, oh, hush thy beating heart;
+      The one thou lovest will be there.
+
+    Alas, not loved by thee alone,
+      Thine idol ever prone to range;
+    To-day all thine, to-morrow flown,
+      Frail thing, that every hour may change.
+
+    Yet, when that truant course is done,
+      If thy lost wanderer reappear,
+    Press to thy heart the only one
+      That nought can make more truly dear.
+
+Within this paper was a smaller envelope containing a one dollar bill,
+and this explanation of the poet's riddle:
+
+    Fair lady, lift thine eyes and tell
+      If this is not a truthful letter;
+    This is the (1) thou lovest well,
+      And nought (0) can make thee love it better (10)
+
+    Though fickle, do not think it strange
+      That such a friend is worth possessing;
+    For one that gold can never change
+      Is Heaven's own dearest earthly blessing.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+THE HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL.
+
+
+Upon the seventeenth of October, 1883, the centennial anniversary of the
+Harvard Medical School, the new building upon the Back Bay was
+dedicated. The fine, commodious structure is situated upon the corner of
+Boylston and Exeter streets, and is at nearly equal distances from the
+Massachusetts General Hospital, the City Hospital, the Boston Dispensary
+and the Children's Hospital with their stores of clinical material,
+available for the purposes of teaching. Close by, also, are the
+Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the museums of the Society of
+Natural History and of Fine Arts, and the Medical Library Association.
+The building has a frontage of one hundred and twenty-two feet toward
+the north on Boylston street, and of ninety feet toward the west on
+Exeter street, and its corner position, together with the reservation
+of a large open area on the east, will always insure good light and good
+air.
+
+The dedication exercises were divided into two parts, the opening
+addresses being given in Huntington Hall, at the Institute of
+Technology, and the remainder of the programme in the new building. Upon
+the platform, in Huntington Hall, were seated President Eliot, of
+Harvard University, the faculty of the Medical School, and numerous
+invited guests. Upon the walls just back of the platform, against a
+background of maroon-colored drapery, and directly over the head of the
+original, hung a portrait of Professor Oliver Wendell Holmes. Beneath
+this portrait was a fine marble bust of Professor Henry J. Bigelow, who
+was seated beside Doctor Holmes.
+
+President Eliot opened the exercises with the interesting address which
+follows:
+
+"We are met to celebrate the beginning of the second century of the
+Medical School's existence, and the simultaneous completion of its new
+building. It is a hundred years since John Warren, Benjamin Waterhouse
+and Aaron Dexter were installed as professors of anatomy and surgery,
+theory and practice, and _materia medica_ respectively, and without the
+aid of collections or hospitals began to lecture in some small, rough
+rooms in the basement of Harvard Hall, and in a part of little Holden
+Chapel, at Cambridge. From that modest beginning the school has
+gradually grown until it counts a staff of forty-seven teachers, ten
+professors, six assistant professors, nine instructors, thirteen
+clinical instructors, and nine assistants--working in the spacious and
+well-equipped building, which we are shortly to inspect, and commanding
+every means of instruction and research which laboratories, dispensaries
+and hospitals can supply. Out of our present strength and abundance we
+look back to the founding of the school and to its slow and painful
+development. We bear in our hearts the three generations of teachers who
+have served this school with disinterested diligence and zeal. We recall
+their unrequited labors, their frequent anxieties and conflicts and
+their unfulfilled hopes; we bring to mind the careful plantings and the
+tardy harvests, reaped at last, but not by them that sowed. We meet,
+indeed, to rejoice in present prosperity and fair prospects, but we
+would first salute our predecessors and think with reverence and
+gratitude of their toils and sacrifices, the best fruits of which our
+generation has inherited.
+
+"The medical faculty of to-day have strong grounds for satisfaction in
+the present state of the school; for they have made great changes in its
+general plan and policy, run serious risks, received hearty support from
+the profession and the community, and now see their efforts crowned with
+substantial success. By doubling the required period of study in each
+year of the course, instituting an admission examination, strengthening
+the examinations at the end of each year, and establishing a voluntary
+fourth year of instruction, which clearly indicates that the real
+standard of the faculty cannot be reached in three years, they have
+taken step after step to increase their own labors, make the attainment
+of the degree more difficult, and diminish the resort of students to the
+school. They have deliberately sacrificed numbers in their determination
+to improve the quality of the graduates of the school. At the same time
+they have successfully carried out an improvement in medical education
+which required large expenditures. This improvement is the partial
+substitution, by every student, of personal practice in laboratories for
+work upon books, and attendance at lectures. The North Grove street
+building, erected in 1846-47, contained only one small laboratory for
+students, that of anatomy. The new building contains a students'
+laboratory for each of the five fundamental subjects--anatomy,
+physiology, chemistry, histology and pathology--and that a large part of
+the building is devoted to these working rooms. It was a grave question
+whether the profession, the community and the young men who year by year
+aspire to become physicians and surgeons would support the faculty in
+making these improvements. The answer can now be recorded.
+
+"The school has received by gift and bequest three hundred and twenty
+thousand dollars in ten years; it has secured itself in the centre of
+the city for many years to come by the timely purchase of a large piece
+of land; it has paid about two hundred and twenty thousand dollars for a
+spacious, durable and well-arranged building; it has increased its
+annual expenditure for salaries of teachers from twenty thousand dollars
+in 1871-72, to thirty-six thousand dollars in 1882-83; its receipts have
+exceeded its expenses in every year since 1871-72, and its invested
+funds now exceed those of 1871 by more than one hundred thousand
+dollars. At the same time the school has become a centre of chemical,
+physiological, histological and sanitary research, as well as a place
+for thorough instruction; its students bring to the school a better
+education than ever before; they work longer and harder while in the
+school, and leave it prepared, so far as sound training can prepare them
+to enter, not the over-crowded lower ranks of the profession, but the
+higher, where there is always room.
+
+"The faculty recognize that the generosity of the community and the
+confidence of the students impose upon them reciprocal obligations. They
+gladly acknowledge themselves bound to teach with candor and enthusiasm,
+to observe and study with diligence that they may teach always better
+and better, to illustrate before their students the pure scientific
+spirit, and to hold all their attainments and discoveries at the
+service of mankind. Certainly the medical faculty have good reason to
+ask to-day for the felicitations of the profession and the public.
+
+"Nevertheless, the governors, teachers, graduates and friends of this
+school have no thought of resting contented with its present condition.
+Instructed by its past, they have faith in its future. They hope they
+know that the best fruits of their labors will be reaped by later
+generations. The medical profession is fortunate among the learned
+professions in that a fresh and boundless field of unimaginable
+fertility spreads out before it. Its conquests to come are infinitely
+greater than those already achieved. The great powers of chemistry and
+physics, themselves all new, have only just now been effectively
+employed in the service of medicine and surgery. The zooelogist,
+entomologist, veterinarian and sanitarian have just begun to contribute
+effectively to the progress of medicine.
+
+"The great achievements of this century in medical science and the
+healing art are all prophetic. Thus, the measurable deliverance of
+mankind from small-pox is an earnest of deliverance from measles,
+scarlatina, and typhoid fever. Within forty years anaesthetics and
+antiseptics have quadrupled the chances of success in grave surgical
+operations and have extended indefinitely the domain of warrantable
+surgery; but in value far beyond all the actual benefits which have thus
+far accrued to mankind from these discoveries is the clear prophecy they
+utter of greater blessing to come. A medical school must needs be always
+expecting new wonders.
+
+"How is medical science to be advanced? First, by the devoted labors of
+men, young and old, who give their lives to medical observations,
+research and teaching; secondly, by the gradual aggregation in safe
+hands of permanent endowments for the promotion of medical science and
+of the sciences upon which medicine rests. Neither of these springs of
+progress is to fail us here. Modern society produces the devoted student
+of science as naturally and inevitably as mediaeval society produced the
+monk. Enthusiastic devotion to unworldly ends has not diminished; it
+only manifests itself in new directions. So, too, benevolence and public
+spirit, when diverted by the teachings of both natural and political
+science from many of the ancient forms of benevolent activity, have
+simply found new and better modes of action.
+
+"With thankfulness for the past, with reasonable satisfaction in the
+present, and with joyful hope in the future, the medical faculty
+celebrate this anniversary festival, welcoming their guests, thanking
+their benefactors, and exchanging with their colleagues, their students,
+and the governing boards mutual congratulations and good wishes as the
+school sets bravely out upon its second century."
+
+At the close of his address President Eliot turned to the large
+audience, and said:
+
+"I have now the pleasure of presenting to you our oldest professor and
+our youngest; our man of science, and our man of letters; our teacher
+and our friend, Doctor Holmes."
+
+From the delightful and characteristic address of Doctor Holmes, we are
+permitted to give the following extracts:
+
+"We are in the habit of counting a generation as completed in thirty
+years, but two lives cover a whole century by an easy act of memory. I,
+who am now addressing you, distinctly remember the Boston practitioner
+who walked among the dead after the battle of Bunker Hill, and pointed
+out the body of Joseph Warren among the heaps of the slain. Look forward
+a little while from that time to the period at which this medical school
+was founded. Eight years had passed since John Jeffries was treading the
+bloody turf on yonder hillside. The independence of the United States
+had just been recognized by Great Britain. The lessons of the war were
+fresh in the minds of those who had served as military surgeons. They
+knew what anatomical knowledge means to the man called upon to deal with
+every form of injury to every organ of the body. They knew what fever
+and dysentery are in the camp, and what skill is needed by those who
+have to treat the diseases more fatal than the conflicts of the
+battlefield. They know also, and too well, how imperfectly taught were
+most of those to whom the health of the whole community was
+entrusted....
+
+"And now I will ask you to take a stride of half a century, from the
+year 1783 to the year 1833. Of this last date I can speak from my own
+recollection. In April, 1833, I had been more than two years a medical
+student attending the winter lectures of this school, and have therefore
+a vivid recollection of the professors of that day. I will only briefly
+characterize them by their various merits, not so much troubling myself
+about what may have been their short-comings. The shadowy procession
+moves almost visibly by me as I speak: John Collins Warren, a cool and
+skilful operator, a man of unshaken nerves, of determined purpose, of
+stern ambition, equipped with a fine library, but remarkable quite as
+much for knowledge of the world as for erudition, and keeping a steady
+eye on professional and social distinctions, which he attained and
+transmitted.
+
+"James Jackson, a man of serene and clear intelligence, well instructed,
+not over book-fed, truthful to the centre, a candid listener to all
+opinions; a man who forgot himself in his care for others and his love
+for his profession; by common consent recognized as a model of the wise
+and good physician. Jacob Bigelow, more learned, far more various in
+gifts and acquirements than any of his colleagues; shrewd, inventive,
+constructive, questioning, patient in forming opinions, steadfast in
+maintaining them; a man of infinite good nature, of ready wit, of a keen
+sense of humor, and a fine literary taste; one of the most accomplished
+of American physicians; I do not recall the name of one who could be
+considered his equal in all respects. Walter Channing, meant by nature
+for a man of letters, like his brothers, William Ellery and Edward;
+vivacious, full of anecdote, ready to make trial of new remedies, with
+the open and receptive intelligence belonging to his name as a
+birthright; esteemed in his specialty by those who called on him in
+emergencies. The professor of chemistry of that day was pleasant in the
+lecture room; rather nervous and excitable, I should say, and
+judiciously self-conservative when an explosion was a part of the
+programme."
+
+Speaking of the new building, Doctor Holmes said:
+
+"You will enter or look into more amphitheatres and lecture-rooms than
+you might have thought were called for. But if you knew what it is to
+lecture and be lectured to, in a room just emptied of its preceding
+audience, you would be thankful that any arrangement should prevent
+such an evil. The experimental physiologists tell us that a bird will
+live under a bell glass until he has substituted a large amount of
+carbonic acid for oxygen in the air of the bell glass. But if another
+bird is taken from the open air and put in with the first, the new-comer
+speedily dies. So when the class I was lecturing to, was sitting in an
+atmosphere once breathed already, after I have seen head after head
+gently declining, and one pair of eyes after another emptying themselves
+of intelligence, I have said, inaudibly, with the considerate
+self-restraint of Musidora's rural lover:
+
+"'Sleep on, dear youth; this does not mean that you are indolent, or
+that I am dull; it is the partial coma of commencing asphyxia.'
+
+"You will see extensive apartments destined for the practical study of
+chemistry and of physiology. But these branches are no longer studied as
+of old, by merely listening to lectures. The student must himself
+perform the analyses which he used to hear about. He must not be
+poisoned at his work, and therefore he will require a spacious and
+well-ventilated room to work in. You read but the other day of an
+esteemed fellow-citizen who died from inhaling the vapors of a broken
+demijohn of a corrosive acid. You will be glad to see that every
+precaution is taken to insure the safety and health of our students.
+
+"Physiology, as now studied, involves the use of much delicate and
+complex machinery. You may remember the balance at which Sanctorius sat
+at his meals, so that when he had taken in a certain number of ounces
+the lightened table and more heavily weighted philosopher gently parted
+company. You have heard, perhaps, of Pettenkofer's chamber, by means of
+which all the living processes of a human body are made to declare the
+total consumption and product during a given period. Food and fuel
+supplied; work done. Never was the human body as a machine so
+understood, never did it give such an account of itself, as it now does
+in the legible handwriting of the cardiograph, the sphygmograph, the
+myograph, and other self-registering contrivances, with all of which the
+student of to-day is expected to be practically familiar.
+
+... Among the various apartments destined to special uses one will be
+sure to rivet your attention; namely, the Anthropotomic Laboratory,
+known to plainer speech as the dissecting room. The most difficult work
+of a medical school is the proper teaching of practical anatomy. The
+pursuit of that vitally essential branch of professional knowledge has
+always been in the face of numerous obstacles. Superstition has arrayed
+all her hobgoblins against it. Popular prejudice has made the study
+embarrassing and even dangerous to those engaged in it. The surgical
+student was prohibited from obtaining the knowledge required in his
+profession, and the surgeon was visited with crushing penalties for want
+of that necessary knowledge. Nothing is easier than to excite the odium
+of the ignorant against this branch of instruction and those who are
+engaged in it. It is the duty and interest of all intelligent members of
+the community to defend the anatomist and his place of labor against
+such appeals to ignorant passion as will interfere with this part of
+medical education, above all, against such inflammatory representations
+as may be expected to lead to mid-day mobs or midnight incendiarism.
+
+"The enlightened legislation of Massachusetts has long sanctioned the
+practice of dissection, and provided means for supporting the needs of
+anatomical instruction, which managed with decent privacy and
+discretion, have served the beneficent purpose intended by the wise and
+humane law-givers, without doing wrong to those natural sensibilities
+which are always to be respected.
+
+"During the long period in which I have been a professor of anatomy in
+this medical school, I have had abundant opportunities of knowing the
+zeal, the industry, the intelligence, the good order and propriety with
+which this practical department has been carried on. The labors
+superintended by the demonstrator and his assistants are in their nature
+repulsive, and not free from risk of diseases, though in both these
+respects modern chemistry has introduced great ameliorations. The
+student is breathing an air which unused senses would find insufferable.
+He has tasks to perform which the chambermaid and the stable-boy would
+shrink from undertaking. We cannot wonder that the sensitive Rousseau
+could not endure the atmosphere of the room in which he had began a
+course of anatomical study. But we know that the great painters, Michael
+Angelo, Leonardo and Raphael must have witnessed many careful
+dissections; and what they endured for art our students can endure for
+science and humanity.
+
+"Among the large number of students who have worked in the department of
+which I am speaking during my long term of service--nearly two thousand
+are on the catalogue as students--there must have been some who were
+thoughtless, careless, unmindful of the proprieties. Something must be
+pardoned to the hardening effect of habit. Something must be forgiven to
+the light-heartedness of youth, which shows itself in scenes that would
+sadden and solemnize the unseasoned visitor. Even youthful womanhood has
+been known to forget itself in the midst of solemn surroundings. I well
+remember the complaint of Willis, a lover of the gentle sex, and not
+likely to have told a lie against a charming young person; I quote from
+my rusty memory, but I believe correctly:
+
+    She trifled! ay, that angel maid,
+    She trifled where the dead was laid.
+
+"Nor are older persons always so thoughtful and serious in the presence
+of mortality as it might be supposed they would show themselves. Some of
+us have encountered Congressional committees attending the remains of
+distinguished functionaries to their distant place of burial. They
+generally bore up well under their bereavement. One might have expected
+to find them gathered in silent groups in the parlors of the Continental
+Hotel or the Brevoort House; to meet the grief-stricken members of the
+party smileless and sobbing as they sadly paced the corridors of
+Parker's, before they set off in a mournful and weeping procession. It
+was not so; Candor would have to confess that it was far otherwise;
+Charity would suggest that Curiosity should withdraw her eye from the
+key-hole; Humanity would try to excuse what she could not help
+witnessing; and a tear would fall from the blind eye of oblivion and
+blot out their hotel bills forever.
+
+"You need not be surprised, then, if among this large number of young
+men there should have been now and then something to find fault with.
+Twice in the course of thirty-five years I have had occasion to rebuke
+the acts of individual students, once in the presence of the whole
+class on the human and manly sympathy of which I could always safely
+rely. I have been in the habit of considering myself at liberty to visit
+the department I am speaking of, though it had its own officers; I took
+a part in drawing up the original regulations which governed the methods
+of work; I have often found fault with individuals or small classes for
+a want of method and neatness which is too common in all such places.
+But in the face of all peccadilloes and of the idle and baseless stories
+which have been circulated, I will say, as if from the chair I no longer
+occupy, that the management of the difficult, delicate and all important
+branch committed to the care of a succession of laborious and
+conscientious demonstrators, as I have known it through more than the
+third of a century, has been discreet, humane, faithful, and that the
+record of that department is most honorable to them and to the classes
+they have instructed.
+
+"But there are better things to think of and to speak of than the false
+and foolish stories to which we have been forced to listen. While the
+pitiable attempt has been making to excite the feelings of the ignorant
+against the school of the university, hundreds of sufferers throughout
+Christendom--throughout civilization--have been blessing the name of
+Boston and the Harvard Medical School as the source from which relief
+has reached them for one of the gravest injuries, and for one of the
+most distressing of human maladies. I witnessed many of the experiments
+by which the great surgeon who lately filled a chair in Harvard
+University, has made the world his debtor. Those poor remains of
+mortality of which we have heard so much, have been of more service to
+the human race than the souls once within them ever dreamed of
+conferring. Doctor Bigelow's repeated and searching investigations into
+the anatomy of the hip joint showed him the band which formed the chief
+difficulty in reducing dislocations of the thigh. What Sir Astley Cooper
+and all the surgeons after him had failed to see, Doctor Bigelow
+detected. New rules for reduction of the dislocation were the
+consequence, and the terrible pulleys disappeared from the operating
+amphitheatre.
+
+"Still more remarkable are the results obtained by Doctor Bigelow in the
+saving of life and the lessening of suffering in the new method of
+operation for calculus. By the testimony of those renowned surgeons, Sir
+Henry Thompson and Mr. Erichsen, by the award to Doctor Bigelow of a
+sexennial prize founded by the Marquis d' Argenteuil, and by general
+consent, this innovation is established as one of the great modern
+improvements in surgery. I saw the numerous and patient experiments by
+which that priceless improvement was effected, and I cannot stop to moan
+over a scrap of integument, said to have been made imperishable, when I
+remember that for every lifeless body which served for these
+experiments, a hundred died or a thousand living fellow creatures have
+been saved from unutterable anguish, and many of them from premature
+death.
+
+"You will visit the noble hall soon to be filled with the collections
+left by the late Professor John Collins Warren, added to by other
+contributors, and to the care and increase of which the late Doctor John
+Jackson of precious memory gave many years of his always useful and
+laborious life. You may expect to find there a perfect Golgotha of
+skulls and a platoon of skeletons open to the sight of all comers. You
+will find portions of every human organ. You will see bones softened by
+acid and tied in bowknots; other bones burned until they are light as
+cork and whiter than ivory, yet still keeping their form; you will see
+sets of teeth from the stage of infancy to that of old age, and in every
+intermediate condition, exquisitely prepared and mounted; you will see
+preparations that once formed portions of living beings now carefully
+preserved to show their vessels and nerves; the organ of hearing
+exquisitely carved by French artists; you will find specimens of human
+integument, showing its constituent parts in different races; among the
+rest, that of the Ethiopian, with its cuticle or false skin turned back
+to show that God gave him a true skin beneath it as white as our own.
+Some of these specimens are injected to show their blood vessels; some
+are preserved in alcohol; some are dried. There was formerly a small
+scrap, said to be human skin, which had been subjected to the tanning
+process, and which was not the least interesting of the series. I have
+not seen it for a good while, and it may have disappeared as the cases
+might happen to be open while unscrupulous strangers were strolling
+through the museum. If it has, the curator will probably ask the next
+poor fellow who has his leg cut off, for permission to have a portion of
+its integument turned into leather. He would not object, in all
+probability, especially if he were promised that a wallet for his pocket
+or a slipper for his remaining foot, should be made from it.
+
+"There is no use in quarrelling with the specimens in a museum because
+so many of them once formed a part of human beings. The British
+Government paid fifteen thousand pounds for the collection made by John
+Hunter, which is full of such relics. The Huntarian Museum is still a
+source of pride to every educated citizen in London. Our foreign
+visitors have already learned that the Warren Anatomical Museum is one
+of the sights worth seeing during their stay among us. Charles Dickens
+was greatly interested in looking through its treasures, and that
+intelligent and indefatigable hard worker, the Emperor of Brazil,
+inspected its wonders with as much curiosity as if he had been a
+professor of anatomy. May it ever remain sacred from harm in the noble
+hall of which it is about taking possession. If violence, excited by
+false outcries, shall ever assail the treasure-house of anthropology, we
+may tremble lest its next victim shall be the home of art, and ignorant
+passions once aroused, the archives that hold the wealth of literature
+perish in a new Alexandrian conflagration. This is not a novel source of
+apprehension to the thoughtful. Education, religious, moral,
+intellectual, is the only safeguard against so fearful a future.
+
+"To one of the great interests of society, the education of those who
+are to be the guardians of its health, the stately edifice which opens
+its doors to us for the first time to-day is devoted. It is a lasting
+record of the spirit and confidence of the young men of the medical
+profession, who led their elders in the brave enterprise, an enduring
+proof of the liberality of the citizens of Boston and of friends beyond
+our narrow boundaries, a monument to the memory of those who, a hundred
+years ago, added a school of medicine to our honored, cherished, revered
+university, and to all who have helped to sustain its usefulness and
+dignity through the century just completed.
+
+"It stands solid and four square among the structures which are the
+pride of our New England Venice--our beautiful metropolis, won by
+well-directed toil from the marshes and creeks and lagoons which were
+our inheritance from nature. The magnificent churches around it let in
+the sunshine through windows stained with the pictured legends of
+antiquity. The student of nature is content with the white rays that
+show her just as she is; and if ever a building was full of light--light
+from the north and the south; light from the east and the west; light
+from above, which the great concave mirror of sky pours down into
+it--this is such an edifice. The halls where Art teaches its lessons and
+those where the sister Sciences store their collections, the galleries
+that display the treasures of painting, and sculpture, are close enough
+for agreeable companionship. It is probable that in due time the Public
+Library, with its vast accumulations, will be next door neighbor to the
+new domicile of our old and venerated institution. And over all this
+region rise the tall landmarks which tell the dwellers in our streets
+and the traveller as he approaches that in the home of Science, Arts,
+and Letters, the God of our Fathers is never forgotten, but that high
+above these shrines of earthly knowledge and beauty, are lifted the
+towers and spires which are the symbols of human aspiration ever looking
+up to Him, the Eternal, Immortal, Invisible."
+
+At the conclusion of this noble address, the portrait of Professor
+Oliver Wendell Holmes was presented to the Medical School by Doctor
+Minot, in the happily-chosen words that follow:
+
+"Many alumni of the school, together with some of its present students,
+have desired that a permanent memorial of their beloved teacher,
+Professor Oliver Wendell Holmes, should be placed in the new college
+building, in token of their gratitude for the great services which he
+has rendered to many generations of his pupils. By his eminent
+scientific attainments, his sound method of teaching, his felicity of
+illustration, and his untiring devotion to all the duties of his chair,
+he inspired those who were so fortunate as to come under his instruction
+with the importance of a thorough knowledge of anatomy, the foundation
+of medical science. In the name of the alumni and students of this
+college, I have the pleasure of presenting to the medical faculty a
+portrait of Professor Holmes, painted by Mr. Alexander, to be placed in
+the college in remembrance of his invaluable services to Harvard
+University, to the medical profession and to the community."
+
+The bust of Professor Bigelow was then presented to the school by Hon.
+Samuel Green, in the following words:
+
+"The pleasant duty has been assigned me, Mr. President, to present to
+you, as the head of the corporation of Harvard College, in behalf of his
+many friends, this animated bust of Professor Henry J. Bigelow. The list
+of subscribers comprises about fifty names, and includes nearly all the
+surgeons of the two great hospitals in this city; several gentlemen not
+belonging to the medical profession, but warm personal friends of Doctor
+Bigelow; a few ladies who had been his patients; and all the surgical
+house pupils who had ever been connected with the Massachusetts General
+Hospital during his long term of service at that institution, so far as
+they could easily be reached by personal application. The bust is given
+on the condition that it shall be placed permanently in the new surgical
+lecture room, which corresponds to the scene of Doctor Bigelow's long
+labors in the old building. It has been made by the eminent sculptor,
+Launt Thompson of New York, and is a most faithful representation of the
+distinguished surgeon. It outlines with such accuracy and precision the
+features of his face and the pose of his head that nothing is wanted, in
+the opinion of his friends, to make it a correct likeness.
+
+"I need not, in the presence of this audience, name the various steps by
+which Doctor Bigelow has reached the high position which is conceded to
+him as freely and fully in Europe as it is in America; but I cannot
+forbear an allusion to some of his original researches. His mechanism of
+the reduction of a dislocated femur by manipulation was a great
+discovery in surgical science, and follows as a simple corollary to the
+anatomical facts which he has so clearly and minutely demonstrated. His
+operation of rapid lithotrity has deprived a painful disease of much of
+its terror as well as of its danger. Nor should I overlook on this
+occasion his quick and ready discernment of the importance of Doctor
+Morton's demonstration of the use of ether as a safe anaesthetic, which
+took place at the Massachusetts General Hospital in the autumn of 1846.
+The discovery of this greatest boon to the human family since the
+invention of printing, was fraught with such immense possibilities that
+the world was slow to realize its magnitude; but by the clear foresight
+and prudent zeal of Doctor Bigelow, shown in many ways, the day was
+hastened when its use became well nigh universal.
+
+"Doctor Bigelow has filled the chair of surgery in this medical school
+during thirty-three years, a period of professional instruction that
+rarely falls to the lot of any teacher; and he now leaves it with the
+honored title of professor emeritus. During this long term of service he
+has taught, through his lectures, probably not fewer than one thousand
+eight hundred students, who have graduated at the Harvard Medical
+School, and perhaps seven thousand five hundred more who have taken
+their degrees elsewhere; and by these thousands of physicians now
+scattered throughout the land, those of them who survive, Doctor Bigelow
+is remembered as most eminently a practical teacher. Active in his
+profession, clear in his instruction, and enthusiastic in his
+investigations, he always had the happy faculty of imparting to his
+students a kindred spirit and zeal. _Haud inexpertus loquor._"
+
+The remainder of the exercises took place in the new building. The
+dedicatory prayer was offered by Rev. Doctor Peabody, who consecrated
+the building "to science, humanity and charity, to Christian tenderness
+and love, and to all the ministries that can enrich humanity."
+
+President Eliot then said:
+
+"In behalf of the President and Fellows of Harvard University, and of
+the Medical School, I declare this building to be devoted to medical
+science and the art of healing."
+
+Professor Henry W. Williams, in behalf of the medical faculty, said:
+
+"Friends of the Harvard Medical School: For a hundred years the medical
+faculty of Harvard College have earnestly sought to discover, and
+striven faithfully to teach, whatever might exalt the condition, relieve
+the woes and prolong the service of those minds and bodies through which
+man lives, and moves, and is. Year by year they have seen their horizon
+of knowledge extended and their sphere of duty enlarged. But, though
+zeal and self-sacrifice have not been wanting, their efforts to be
+useful have been continually hindered because of imperfect facilities
+and scanty resources. All is changed. In this more wonderful than
+Aladdin's palace, risen from the sea,[8] and which has already endured
+the wrath and mercy of the flames, we see a fulfilment of our hopes, and
+the means and assurance of success. Thanks to generous benefactors,
+there will no longer be a lack of room or of appliances for our needs;
+our work will go on under fairer auspices, and we can offer to disciples
+of the healing art fitter opportunities and ampler aid in their studies.
+
+"As spokesman of the faculty on this occasion, so full of felicitation
+and of promise, I would I could give to their message a host of tongues,
+to adequately thank those whose great flood of bounty has thus favored
+and endowed us. In occupying this beautiful and convenient structure, we
+shall ever feel that the place is dignified by the givers' deed. And we
+rejoice the more, because we know that this gift of three hundred
+thousand dollars has been bestowed by those who are accustomed to use
+their own eyes in their estimation of desert, and that it signifies a
+hearty approval of our endeavors, and an intent that medical science, as
+it is to be here embodied and taught, shall have a warm and generous
+support.
+
+"In accepting this more than princely gift as a token that the value and
+necessity of well-educated physicians to every community is felt and
+acknowledged, we hail the privilege of goodly fellowship in which the
+donors and ourselves have become co-workers, to the end that blessings
+to the whole land may arise and be memorized in this institution; and we
+trust that the efforts of the faculty to advance the knowledge, train
+the judgment and perfect the skill of those entering our profession will
+ever continue to deserve countenance and help.
+
+Colonel Henry Lee's address was the next to follow:
+
+Mr. President: Thanks for your invitation to be present on this
+interesting occasion--the hundredth anniversary of your medical school
+and the dedication of a new building of fair proportions, well adapted
+to your wants, as far as a non-professional can judge. You have assigned
+to me the honorable task of speaking for the contributors to the
+building fund. I little thought, as I used to gaze with awe at that
+prim, solitary, impenetrable little building in Mason Street, and with
+imaginative companions conjure up the mysteries within, that I should
+ever dare to enter and explore its interior; nor have I yet acquired
+that relish for morbid specimens which characterized my lamented
+kinsman, who devoted so many years to accumulating and illustrating your
+pathological collection. It is an ordeal to a layman, Mr. President,
+especially to one who has reached the sixth age, to be so forcibly
+reminded, as one is here, of the
+
+                          last scene of all
+    That ends this strange, eventful history,
+    _Sans_ teeth, _sans_ eyes, _sans_ taste, _sans_ everything,
+
+and it is a further ordeal to assume to speak for others, whose motives
+for aiding you I may not adequately set forth. This I can say, that we
+are citizens of no mean city; that private frugality and public
+liberality have distinguished the inhabitants of this 'Old Town of
+Boston,' from the days of the good and wise John Winthrop, whose own
+substance was consumed in founding this colony, to the present time.
+Down through these two centuries and a half the multiform and
+ever-increasing needs of the community have been discovered and
+supplied, not by Government, but by patriotic citizens, who have given
+of their time and substance to promote the common weal, remembering
+'that the body is not one member, but many, and that the members should
+have the same care, one for another.' It is this public spirit,
+manifested in its heroic form in our civil war, that has made this dear
+old Commonwealth what we all know it to be, despite foul slanders. Far
+distant be the day when this sense of brotherhood shall be lost. Purple
+and fine linen are well, if one can afford them; but let not Dives
+forget Lazarus at his gate.
+
+    Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
+    Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.
+
+"Whatever doubts may arise as to some of our benevolent schemes, our
+safety and progress rest upon the advancement of sound learning, and we
+feel assured that the increased facilities furnished by this ample
+building, for acquiring and disseminating knowledge of our fearful and
+wonderful frame, will be improved by your brethren. Some of the papers
+read before the International Medical College, in London, two years ago,
+impressed me deeply with the many wants of the profession. And who are
+more likely to have their wants supplied? for the physician is not
+regarded here, as in some countries, as the successor to the barber
+surgeon, and his fees slipped into his upturned palm as if he were a
+mendicant or a menial. Dining with two Englishmen, one an Oxford
+professor, the other the brother of a lord, a few years since, I was
+surprised to hear their views of the social standing of the medical
+profession, and could not help contrasting their position here, where,
+if not all autocrats, they are all constitutional, and some of them
+hereditary, monarchs, accompanied by honor, love, obedience, troops of
+friends. But however ranked, physicians have the same attributes the
+world over. I have had occasion to see a good deal of English, French,
+German and Italian physicians under very trying circumstances, and have
+been touched by their affectionate devotion to their patients. The good
+physician is our earliest and our latest friend; he listens to our first
+and our last breath; in all times of bodily distress and danger we look
+up to him to relieve us. 'Neither the pestilence that walketh in
+darkness, nor the sickness that destroyeth in the noonday, deters him.'
+
+    Alike to him is time, or tide,
+    December's snow or July's pride;
+    Alike to him is tide, or time,
+    Moonless midnight, or matin prime.
+
+"The faithful pursuit of any profession involves sacrifice of self; but
+the man who calls no hour his own, who consecrates his days and nights
+to suffering humanity, treads close in the footsteps of his Master. No
+wonder, then, that the bond between them and their patients is so
+strong; no wonder that we respond cheerfully to their call, in gratitude
+for what they have, and in sorrow for what they have not, been able to
+do to preserve the lives and to promote the health of those dear to us.
+And how could money be spent more economically than to promote the
+further enlightenment of the medical profession? What better legacy can
+we leave our children, and our children's children, than an illumined
+medical faculty?"
+
+After these addresses a reception was given to the subscribers to the
+building fund by President Eliot and the faculty of the Medical School.
+
+In referring to Doctor Holmes' brave, outspoken words, an eminent Boston
+clergyman wrote as follows:
+
+"The only qualification which we have heard of the universal and
+enthusiastic appreciation of the sage, the vivacious and the rich
+utterance of our admired doctor and foremost man of letters on this
+occasion, was in a somewhat regretful feeling that he should have turned
+the full power of his humor and of his caustic satire upon the mean and
+contemptible effort of an unprincipled demagogue to defame the Harvard
+Medical School. We do not sympathize with even this qualified stricture
+on the remarks of Doctor Holmes here referred to. True, his address was
+an historical one, designed for an historical review of the past of the
+institution. But it is also to serve the uses of history for the future,
+especially as a record of the aspects of the institution and of the
+interest and confidence of our living community in it during the year
+marking such a conspicuous event for it as the inauguration of the new
+edifice prepared for it by the munificence of those who appreciate its
+almost divine offices of mercy and benevolence. And during this very
+year, an assault of the most dastardly character has been made upon it
+by one who, high in office and with vast power of influence over an
+ignorant and easily prejudiced constituency, knows as well as any one
+among us the utter and wicked falsity of his allegations.
+
+"Doctor Holmes was forced to make some recognition of these slanders
+addressed to the uninformed, credulous and gullible portion of our
+community. He would have been generally censured if he had passed them
+by. The only question for him and for a critically judging community
+would concern the true spirit and way in which he should recognize them.
+We can conceive of no more fitting and effective course than that which
+the sagacious doctor followed. The occasion was one in which it was for
+him, in defining and greeting the steady advance made during a century
+in medical and surgical science among us, to remind his hearers that
+those to whom we are indebted for this advancement, have had, with their
+own noble, personal devotion and effort, to triumph over and fight their
+way against all the prejudices and obstructions which popular ignorance,
+prejudice and superstition have engaged to annoy and withstand them. In
+scarcely any one of the multiplied interests of average society have
+popular weaknesses and follies more mischievously asserted themselves
+than in opposition to hospitals and medical schools. When that noble
+institution, the Massachusetts General Hospital, was devised, about
+three quarters of a century ago, the most besotted folly and suspicion
+were engaged against those who planned and fostered it. It was charged
+that under the guise of benevolent service for homeless sufferers and
+for the victims of accident or special maladies, it was really to be
+artfully used for the trial of new medicines and risky experiments on
+the poor and humble, that practitioners might have the benefit of the
+knowledge thus gained in dealing with their rich patients. Let any one
+visit the wards of that institution to-day, or read its annual reports,
+noting the thousands of cases of its work of mercy in restoration or
+relief of all classes of sufferers, and then recall the asinine abuse
+visited upon its projectors. The millions of money which have been
+poured into its treasury, mostly from the private benevolence of our own
+citizens, is the crown of glory for that institution. An appeal of the
+most artful and atrocious sort to this same popular ignorance and
+passion has been made this year for purposes which we need not search
+the dictionary to characterize with fitting epithets. How could Doctor
+Holmes on this great occasion pass it by? How could he have treated the
+offence and the offender with a more fitting combination of wit and
+scorn? Most happy also was his suggestive allusion to the self mastery
+by which practitioners at the dissecting table have to control, in the
+interest of their high service, revulsions and shrinkings incident to
+disgusting offices unknown even to chambermaids and stable boys.
+
+"But as Doctor Holmes well said, there are more attractive and
+instructive matters to engage our most grateful interest in the occasion
+to which he gave such a grand interpretation. The century of medical
+history which he sketched with such a naive and vigorous narrative has
+its most suggestive incidents lettered on the walls on the main stairway
+of the imposing edifice just opened for use. Little Holden Hall in
+Cambridge; the obscure structure on Mason street; the melancholy
+building on Grove street, with its tragic history, in which the donor of
+its site was turned to a use by no means serviceable to science, make up
+the genealogical, architectural ancestry of the new hall. The
+development in the material fabric is no inadequate symbol of the
+progress in every quality, accomplishment and attainment characteristic
+of the advance of the profession in the last hundred years."
+
+The name of Doctor Holmes will always be so intimately connected with
+the Harvard Medical School that we give below a brief sketch of its past
+history.
+
+In the year 1780, the Boston Medical Society voted "that Doctor John
+Warren be desired to demonstrate a course of anatomical lectures the
+ensuing winter." The course of lectures proved so popular that the
+corporation of the college asked Doctor Warren to draw up a plan for a
+Medical School in connection with Harvard College. At the commencement
+of the school, October 7th, 1783, there were three professors: Doctor
+John Warren, who lectured on anatomy and surgery; Doctor Aaron Dexter,
+who took the department of chemistry and materia medica; and Doctor
+Benjamin Waterhouse, instructor in the theory and practice of medicine.
+During the first year of its establishment the attendance was rather
+small, consisting of members of the senior class of the college and
+those students who could procure the consent of their parents. The name
+of the first graduate recorded was that of John Fleet, in 1788, and he
+seems to have been the only graduate of that class.
+
+In 1806, Doctor John Collins Warren, son of Doctor John Warren, was
+appointed assistant professor of anatomy and surgery. He proved a most
+enthusiastic laborer in behalf of the school and to it he gave his large
+anatomical collection, which was considered the most complete in the
+country. In his will he bequeathed his body to the interest of science,
+and provided that his skeleton be prepared and mounted, to serve the
+uses of the demonstrators on anatomy. It was he, also, who took the
+first steps that led to the establishment of the Medical School in
+Boston. At 49 Marlborough street, he opened a room for the demonstration
+of practical anatomy, and here a course of lectures was started in the
+autumn of 1810 by Doctors Warren, Jackson, and Waterhouse.
+
+In 1816, the "Massachusetts Medical College" was formally inaugurated in
+a building erected on Mason street by a special grant from the
+Commonwealth. At this time the faculty consisted of Doctors Jackson,
+Warren, Gorham, Jacob Bigelow and Walter Channing.
+
+In 1821 the Massachusetts General Hospital on Allan street, was
+established; the two institutions have since been intimately connected
+as the resources afforded students by the Hospital are here given to
+members of the Medical School.
+
+In 1836, Doctor Jackson resigned his position, and Doctor John Ware, the
+assistant professor of theory and practice was appointed in the chair.
+Eleven years later Doctor John Collins Warren resigned, having served
+the interests of the school for forty-one years.
+
+In 1847, through the liberality of Doctor George C. Shattuck, Sr., a
+professorship of pathological anatomy was established, and Doctor John
+Barnard Swett Jackson was appointed to fill the chair. It was during
+this year that Doctor Oliver Wendell Holmes was chosen Parkman professor
+of anatomy and physiology.
+
+In 1849 Doctor Henry J. Bigelow was appointed to the chair of surgery
+left vacant by the resignation of Doctor George Hayward, and in 1854,
+Doctor Walter Channing was succeeded by Doctor David Humphreys Storer.
+In 1855 Doctor Jacob Bigelow resigned, and was succeeded by Doctor
+Edward Hammond Clarke.
+
+The building on North Grove street, erected by a grant of the State upon
+land donated by Doctor George Parkman, was first occupied by the school
+in 1846. In this building, which was considered amply commodious at that
+time, were stored the Warren Anatomical Museum, the physiological
+library founded by George Woodbury Swett, the gifts to the chemical
+department by Doctor John Bacon, and the collection of microscopes given
+by Doctor Ellis. Since then the number of medical students has
+constantly increased and the accommodations becoming inadequate, steps
+were taken for the erection of the new building.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[8] The site occupied by the medical college was once covered by the
+tides.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+TOKENS OF ESTEEM.
+
+
+Said one of the medical students in Doctor Holmes' last class at
+Harvard:
+
+"We always welcomed Professor Holmes with enthusiastic cheers when he
+came into the class room, and his lectures were so brimful of witty
+anecdotes that we sometimes forgot it was a lesson in anatomy we had
+come to learn. But the instruction--deep, sound and thorough--was there
+all the same, and we never left the room without feeling what a fund of
+knowledge and what a clear insight upon difficult points in medical
+science had been imparted to us through the sparkling medium!"
+
+The position of Parkman Professor of Anatomy in Harvard University, was
+resigned by Doctor Holmes in the autumn of 1882, that he might give his
+time more exclusively to literary pursuits. He was immediately appointed
+Professor Emeritus by the college, and Doctor Thomas Dwight, a teacher
+in the Medical School, succeeded him in the active duties of the chair.
+
+The last lecture of Doctor Holmes before his students, was delivered in
+the anatomical room, on the twenty-eighth of November. As he entered the
+room, a storm of applause greeted him, and then as it died away, one of
+the students came forward and presented him, in behalf of his last
+class, with an exquisite "Loving Cup." On one side of this beautiful
+souvenir was the happy quotation from his own writings: "Love bless
+thee, joy crown thee, God speed thy career."
+
+Doctor Holmes was so deeply affected by this delicate token of esteem
+that, afterwards, in acknowledging the cup by letter, he said that the
+tribute was so unexpected it made him speechless. He was quite sure,
+however, that they did not mistake _aphasia_ for _acardia_--his heart
+was in its right place, though his tongue forgot its office.
+
+In the address to his class, the Professor gave an interesting review of
+his thirty-five years' connection with the school. Then he referred to
+his early college days, and to his studies in Paris, and added many
+delightful reminiscences of the famous French savants whose lectures he
+attended at that time. A full report of this address may be found in the
+_Boston Medical and Surgical Journal_, for December 7, 1882.
+
+This, one of his most interesting essays, is also reprinted in one of
+Doctor Holmes' later volumes, entitled _Medical Essays_.
+
+On the evening of April 12, 1883, a complimentary dinner was given
+Doctor Holmes at Delmonico's, by the medical profession of New York
+City. The reception opened at about half-past six, and soon after that
+hour Doctor Holmes entered the rooms with Doctor Fordyce Barker. The
+guests, numbering some two hundred and twenty-five in all, were seated
+at six tables, the table of honor occupying the upper end of the room,
+and decorated with banks of choice flowers.
+
+The _menus_ were cleverly arranged in the form of small books bound in
+various-colored plush. A dainty design in gilt, representing a scalpel
+and pen, surrounded by a laurel wreath, adorned the covers, and inside
+was the stanza:
+
+    A few can touch the magic string,
+      And noisy fame is proud to win them,
+    Alas, for those that never sing,
+      But die with all their music in them.
+
+At the top of the leaf containing the bill of fare were the lines:
+
+     You know your own degree; sit down; at first and last a hearty
+     welcome.
+
+at the end:
+
+    Prithee, no more; thou dost talk nothing to me.
+
+A few minutes before the coffee was brought in, each guest received what
+purported to be a telegram from Boston, dated April 1, 1883. The message
+read as follows:
+
+    The dinner bell, the dinner bell
+      Is ringing loud and clear,
+    Through hill and plain, through street and lane
+      It echoes far and near.
+
+    I hear the voice! I go, I go!
+      Prepare your meat and wine;
+    They little heed their future need
+      Who pay not when they dine.
+                                                  --_O.W.H._
+
+The back of the despatch was decorated with two pictures; one showing
+Doctor Fordyce Barker ringing a dinner bell and brandishing a knife and
+fork, the other Doctor Holmes hurrying to answer the bell, with a pile
+of books under one arm and a bundle of bones under the other.
+
+Among the guests present were George William Curtis, Hon. William M.
+Evarts, Bishop Clark, Whitelaw Reid, Doctors Post, Emmett, Sayre,
+Billing, Vanderpoel Metcalfe, Detmoold Draper, Doremus, Hammond, St. J.
+Roosa, Flint, Dana, Peabody, Ranney, Jacobi, Austin, and many others.
+
+The first toast was as follows:
+
+          The hour's now come;
+    The very minute bids thee ope thine ear
+            Obey, and be attentive.
+                                            --_The Tempest._
+
+After a few brief words of introduction, Doctor Barker called upon
+Doctor A.H. Smith to complete the greeting, which he did in the
+following happy lines:
+
+    You've heard of the deacon's one hoss shay
+    Which, finished in Boston the self-same day
+    That the City of Lisbon went to pot,
+    Did a century's service, and then was not.
+    But the record's at fault which says that it burst
+    Into simply a heap of amorphous dust,
+    For after the wreck of that wonderful tub
+    Out of the ruins they saved a hub;
+    And the hub has since stood for Boston town,
+    Hub of the universe, note that down.
+    But an orderly hub as all will own,
+    Must have something central to turn upon,
+    And, rubber-cushioned, and true and bright
+    We have the axle here to-night.
+    Thrice welcome then to our festal board
+    The doctor-poet, so doubly stored
+    With science as well as with native wit,
+    _Poeta nascitur_, you know, _non fit_,
+    Skilled to dissect with knife or pen
+    His subjects dead or living men;
+    With thought sublime on every page
+    To swell the veins with virtuous rage,
+    Or with a syringe to inject them
+    With sublimate to disinfect them;
+    To show with demonstrator's art
+    The complex chambers of the heart,
+    Or armed with a diviner skill
+    To make it pulsate at his will;
+    With generous verse to celebrate
+    The loaves and fishes of some giver;
+    And then proceed to demonstrate
+    The lobes and fissures of the liver;
+    To soothe the pulses of the brain
+    With poetry's enchanting strain.
+    Or to describe to class uproarious
+    _Pes hippocampi accessorious_;
+    To nerve with fervor of appeal
+    The sluggish muscles into steel,
+    Or, pulling their attachments, show
+    Whence they arise and where they go;
+    To fire the eye by wit consummate,
+    Or draw the aqueous humor from it;
+    In times of peril give the tone
+    To public feeling, called backbone,
+    Or to discuss that question solemn,
+    The muscles of the spinal column.
+    And now I close my artless ditty
+    As per agreement with committee,
+    And making place for those more able
+    I leave the subject on the table.
+
+The toast "Our Guest," was prefaced by the following quotation from
+Emerson:
+
+"One would say here is a man with such an abundance of thought! He is
+never dull, never insincere, and has the genius to make the reader care
+for all that he cares for."
+
+As Doctor Holmes rose, the room fairly shook with applause. Without any
+prefatory remarks, he then read the following poem:
+
+    Have I deserved your kindness? Nay, my friends;
+    While the fair banquet its illusion lends,
+    Let me believe it, though the blood may rush
+    And to my cheek recall the maiden blush
+    That o'er it flamed with momentary blaze
+    When first I heard the honeyed words of praise;
+    Let me believe it while the roses wear
+    Their bloom unwithering in the heated air;
+    Too soon, too soon their glowing leaves must fall,
+    The laughing echoes leave the silent hall,
+    Joy drop his garland, turn his empty cup,
+    And weary labor take his burden up,--
+    How weigh that burden they can tell alone
+    Whose dial marks no moment as their own.
+
+    Am I your creditor? Too well I know
+    How Friendship pays the debt it does not owe,
+    Shapes a poor semblance fondly to its mind,
+    Adds all the virtues that it fails to find,
+    Adorns with graces to its heart's content,
+    Borrows from love what nature never lent,
+    Till what with halo, jewels, gilding, paint,
+    The veriest sinner deems himself a saint.
+    Thus while you pay these honors as my due,
+    I owe my value's larger part to you;
+    And in the tribute of the hour I see
+    Not what I am, but what I ought to be.
+
+    Friends of the Muse, to you of right belong
+    The first staid footsteps of my square-toed song;
+    Full well I know the strong heroic line
+    Has lost its fashion since I made it mine;
+    But there are tricks old singers will not learn,
+    And this grave measure still must serve my turn,
+    So the old bird resumes the self-same note
+    His first young summer wakened in his throat;
+    The self-same tune the old canary sings,
+    And all unchanged the bobolink's carol rings;
+    When the tired songsters of the day are still,
+    The thrush repeats his long-remembered trill;
+    Age alters not the crow's persistent caw,
+    The Yankee's "Haow," the stammering Briton's "Haw;"
+    And so the hand that takes the lyre for you
+    Plays the old tune on strings that once were new,
+    Nor let the rhymester of the hour deride
+    The straight-backed measure with its stately stride;
+    It gave the mighty voice of Dryden scope:
+    It sheathed the steel-bright epigrams of Pope;
+    In Goldsmith's verse it learned a sweeter strain,
+    Byron and Campbell wore its clanking chain;
+    I smile to listen while the critic's scorn
+    Flouts the proud purple kings have nobly worn;
+    Bid each new rhymer try his dainty skill
+    And mould his frozen phrases as he will;
+    We thank the artist for his neat device--
+    The shape is pleasing though the stuff is ice.
+
+    Fashions will change--the new costume allures--
+    Unfading still the better type endures;
+    While the slashed doublet of the cavalier
+    Gave the old knight the pomp of chanticleer,
+    Our last-hatched dandy with his glass and stick
+    Recalls the semblance of a new-born chick
+    (To match the model he is aiming at
+    He ought to wear an eggshell for a hat),
+    Which of these objects would a painter choose,
+    And which Velasquez or Vandyke refuse?
+    When your kind summons reached my calm retreat,
+    Who are the friends, I questioned, I shall meet?
+    Some in young manhood, shivering with desire
+    To feel the genial warmth of Fortune's fire--
+    Each with his bellows ready in his hand
+    To puff the flame just waiting to be fanned;
+    Some heads half-silvered, some with snow-white hair;
+    A crown ungarnished glistening here and there,
+    The mimic moonlight gleaming on the scalps
+    As evening's empress lights the shining Alps.
+    But count the crowds that throng your festal scenes--
+    How few that knew the century in its teens!
+
+    Save for the lingering handful fate befriends,
+    Life's busy day the Sabbath decade ends;
+    When that is over, how with what remains
+    Of Nature's outfit--muscle, nerve and brains?
+
+    Were this a pulpit, I should doubtless preach;
+    Were this a platform, I should gravely teach;
+    But to no solemn duties I pretend
+    In my vocation at the table's end,
+    So as my answer let me tell instead
+    What Landlord Porter--rest his soul--once said.
+    A feast it was that none might scorn to share;
+    Cambridge and Concord demigods were there--
+    And who were they? You know as well as I
+    The stars long glittering in our Eastern sky--
+    The names that blazon our provincial scroll
+    Ring round the world with Britain's drumbeat roll!
+
+    Good was the dinner, better was the talk;
+    Some whispered, devious was the homeward walk;
+    The story came from some reporting spy--
+    They lie, those fellows--Oh, how they do lie!
+    Not ours those foot tracks in the new fallen snow--
+    Poets and sages never zigzagged so!
+
+    Now Landlord Porter, grave, concise, severe,
+    Master, nay, monarch, in his proper sphere,
+    Though to belles-lettres he pretended not,
+    Lived close to Harvard, so knew what was what;
+    And having bards, philosophers and such
+    To eat his dinner, put the finest touch
+    His art could teach, those learned mouths to fill
+    With the best proofs of gustatory skill;
+    And finding wisdom plenty at his board,
+    Wit, science, learning, all his guests had stored,
+    By way of contrast, ventured to produce,
+    To please their palates, an inviting goose.
+
+    Better it were the company should starve
+    Than hands unskilled that goose attempt to carve;
+    None but the master artist shall assail
+    The bird that turns the mightiest surgeon pale.
+
+    One voice arises from the banquet hall,--
+    The landlord answers to the pleading call;
+    Of stature tall, sublime of port he stands,
+    His blade and trident gleaming in his hands;
+    Beneath his glance the strong-knit joints relax
+    As the weak knees before the headsman's axe.
+
+    And Landlord Porter lifts his glittering knife
+    As some stout warrior armed for bloody strife;
+    All eyes are on him; some in whispers ask--
+    What man is he who dares this dangerous task?
+    When, lo! the triumph of consummate art,
+    With scarce a touch the creature drops apart!
+    As when the baby in his nurse's lap
+    Spills on the carpet a dissected map.
+
+    Then the calm sage, the monarch of the lyre,
+    Critics and men of science all admire,
+    And one whose wisdom I will not impeach,
+    Lively, not churlish, somewhat free of speech,
+    Speaks thus: "Say, master, what of worth is left
+    In birds like this, of breast and legs bereft?"
+
+    And Landlord Porter, with uplifted eyes,
+    Smiles on the simple querist, and replies--
+    "When from a goose you've taken legs and breast,
+    Wipe lips, thank God, and leave the poor the rest!"
+
+    Kind friends, sweet friends, I hold it hardly fair
+    With that same bird your minstrel to compare,
+    Yet in a certain likeness we agree--
+    No wrong to him, and no offence to me;
+    I take him for the moral he has lent,
+    My partner--to a limited extent.
+
+    When the stern landlord, whom we all obey,
+    Has carved from life its seventh great slice away,
+    Is the poor fragment left in blank collapse
+    A pauper remnant of unvalued scraps?
+    I care not much what Solomon has said,
+    Before his time to nobler pleasures dead;
+    Poor man! he needed half a hundred lives
+    With such a babbling wilderness of wives!
+    But is there nothing that may well employ
+    Life's winter months--no sunny hour of joy?
+    While o'er the fields the howling tempests rage,
+    The prisoned linnet warbles in his cage;
+    When chill November through the forest blows
+    The greenhouse shelters the untroubled rose,
+    Round the high trellis creeping tendrils twine,
+    And the ripe clusters fill with blameless wine,
+    We make the vine forget the winter's cold,
+    But how shall age forget it's growing old?
+
+    Though doing right is better than deceit,
+    Time is a trickster it is fair to cheat;
+    The honest watches ticking in your fobs
+    Tell every minute how the rascal robs.
+    To clip his forelock and his scythe to hide,
+    To lay his hour-glass gently on its side,
+    To slip the cards he marked upon the shelf,
+    And deal him others you have marked yourself,
+    If not a virtue, cannot be a sin,
+    For the old rogue is sure at last to win.
+
+    What does he leave when life is well-nigh spent
+    To lap its evening in a calm content?
+    Art, Letters, Science, these at least befriend
+    Our day's brief remnant to its peaceful end--
+    Peaceful for him who shows the setting sun
+    A record worthy of his Lord's "well done!"
+
+    When he, the Master whom I will not name,
+    Known to our calling, not unknown to fame,
+    At life's extremest verge half-conscious lay,
+    Helpless and sightless, dying day by day,
+
+    His brain, so long with varied wisdom fraught,
+    Filled with the broken enginery of thought,
+    A flitting vision often would illume
+    His darkened world and cheer its deepening gloom,--
+    A sunbeam struggling through the long eclipse,--
+    And smiles of pleasure play around his lips.
+    He loved the Art that shapes the dome and spire;
+    The Roman's page, the ring of Byron's lyre,
+    And oft, when fitful memory would return
+    To find some fragment in her broken urn,
+    Would wake to life some long-forgotten hour,
+    And lead his thought to Pisa's terraced tower,
+    Or trace in light before his rayless eye
+    The dome-crowned Pantheon printed on the sky;
+    Then while the view his ravished soul absorbs
+    And lends a glitter to the sightless orbs,
+    The patient watcher feels the stillness stirred
+    By the faint murmur of some classic word,
+    Or the long roll of Harold's lofty rhyme,
+    "Simple, erect, severe, austere, sublime,"--
+    Such were the dreams that soothed his couch of pain,
+    The sweet nepenthe of the worn-out brain.
+
+    Brothers in art, who live for others' needs
+    In duty's bondage, mercy's gracious deeds,
+    Of all who toil beneath the circling sun
+    Whose evening rest than yours more fairly won?
+    Though many a cloud your struggling morn obscures,
+    What sunset brings a brighter sky than yours?
+
+    I, who your labors for a while have shared,
+    New tasks have sought, with new companions fared,
+    For Nature's servant far too often seen
+    A loiterer by the waves of Hippocrene;
+    Yet round the earlier friendship twines the new;
+    My footsteps wander, but my heart is true,
+    Nor e'er forgets the living or the dead
+    Who trod with me the paths where science led.
+
+    How can I tell you, O my loving friends,
+    What light, what warmth, your joyous welcome lends
+    To life's late hour? Alas! my song is sung,
+    Its fading accents falter on my tongue.
+    Sweet friends, if shrinking in the banquet's blaze,
+    Your blushing guest must face the breath of praise,
+    Speak not too well of one who scarce will know
+    Himself transfigured in its roseate glow;
+    Say kindly of him what is--chiefly--true,
+    Remembering always he belongs to you;
+    Deal with him as a truant, if you will,
+    But claim him, keep him, call him brother still!
+
+The next toast was to "The Clergy."
+
+    He was a scholar, and a ripe and good one, exceeding
+    wise, fair-spoken and persuading.
+                                --_King Henry VIII._
+
+Bishop Clark of Rhode Island responded. "We honor," he said, "the high
+priesthood of science and art. We honor the man who has brought life and
+joy to many weary dwellings, and therefore we extend the right hand of
+fellowship to him." When after tracing the lineage of the guest, he
+reviewed his life, quoted from his writings, and said in conclusion,
+that he stood side by side with Oliver Goldsmith.
+
+The toast to "The Bar"--
+
+    Why might that not be the skull
+    Of a lawyer? Where be his quidet's now?
+                                         --_Hamlet._
+
+was answered by Hon. Wm. M. Evarts, in a witty and characteristic
+address.
+
+Doctor T. Gaillard Thomas responded to the toast, "The Medical
+Profession"--
+
+    She honors herself in honoring a favorite son,--
+
+and George William Curtis followed in an address, answering to the toast
+"Literature"--
+
+    A kind of medicine in itself.
+                              --_Measure for Measure._
+
+All factions, he declared, claimed Oliver Wendell Holmes, and all
+peoples spoke of him in praise. He then mentioned many of the poet's
+songs, reciting a stanza occasionally and commenting on them in a
+touching manner. The next toast was "The Press"--
+
+    But words are things, and a small drop of ink
+    Falling like dew upon a thought, produces
+    That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.
+                                                --_Byron._
+
+This was responded to by Whitelaw Reid in a humorous address in which he
+closely connected Doctor Holmes with the profession of journalism. It
+was a late hour when the company separated, and the last toast given,
+found a hearty, though silent response from all present--
+
+    Good-night, good-night! Parting is such sweet sorrow,
+    That I shall say good-night till it be to-morrow.
+                                          --_Romeo and Juliet._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Before closing this long chapter of "honors to Doctor Holmes," we cannot
+refrain from giving the following cordial tribute from John Boyle
+O'Reilly:
+
+"Oliver Wendell Holmes:--the wise, the witty, the many ideald,
+philosopher, poet, physician, novelist, essayist, professor, but, best
+of all, the kind, the warm heart. A man of unexpected tastes, ranging in
+all directions from song to science, and from theology to boatracing.
+Me met one day on Tremont street an acquaintance fond of athletic
+exercise, and he stopped himself with a pathetic little sigh.
+
+"'Ah, you send me back fifty years,' he said. 'As you walked then with a
+swing, you reminded me of an old friend who was dead before you were
+born; and he was a good man with his hands, too.'
+
+"Never was a more healthy, natural, lovable man than Doctor Holmes."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+IN LATER YEARS.
+
+
+It was not until the spring of 1886 that Doctor Holmes made his second
+trip to Europe. A whole half century had elapsed since his return home
+from the three years spent abroad when he was completing his medical
+studies.
+
+In this second European tour he was accompanied by his daughter, Mrs.
+Sargent; and he gives his own delightful account of it in "One Hundred
+Days in Europe," which first appeared as a serial in the _Atlantic
+Monthly_, and has since been published in book form, with a charming
+dedication to his daughter. "The Sailing of the Autocrat" was celebrated
+by T.B. Aldrich in a fine poem, from which we quote a few lines as
+embodying the tender love and ardent admiration of the whole American
+people:--
+
+   "O Wind and Wave, be kind to him!
+    For him may radiant mornings break
+    From out the bosom of the deep,
+    And golden noons above him bend,
+    And fortunate constellations keep
+    Bright vigils to his journey's end!
+
+    Take him, green Erin, to thy breast!
+    Keep him, gray London--for a while!
+    _In him we send thee of our best,
+    Our wisest word, our blithest smile_--
+    Our epigram, alert and pat,
+    That kills with joy the folly hit--
+    Our Yankee Tzar, our Autocrat
+    Of all the happy realms of wit!
+    Take him and keep him--but forbear
+    To keep him more than half a year....
+    His presence will be sunshine there,
+    His absence will be shadow here!"
+
+We delight to recall with what distinguished honors he was received
+abroad from the highest dignitaries of church and state, as well as from
+his own literary compeers. It was during this visit in England that the
+London _Spectator_ wrote, "No literary American--unless it be Mr.
+Lowell, and we should not except even him--occupies precisely the same
+place as Doctor Holmes in Englishmen's regard. They have the feeling for
+him which they had for Charles Lamb, Charles Dickens, and John Leech,
+in which admiration somewhat blends into and is indistinguishable from
+affectionateness."
+
+The Universities of Edinburgh, Oxford, and Cambridge all conferred their
+honorary degrees upon him, and he has given us his own inimitable
+description of the manner in which he was entertained by Carlyle and by
+Tennyson.
+
+At a club dinner given to him in London, he said to the bishop of
+Gloucester:
+
+"I think we are all unconsciously conscious of each other's brain waves
+at times. The fact is that words and even signs are a very poor sort of
+language, compared with the direct telegraphy between souls. The mistake
+we make is to suppose that the soul is circumscribed and imprisoned by
+the body. Now, the truth is, I believe I extend a good way outside my
+body. Well, I should say at least three or four feet all round, and so
+do you, and it is our extensions that meet. Before words pass or we
+shake hands, our souls have exchanged impressions, and they never lie."
+
+In reply to a toast at the farewell banquet given him in Liverpool by
+the Medical Society of London, he said:
+
+"I cannot do justice to the manner in which I have been everywhere
+received. Any phrase of mine would be a most inadequate return for the
+months of loving and assiduous attentions through which I have been
+living. You need not ask me, therefore, the almost stereotyped question,
+how I like England and Scotland. I cannot help loving both, and I only
+regret I could not accept the welcome awaiting me from my friends in
+warmhearted Ireland."
+
+Fresh in mind still is the enthusiastic ovation given to our beloved
+Autocrat when the hundred days had passed, and "Wind and Wave" brought
+safely home again "our wisest word, our blithest smile."
+
+But grim Death, that had "rained through every roof save his," was soon
+to send a cruel shaft into the poet's happy home. On the 6th of
+February, 1888, the dear companion and helpmeet of his life for nearly
+half a century--
+
+   "Stole with soft step the shining archway through
+    And left the past years' dwelling for the new."
+
+Mrs. Holmes was a remarkably gifted woman, and singularly fitted to be
+the wife of a man of genius. She was devoted to her home and family, and
+the charm of her sweet womanliness will long be remembered by those who
+had the privilege of knowing her intimately. Doctor Holmes has himself
+told us that her simple, reticent "I think so," was valued by him as a
+far more encouraging sanction for action, than the dogmatic advice of a
+more arbitrary adviser. When the Civil War broke out, Mrs. Holmes was
+one of the first Boston women to enter actively into the work of the
+United States Sanitary Commission.
+
+"She impressed us all," says one of her fellow workers, "as being so
+strong, steady, clear, and firm. There was not one among the whole body
+with whom we were so united as with her. And the strange thing about her
+was that she really had the executive ability and the clear mind, as
+well as the gentle and amiable spirit. She shirked no labor, even of the
+most menial, and was one of those who gave up almost all her time to the
+work. Her eldest son was at this time in the war, and went through six
+battles; and this, although she never complained, was a constantly
+harrowing pain to her."
+
+The younger son of Doctor Holmes, Edward Jackson Holmes, died in 1884,
+leaving one son who bears the same name; and in 1889, his only daughter,
+Mrs. Sargent, passed away. The aching void left in heart and home by
+these sad bereavements was felt still more keenly as, one after another,
+the old friends of his youth were laid to rest.
+
+"I do not think," he said upon one of his last birthdays, "that one of
+the companions of my early years, of my boyhood, is left. When a man
+reaches my age, and then looks back fifty years, why, even that distance
+into the past to such a man leaves a pretty good gap behind it. Half a
+century from eighty years leaves a 'gap' of thirty years, and thirty
+years are a good many to most men."
+
+At one of the Saturday Club dinners, when fewer members than usual were
+present, Doctor Holmes remarked,
+
+"This room is full of ghosts to me. I can see so many faces here that
+used to be here years ago, and that have since passed from this life.
+They are all real to me here, and I think if I were the only living
+person at one of these dinners, I could sit here and talk to those I see
+about me, and dine pleasantly, even alone."
+
+Bryant, Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier and Lowell--all lifelong friends
+of Holmes--had already "passed on." To other dearly-loved comrades,
+also, the great last summons had come. Ticknor, Prescott, Fields,
+Benjamin Pierce, James Freeman Clarke, Francis Parkman--all were gone.
+
+"I feel," he often said with a sigh, "that I am living in another age
+and generation."
+
+Little, indeed, did the young Oliver realize when he wrote that pathetic
+poem, "The Last Leaf," that he was the one of our five great poets
+destined to be the "last upon the tree!"
+
+Upon his eightieth birthday, he remarked, "I have worn well, but you
+cannot cheat old age. The difficulty with me now in writing is that I
+don't like to start on anything. I always feel that people must be
+saying, 'Are you not rash at eighty years of age to write for young
+people who think a man old at forty?'"
+
+But in his delightful series of papers, "Over the Teacups," we mark the
+same brilliant flashes of wit, the same keen intuition, the same
+warmhearted sympathy with all phases of human nature, that our beloved
+Autocrat showed in the Breakfast Table chats. As Doctor Holmes himself
+says:
+
+"In sketching the characters, I have tried to make just the difference
+one would naturally find in a breakfast and a tea table set."
+
+Another volume of poems, "Before the Curfew," and a series of essays
+entitled "Our New Portfolio," were published soon after. The last poem
+of Doctor Holmes printed in the _Atlantic Monthly_ was written in his
+eighty-fourth year and dedicated to the memory of Francis Parkman. Some
+of its verses, however, pay a loving tribute also to his old friends
+Prescott and Motley:
+
+   "One wrought the record of a royal pair
+    Who saw the great discoverer's sail unfurled,
+    Happy his more than regal prize to share,
+    The spoils, the wonders of the sunset world.
+
+    There, too, he found his theme; upreared anew
+    Our eyes beheld the vanished Aztec shrines,
+    And all the silver splendors of Peru
+    That lured the conqueror to her fatal mines.
+
+    Nor less remembered he who told the tale
+    Of empire wrested from the strangling sea;
+    Of Leyden's woe, that turned his readers pale,
+    The price of unborn freedom yet to be;
+
+    Who taught the new world what the old could teach;
+    Whose silent hero, peerless as our own,
+    By deeds that mocked the feeble breath of speech
+    Called up to life a State without a throne.
+
+    As year by year his tapestry unrolled,
+    What varied wealth its growing length displayed!
+    What long processions flamed in cloth of gold!
+    What stately forms their glowing robes arrayed!"
+
+Contrasting with Prescott's and Motley's the subject of Parkman's
+histories, the poet says,
+
+   "Not such the scenes our later craftsman drew,
+    Not such the shapes his darker pattern held;
+    A deeper shadow lent its sombre hue,
+    A sadder tale his tragic task compelled.
+
+    He told the red man's story; far and wide
+    He searched the unwritten records of his race;
+    He sat a listener at the sachem's side,
+    He tracked the hunter through his wildwood chase.
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    Soon o'er the horizon rose the cloud of strife,
+    Two proud, strong nations battling for the prize;
+    Which swarming host should mould a nation's life,
+    Which royal banner flout the western skies.
+
+    Long raged the conflict; on the crimson sod
+    Native and alien joined their hosts in vain;
+    The lilies withered where the lion trod,
+    Till peace lay panting on the ravaged plain."
+
+In the extracts given from this fine poem, with its stately, majestic
+rhythm, it is plain to see that, even at the age of eighty-four, our
+autocrat poet had lost none of the vigor and fire of youth.
+
+In the closing verses he speaks most tenderly of Parkman's patient,
+untiring energy,
+
+    "While through long years his burdening cross he bore,"
+
+and concludes with this fine eulogy:
+
+   "A brave, bright memory! his the stainless shield
+    No shame defaces and no envy mars!
+    When our far future's record is unsealed
+    His name will shine among its morning stars."
+
+It was in January, 1889, that Doctor Holmes sent to Doctor Richard M.
+Hodges, who was at that time president of the Boston Medical Library
+Association, the following characteristic letter:
+
+     MY DEAR SIR:
+
+     I have transferred my medical library to the hall of the Boston
+     Medical Library Association. Please accept it as a gift from its
+     late president. As there is no provision for its reception, and as
+     I liked the idea of keeping together the books which had been so
+     long together, I have provided a new set of shelves in which they
+     can be properly and conveniently arranged.
+
+     Your very truly,
+                                                            O.W. HOLMES.
+
+To show how highly Doctor Holmes valued this library, which consisted of
+nine hundred and sixty-eight extremely rare volumes, Doctor Chadwick,
+the librarian, said: "All these books have been collected by him in his
+fifty years of experience, and it is fitting that we should realize it
+is the result of years of labor. He has been ready on every occasion to
+deliver addresses on topics having a wide scope. He carried off with
+honor three of the four Boylston prizes, and this alone shows the range
+of his studies. He has contributed to the funds of the association in
+various ways, and now gives us his most valuable library. In this act,
+as well as his continuing the position as president of the association
+several years after he had relinquished all other connection with the
+profession, he has designated our institution as the one in which he
+takes the greatest pride; in whose future he has the greatest
+confidence."
+
+In reply, Doctor Holmes then said:
+
+"The books I have offered the association, and which you have kindly
+accepted, constitute my own medical library, with the exception of a few
+volumes which, for several reasons, I have retained. It has grown by a
+slow process of accretion. The first volume of it was 'Bell's Anatomy,'
+and the last was 'Elements of Pharmacy.' The oldest book was written in
+1490, and the latest in 1887, so it can be seen that the library covers
+the space of four centuries."
+
+After reviewing the better books of the library, and alluding to the
+private library that a practitioner should keep, Doctor Holmes added:
+"These books are dear to me; a twig from some one of my nerves runs to
+every one of them, and they mark the progress of my study and the
+stepping-stones of my professional life. If any of them can be to others
+as they have been to me, I am willing to part with them, even if they
+are such old and beloved companions."
+
+Doctor Holmes' warm interest in everything connected with education was
+shown most emphatically in one of the last public addresses he
+delivered. It was at that memorable reception given at the Vendome,
+February 28, 1893, by the Boston publishers to Doctor Holmes and other
+authors, and to the members of the National Educational Association.
+Mrs. Elizabeth Phelps-Ward, with Mr. Henry O. Houghton and Mr. Edwin
+Ginn, gave welcome to the many distinguished guests.
+
+When Doctor Holmes was called upon to address the large company
+assembled, he began:
+
+"Surely the Autocrat never felt more powerless than he does at this
+moment. I meant to come here and say a few almost careless words. I was
+saying to myself, 'You know very well what you've got to talk about, and
+you can soon say it.' But," and here the Autocrat's bright face grew
+serious, "at half-past ten this morning there came to me an elegantly
+engraved copper-plate invitation to appear here, with a formality and a
+style about it which showed that I had deceived myself in thinking I
+could utter a few careless words. There was but one refuge for me, and
+that was the old one. I can only hold up a copy of verses," and he waved
+the manuscript deprecatingly.
+
+"But not one word, not one thought of it was in my head before half-past
+ten to-day. There are things in literature," and here Dr. Holmes dropped
+his voice to a confidential key, "that are christened 'impromptus,' the
+authenticity of which I am inclined to doubt. I have the idea that a
+good many impromptus have cost their authors many sleepless nights.
+
+"I shall tell you what I would have spoken about. I should have said, in
+the first place, that I have a great sympathy with instructors. I have
+been an instructor myself. I was for thirty-five years professor in
+Harvard College, and two years before that professor in Dartmouth
+College. I enjoyed very much the relations I had with my students in
+both places. Many of them have lasted up to the present time, and it is
+pleasant for me every now and then to have a bald-headed man come up to
+me and tell me he was one of my boys thirty or forty years ago.
+
+"A great many changes have taken place since that time, but two of them
+are especially interesting. One is the sub-division of teaching. There
+were six of us who taught the medical graduates of Harvard College
+during a considerable part of the time when I was professor there. There
+are now seventy. How much better they are taught I do not know. I
+presume they are taught well. But a wicked thought came into my head
+just now--it is not every animal that has the most legs who crawls the
+fastest. It reminds me of the sirloin of beef one day, which was
+mince-meat on the second."
+
+All these pleasantries were given in the Autocrat's happiest manner,
+amidst many interruptions of laughter and applause from his audience.
+
+"I don't mean, however," he added, "to deprecate that which I
+accomplished by the sub-division into specialties. What I say is rather
+playful than serious. The next point is the education of women, which I
+have regarded at a distance, to be sure. But, occasionally visiting
+Wellesley and the Cambridge Annex, it has been a great delight to me to
+see how the intellects of the fair sex matched with those of the
+sterner. I then thought I should say something of the importance of
+implanting ideas on all the most important subjects at a very early
+period of life, and I was going to recall my theology which came out of
+the little primer, and my patriotism which was kindled at the shrine of
+Dr. Dwight's 'Columbia, Queen of the World.' But all these things I
+would prefer to leave, and what else I would have said I will defer
+until the next occasion, I also wish to say here, personally, that it
+was most unwillingly that I appeared before an audience like this. I
+felt it was, at my age, more becoming that I should be a listener rather
+than a speaker." Here he was interrupted by cries of "No! No!" but he
+shook his head determinedly, saying, "I am speaking seriously now,
+however difficult it may be to do that. These little verses I have
+written, and which I am going to read, are really impromptu. They are
+poorly scrawled, for my hand was unsteady."
+
+Then in a clear, strong voice he read:
+
+   "Teachers of teachers! yours the task,
+    Noblest that noble minds can ask,
+    High up Aonia's murmurous mount
+    To watch, to guard the sacred fount
+    That feeds the stream below.
+    To guide the hurrying flood that fills
+    A thousand silvery, rippling rills
+    In ever widening flow.
+
+    Rich is the harvest from the fields
+    That bounteous nature kindly yields;
+    But fairer growths enrich the soil
+    Ploughed deep by thought and wearied toil,
+    In learning's broad domain.
+    And where the leaves, the flowers, the fruits,
+    Without your watering at the roots
+    To fill each branching vein?
+
+    Welcome! the author's firmest friends,
+    Your voice the surest Godspeed lends.
+    Of you the growing mind demands
+    The patient care, the guiding hands
+    Through all the mists of morn.
+    And knowing well the future's need,
+    Your prescient wisdom sows the seed
+    To flower in years unborn."
+
+It will be remembered that the last time Doctor Holmes appeared in
+public to read a poem was on May 28, 1893, when he attended the
+celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the reorganization of the
+Boston Young Men's Christian Union. The beautiful hymn he wrote for this
+occasion is the sweet, simple expression of his own lifelong creed:
+
+   "Our Father! while our hearts unlearn
+      The creeds that wrong thy name,
+    Still let our hallowed altars burn
+      With faith's undying flame.
+
+    Not by the lightning's gleam of wrath
+      Our souls thy face shall see,
+    The star of love must light the path
+      That leads to heaven and thee.
+
+    Help us to read our Master's will
+      Through every darkening stain
+    That clouds his sacred image still,
+      And see him once again,
+
+    The brother man, the pitying friend
+      Who weeps for human woes,
+    Whose pleading words of pardon blend
+      With cries of raging foes.
+
+    If, 'mid the gathering storms of doubt
+      Our hearts grow faint and cold,
+    The strength we cannot live without,
+      Thy love will not withhold.
+
+    Our prayers accept; our sins forgive;
+      Our youthful zeal renew;
+    Shape for us holier lives to live,
+      And nobler work to do!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+LAST DAYS.
+
+
+The eighty-fifth birthday of Doctor Holmes was quietly spent at his
+pleasant country home in Beverly.
+
+"The burden of years sits lightly upon me," he remarked to a friend that
+day, "but after fourscore years the encroachments of time make
+themselves felt with rapidly increasing progress. The twelfth septennial
+period has always seemed to me as one of the natural boundaries of life.
+One who has lived to complete his eighty-fourth year has had his full
+share, even of an old man's allowance. Whatever is granted over that is
+a prodigal indulgence of nature. When one can no longer hear the lark,
+when he can no longer recognize the faces he passes on the street, when
+he has to watch his steps, when it becomes more and more difficult for
+him to recall names, he is reminded at every moment that he must spare
+himself, or nature will not spare him the penalties she exacts for
+overtaxing his declining powers."
+
+In spite of these words, that seem prophetic to us now, the
+sunny-hearted Autocrat declared he was "eighty-five years _young_" that
+day, and all the friends who came with loving gifts and congratulations
+fully agreed with him. His conversation sparkled with all the wit of his
+younger days, and he talked with animation of his daily walks through
+the town, and of his long drives into the country in search of "big
+trees." Near the base of "Woodbury's Hill" in Beverly, he had recently
+found a mammoth elm that he considered finer than all his other
+favorites in Essex county; for, in addition to its great size, the wide
+spreading branches were covered with unusually thick rich foliage.
+
+"I call all trees mine," said the Autocrat, "that I have put my
+wedding-ring on--that is, my thirty-foot tape-measure!"
+
+Having been slightly troubled with writers' cramp, Doctor Holmes was
+advised by one of his callers that day to try a typewriter. This remark
+brought forth a smile from the man who had moved the people of the world
+with his pen; and he said, with a merry laugh, that he did not propose
+to forsake an old friend for a new one at that late time in life.
+
+In speaking of his birthday, Doctor Holmes alluded to the great men who
+were born that same year, 1809.
+
+"Yes," he said, "I was particularly fortunate in being born the same
+year with four of the most distinguished men of the age, and I really
+feel flattered that it so happened. Now, in England, there were
+Tennyson, Darwin, and Gladstone--Gladstone being, I think, four months
+younger than myself. That is a most remarkable trio, isn't it? Just
+contemplate the greatness of those three men, and then remember that in
+the same year Abraham Lincoln was born in this country. Most
+remarkable!" And when the visitor added, "You have forgotten to mention
+the fifth, doctor; there was also Oliver Wendell Holmes," Doctor Holmes
+quickly retorted in his own inimitable way:
+
+"Oh! that does not count; I 'sneaked in,' as it were!"
+
+Doctor Holmes remained at his country home in Beverly until late in
+September, this last year of his life, and his health seemed steadily to
+improve with the bracing autumn weather.
+
+On his return to the city, however, he had a severe attack of the
+asthmatic trouble from which he had suffered all his life. A severe
+cold, and the "weight of years" aggravated what seemed at first but a
+slight indisposition; and the poet, with his accurate medical knowledge,
+realized that the end was not far distant.
+
+But as he grew weaker and weaker, his sunshiny spirit shone all the
+brighter. With playful jests he tried to soothe the sad hearts of his
+dear ones, and to make them feel that the pain of parting was the only
+sting of death. He seldom, indeed, made any reference to the dark shadow
+he felt so near; but one morning, three or four days before his death,
+he said to his son:
+
+"Well, Wendell, what is it? King's Chapel?"
+
+"Oh, yes, father," said Judge Holmes.
+
+"Then I am satisfied. That is all I am going to say about it."
+
+On Sunday morning, October 7th, he seemed so much easier that his
+physician and intimate friend, Doctor Charles P. Putnam, went out of
+town to make a professional visit, leaving his brother, Doctor James
+Putnam, in charge.
+
+About noon Doctor Holmes had a sudden spasm, and his breathing became so
+labored that he asked to be moved into his favorite armchair.
+
+"That is better, thank you. That rests me more," he said to his son, who
+stood beside him.
+
+These were his last words. Painlessly and peacefully, with all the dear
+ones of his home around him, his life flowed away like the ebbing of a
+tide.
+
+To the world outside, the tidings of Doctor Holmes' death, that bright
+October day, came with a terrible shock. As late as Thursday of the
+preceding week he had been down town, and was intending to be present at
+the meeting of the Saturday Morning Club. Not even his nearest friends
+realized that the end was so near.
+
+"It is as if a long accustomed element had gone out of the air!"
+exclaimed one Boston citizen. "While Doctor Holmes lived we felt as if
+we were still bound by a living tie to the Titanic age of American
+literature."
+
+"The death of Doctor Holmes," said Charles Eliot Norton, "marks the
+close of an epoch in American literature. He was the sole survivor of
+the five great New England authors, and he has no successor. This group
+was a remarkable one. They grew up, as it were, together, and are the
+product of our New England life in the first half century. Their
+writings were contemporaneous, and they were bound in the closest ties
+of friendship. Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes--no other
+section of the country can show such a group."
+
+"Boston without Doctor Holmes!" exclaimed another friend. "What will it
+be like? There has been but one 'Autocrat,'--there will never be
+another!"
+
+Yet not only Boston--the whole world mourned the departure of Oliver
+Wendell Holmes. Within his domain his genius was imperial, and his
+bright cheery nature endeared him to all humanity.
+
+It seemed fitting that Nature herself should weep on the sad burial day
+of one whose life had embodied her sunshine!
+
+The wind mourned, the rain fell continuously, as loving hands bore into
+King's Chapel, upon Wednesday, October 10, all that was mortal of our
+famous poet. The simple funeral rites began just at noon. The casket,
+upon which rested wreaths of pansies and laurels, was borne up the aisle
+to the wailing organ strains of Haendel's "Dead March in Saul." Rev.
+Edward Everett Hale led the sad procession, reciting in his clear,
+sympathetic voice, "I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord;
+he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live."
+
+All the seats upon the middle aisle were reserved and occupied by the
+poet's immediate family and intimate friends, members of the
+Massachusetts Medical Society, representatives of Harvard College, and
+delegations from the numerous other societies of which the poet and
+physician was a member.
+
+A beautiful wreath of laurel hung from the south gallery, marking with
+mute eloquence the vacant pew of the dead poet.
+
+The Chapel was filled with a notable assembly, representing the best
+life of Boston--its intellect, culture, and heart. And probably never at
+one time had the ancient church held so many venerable personages. Rev.
+S.F. Smith, the author of "America," and Rev. Samuel May of Leicester,
+the only surviving classmates of Doctor Holmes, were present, in spite
+of the inclement weather. Judge Rockwood Hoar, fast nearing the
+fourscore milestone, Doctor Bartol, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe--all the great
+poet's friends and contemporaries were there to pay their last tribute.
+
+After the reading of passages from the Bible, and a prayer by Rev.
+Edward Everett Hale, a selection from Mendelssohn's "Elijah," "Oh, rest
+in the Lord," was sung by Miss Lena Little, followed by a chant, "The
+Lord is my Shepherd," and a hymn, "O Paradise," by the choir.
+
+Then the strains of the "Dead March" again rolled from the organ, and
+the funeral procession left the Chapel.
+
+The services at the grave were attended by only the relatives and most
+intimate friends. It was the wish of Doctor Holmes and his family that
+he should rest beside his wife in the Jackson lot at Mt. Auburn. It is
+in the immediate vicinity of the Holmes' lot, amidst the beautiful oaks
+that the poet loved; and only a few yards distant rest Longfellow and
+James Russell Lowell.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The life of Oliver Wendell Holmes spanned nearly the whole nineteenth
+century; and to the very last he kept abreast of the feeling, the
+thought, the movement, of the day. He was one of the few men of our
+generation who raised the American name in the esteem of the whole
+world.
+
+Comparing Doctor Holmes with his four illustrious contemporaries in
+literature, Professor Norton says:--
+
+"Emerson was the deepest thinker of them all; Longfellow possessed in a
+rare degree the power of felicitous expression, and gave us thoughts
+couched in the most beautiful poetry; Whittier was the apostle of
+freedom, fearless, and moved by an untiring purpose; Lowell was a man of
+versatile genius, as great in the field of poetry as he was in that of
+prose.
+
+"Holmes was one who wrote without effort. His was a ready genius. His
+thoughts came unbidden, and he had but to give them expression in words.
+Apt, vivacious, animated, pure, happy, he always was at once a wit and a
+humorist, but greater in his wit than in his humor. Whatever his
+subject, he wrote of it with equal ability, and his books are remarkable
+for the variety of topics which he has treated so easily."
+
+Of all his poems, Doctor Holmes ranked "The Chambered Nautilus" highest.
+
+"I wrote that poem," he said, "at white heat. When it was finished I
+took it to my wife, who was sewing in an adjoining room, and said, 'I
+think I have the best poem here that I have ever written.' And I have
+never changed my mind about it."
+
+By universal consent, indeed, "The Chambered Nautilus" is considered the
+gem of Doctor Holmes' beautiful lyrics. The poet always kept in his
+study specimens of the nautilus shell, cut entirely across, to show the
+spiral ascent of its curious inhabitant. He delighted to show these
+shells to his visitors; and, as he replaced them on the shelves, he
+would often repeat the last stanza of his beautiful poem:--
+
+    Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
+    As the swift seasons roll;
+    Leave thy low-vaulted past;
+    Let each new temple, loftier than the last,
+    Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
+    Till thou at length art free,
+    Leaving thine out-grown shell by life's unresting sea.
+
+Among the poems of Oliver Wendell Holmes are seven that may truly be
+called "Hymns;" and it is well to remember that the test of the use and
+value of a hymn is not the occasion for which it was written, but its
+adoption into hymnal collections, and its use thereafter.
+
+"We were singing one of Doctor Holmes' hymns in our church," said Rev.
+Minot Savage, "that Sunday morning when the great singer was passing
+into the higher choir.
+
+"Doctor Holmes was manly in his religion, and his songs show the bright
+and noble spirit that dominated his life. He was worshipful and
+trustful, and always hopeful. He was a firm, even passionate, believer
+in an existence after death, and found the ground of his trust in the
+dissecting-room. As a scientist he faced everything, and then believed
+that the soul was more than the body."
+
+Of these seven hymns of Doctor Holmes', the familiar one beginning,--
+
+    Lord of all being, throned afar,
+    Thy glory flames from star to star,
+
+the poet appropriately characterized his "Sunday Hymn." It first
+appeared in the _Atlantic Monthly_ of December, 1859, and the
+"Professor" prefaced it with these words:--
+
+"Peace be to all such as may have been vexed by any utterance the pages
+have repeated. They will doubtless forget for the moment the difference
+in the lines of truth we look at through our human prisms, and join in
+singing (inwardly) this hymn to the Source of the Light we all need to
+lead us, and the warmth which alone can make us all brothers."
+
+In the many heartfelt tributes to Doctor Holmes, it is interesting to
+note that his spiritual character was appreciated and approved by men
+differing from him very widely in religious belief. Indeed, it would be
+impossible for any one to hold communion with him through his writings
+without growing more kindly, more loving toward his fellow-men, and more
+reverent, more filial, towards his Heavenly Father.
+
+"And personally," remarked an intimate friend, "Doctor Holmes was as
+delightful a character as he is in his books. His best thoughts came
+full flood, as it were, from a richly stocked mind. His most
+characteristic traits were his extreme kindliness and his animation. The
+mirth and vivacity which bubble forth from his books was the same which
+came spontaneously from his lips in conversation. He was a delightful
+companion, and a true friend to those who were so fortunate as to know
+him and be known by him."
+
+Oliver Wendell Holmes taught that life is good and sweet, and worth the
+living. There is not in all his writings a single morbid note. The world
+is brighter and happier and better for the rare gift of such a life.
+
+His wit has been the solvent of bigotry. He has done for the religious
+thought of the century what Whittier did for the political; and his
+bright optimism has pierced many an old-time error with the potency of
+the sunbeam.
+
+"It is clearly seen in the perspective," says Charles Dudley Warner,
+"that Doctor Holmes' life gives us the kind of reputation that is of
+value to one's native land, and shows us that, after all the parade of
+official station and the notoriety of politics and money, those names
+only endure in honor and love which are borne by men of high
+intellectual and moral qualities. When we sum up all our sources and
+achievements, it is to him and his few compeers that we must point for
+our distinction."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Transcribers notes:
+
+Maintained original spelling and punctuation.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes, by E. E. Brown
+
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