IPS 1981 
 B7 
 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 
 
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 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 
 
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
LIFE OF 
 
 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 
 
 
 BY Ei E. BROWN 
 
 Author of " Life of Garfield," " Life of Washington," " From 
 Night to Light," etc., etc. 
 
 7i ^tj 
 
 BOSTON 
 D. LOTHROP AND COMPANY 
 
 FRANKLIN STREET 
 

 Copyright, 1884. 
 By D. Lothrop & Company. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Chap. 
 
 
 Pask. 
 
 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 
 
 ^3 
 
 X. 
 
 Elsie Venner .... 
 
 92 
 
 f 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 
 
 f XVIII. 
 
 The Harvard Medical School 
 
 240 
 
 XIX. 
 
 Tokens of Esteem . . . . 
 
 284 
 
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 
 
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 ANCESTRY. 
 
 IN a quaint old gambrel-roofed house still 
 standing 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 Wash- 
 ington frequently worshipped, and the old home- 
 stead itself was the headquarters of the Ameri- 
 can army during the siege of Boston. 
 
 9 
 
10 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 "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 strong- 
 holds. 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 Rev- 
 erend 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.*' 
 
ANCESTRY, 11 
 
 The house was not originally built for a par- 
 sonage. 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 Elipha- 
 let 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 Wen- 
 dell Holmes ministered to his Cambridge par- 
 ish, r'^vered 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 Break- 
 fast: 
 
 "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, ray 
 father's house being next door to that of Doctor 
 Holmes' gambrel- roofed house, and the library 
 
12 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 difficul- 
 ties to the stars.* He explained to us what it 
 meant, and I have never forgotten that quiet win- 
 ter evening and the sweet talk of that old man." 
 The good pastor was a graduate of Yale 
 College, and before coming to Cam.bridge 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 Revo- 
 lutionary army. The grandfather of Doctor 
 David Holmes was one of the original settlers 
 of Woodstock. * 
 
 *From notes furnished the writer by Dr. Holmes. 
 
ANCE8TBY. 13 
 
 The genealogy of the Holmes family of Wood- 
 stock 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 171 7, 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 daugh- 
 ter of Hon. Oliver Wendell, an eminent law- 
 yer. He was descended from various Wendells, 
 Olivers, Quinceys, and Bradstreets — names 
 that belonged to the best blue blood of New 
 England — and his wife was Mary Jackson, a 
 daughter of Dorothy Quincy, the ** Dorothy 
 
14 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 I 
 
 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. 
 
ANCESTRY. 16 
 
 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 I 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 I 
 
16 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 There were tones in the voice that whispered thea 
 You may hear to-day in a hundred men. 
 
 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, 
 
 1 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 Al- 
 bany. 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 
 
ANCESTRY. 17 
 
 in Albany, the arms of the Wendells — a ship 
 riding at two anchors — were represented in 
 stained glass. Very little is known of these early 
 ancestors, but the name is still an influential 
 one among the old Knickerbocker families. 
 
 Early in the eighteenth century, Abraham 
 and Jacob Wendell left their Albany home and 
 came to Boston. It is said that Jacob (the 
 great-grandfather of Oliver Wendell Holmes) fell 
 in love with his future wife, the daughter of 
 Doctor James Oliver, when she was only nine 
 years of age. Seeing her at play, he was so 
 impressed by her beauty and grace that, like 
 the Jacob of old, he willingly waited the flight 
 of years. Twelve children blessed this happy 
 union, and the youngest daughter married Wil- 
 liam Phillips, the first mayor of Boston, and the 
 father of Wendell Phillips. 
 
 Fair cousin, Wendell P., 
 
 says Doctor Holmes in his Phi Beta Kappa 
 poem of 1881 : 
 
 Our ancestors were dwellers beside the Zuyder Zee ; 
 Both Grotius and Erasmus were countrymen of we, 
 And Vondel was our namesake, though he spelt it with a v. 
 
18 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 Pro- 
 bate for Suffolk County. In Drake's 0/d Land- 
 marks 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 Dud- 
 ley's daughter Anne * This accomplished lady, 
 the first New England poetess, and frequently 
 
 * 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 vith great 
 variety of wit and learning, full of delight, wherein especially is contained a com- 
 plete 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, 
 
ANCESTRY. 19 
 
 called by her contemporaries " The Tenth Muse," 
 was Doctor Holmes' grandmother's great-great- 
 grandmother.* 
 
 With such an ancestry, Oliver Wendell Holmes 
 surely fulfils all the conditions of " a man of fam- 
 ily," 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 Yor 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." 
 
 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 Chanuings, Danas and 
 Phillipses. 
 * From notes furnished by Doctor Holmes. 
 
20 OLIVEB WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 BOYHOOD. 
 
 IN a curious little almanac for 1809 "^^Y 
 still be seen against the date of August 
 9, 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 sensi- 
 tive. Speaking of his childhood in after years, 
 and of certain superstitious fancies that always 
 clung to him, he says : 
 
BOYHOOD. 21 
 
 " I tell you it was not so pleasant for a little 
 boy of impressible nature to go up to bed in 
 an old gambrel-roofed house, with 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 offi- 
 cers' 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 yon- 
 der where you may now observe a granite obe- 
 
22 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 lisk, the study in my father's time, but in those 
 days the council-chamber of armed men, some- 
 times 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 appa- 
 ritions, no wonder that my imagination got ex- 
 cited, and I was liable to superstitious fancies." 
 
 What some of these fancies were, he tells 
 us elsewhere : 
 
 " I was afraid of ships. Why, I could never 
 tell. The masts looked frightfully tall, but they 
 were not so tall as the steeple of our old yel- 
 low meeting-house. At any rate, I used to hide 
 my eyes from the sloops and schooners that 
 were wont to lie at the end of the bridge, and 
 I confess that traces of this undefined terror 
 lasted very long. ' One other source of alarm 
 had a still more fearful significance. There was 
 
BOYHOOD. 23 
 
 a great wooden hand, a glovemaker's sign, which 
 used to swing and creak in the blast as it hung 
 from a pillar before a certain shop a mile or 
 two outside of the city. Oh, the dreadful hand ! 
 Always hanging there ready to catch up a little 
 boy who would come home to supper no more, 
 nor yet to bed, whose porringer would be laid 
 away empty thenceforth, and his half-worn shoes 
 wait until his small brother grew to fit them. 
 
 " As for all manner of superstitious observances, 
 I used once to think I must have been pecul- 
 iar 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 men- 
 tioned in one or more biographies, I well 
 remember. Stepping on or over certain partic- 
 ular things or spots — Doctor Johnson's special 
 weakness — I got the habit of at a very early 
 age. 
 
 "With these follies mingled sweet delusions 
 which I loved so well I would not outgrow 
 
24 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 illu- 
 sion 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 I ' 
 
BOYHOOD. 25 
 
 and almost thinking I could see her as she 
 rolled in, crumpling the waters before her, 
 weather-beaten, barnacled, with shattered spars 
 and threadbare canvas, welcomed by the shouts 
 and tears of thousands. This was one of those 
 dreams that I mused and never told. Let 
 me make a clean breast of it now, and say, 
 that, so late as * to have outgrown childhood, 
 perhaps to have got far on towards manhood, 
 when the roar of the cannon has struck 
 suddenly on my ear, I have started with a 
 thrill of vague expectation and tremulous 
 delight, and the long unspoken words have artic- 
 ulated themselves in the mind's dumb whisper, 
 The Wasp has come ! 
 
 " Yes ; children believe plenty of queer things. 
 I suppose all of you have had the pocket-book 
 fever when you were little } What do I mean } 
 Why, ripping up old pocket-books in the firm 
 belief that bank-bills to an immense amount 
 were hidden in them. So, too, you must all 
 remember some splendid unfulfilled promise of 
 somebody or other, which fed you with hopes 
 perhaps for years, and which left a blank in 
 your life which nothing has ever filled up. 
 O. T. quitted our household carrying with him 
 
26 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, 
 
 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 ^iu'). 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^/;^ 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, "remind- 
 
BOYHOOD. 27 
 
 ing,* 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 experi- 
 ences 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 par- 
 ticular 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 pas- 
 
 *From notes furnished by Doctor Holmes. 
 
28 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 tor sent his little son was kept by William 
 Biglow, a man of considerable scholarship and 
 much native wit. Five years were spent at 
 a school in Cambridgeport, which was kept 
 by several successive teachers, and it was here, 
 as schoolmates, that Oliver Wendell Holmes 
 first met Margaret Fuller and Richard Henry 
 Dana. 
 
 " I was moderately studious," says Doctor 
 Holmes, and very fond of reading stories, which 
 I sometimes did in school hours. I was fond 
 also of whispering, and my desk bore sad wit- 
 ness 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."* 
 
 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 
 
 ♦From notes furnished by Doctor Holmes. 
 
BOYHOOD. 29 
 
 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 : 
 ^ " Tke 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 vulner- 
 able point of the artificial integument." 
 
30 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 EARLY RECOLLECTIONS. y 
 
 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 Hnes 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 con- 
 demned caps, without their petals ever seeing 
 daylight ; roses were disfigured with monstrous 
 protrusions through their very centres, some- 
 thing that looked like a second bud pushing 
 through the middle of the corolla ; lettuces and 
 cabbages would not head ; radishes knotted 
 
EARLY RECOLLECTIONS. 31 
 
 themselves until they looked like centenarians' 
 fringes ; and on every stem, on every leaf, and 
 both sides of it, and at the root of everything 
 that grew, was a professional specialist in the 
 shape of grub, caterpillar, aphis, or other expert, 
 whose business it was to devour that particular 
 part, and help murder the whole attempt at veg- 
 etation. . . . Yet Nature is never wholly 
 unkind. Economical as she was in my unpar- 
 adised 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 meas- 
 urement of after years, bordered to the north 
 by a fathomless chasm — the ditch the base-ball 
 l\]ayers of the present era jump over ; on the 
 east by unexplored territory ; on the south by 
 
32 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 a barren enclosure, where the red sorrel pro- 
 claimed 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 Com- 
 mon, not then disgraced by jealous enclosures 
 which make it look like a cattle-market. 
 
 " Beyond, as I looked round, were the col- 
 leges, the meeting-house, the little square mar- 
 ket-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 
 
SARLY BECOLLECTIONS. 33 
 
 between the knees of fond parental pair, we 
 would sometimes cross the bridge to the next 
 village town and stop opposite a low, brown, 
 gambrel-roofed cottage. Out of it would come 
 one Sally, sister of its swarthy tenant, swarthy 
 herself, shady-lipped, sad-voiced, and bending 
 over her flower bed, would gather a * posy,' 
 as she called it, for the little boy. Sally lies 
 in the churchyard, with a slab of blue slate at 
 her head, lichen-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 sooth- 
 ing and placid. In front of you lay the town, 
 tufted with elms, lindens, and horse-chestnuts, 
 which had seen Massachusetts a colony, anci 
 
34 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 Epis- 
 copal 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 south- 
 ward. . . . 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, v^ith 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 hand- 
 some Virginia general who had come to wield 
 our homespun Saxon chivalry. The hooks were 
 
EARLY BEC0LLECTI0N8. 35 
 
 to be seen from which had swung the ham- 
 mocks of Burgoyne's captive red-coats. If mem- 
 ory 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 bene- 
 ficiary. Was it possible for us in those days 
 to conceive of a greater potentate than the 
 president of the University, in his square doc- 
 tor's cap, that still filially recalled Oxford and 
 Cambridge } " 
 
 The father of Oliver Wendell Holmes was a ^ 
 Calvanist, not indeed of the severest east, but 
 still strictly " orthodox " in all his religious 
 views, and when Oliver, his elder son, was fif- 
 teen years of age, he sent him to the Phillips 
 Academy in Andover, thinking that the relig- 
 ious atmosphere there was less heretical than 
 at Phillips Academy, Exeter, where Arminian 
 
36 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 tendencies were just beginning to show them- 
 selves. 
 
 " I have some recollections of Andover, pleas- 
 ant and other," says Doctor Holmes. " I won- 
 der 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 pro- 
 tect it from Indian tomahawks {Credab Hahnue- 
 manmis), and to have grown round its hoops 
 and buried them in its wood." 
 
 The extreme conscientiousness of the boy is 
 strikingly depicted in the following revelation : 
 
 " The first unequivocal act of wrong that has 
 left its trace in my memory was this : refusing 
 a small favor asked of me — nothing more than 
 telling what had happened at school one morn- 
 
EARLY RECOLLECTIONS. 37 
 
 ing. No matter who asked it ; but there were 
 circumstances which saddened and awed me. I 
 had no heart to speak ; I faltered some miser- 
 able, perhaps petulant excuse, stole away, and 
 the first battle of life was lost. 
 
 " What remorse followed I need not tell. 
 Then and there to the best of my knowledge, 
 I first consciously took Sin by the hand and 
 turned my back on Duty. Time has led me 
 to look upon my offence more leniently ; I do 
 not believe it or any other childish wrong is 
 infinite, as some have pretended, but infinitely 
 finite. Yet, if I had but won that first battle!" 
 
 And what a charming picture he gives us 
 of the peaceful, hallowing influences about him 
 in that quiet old parsonage ! 
 
 " The Puritan * Sabbath,' as everybody knows, 
 began at * sundown ' on Saturday evening. To 
 such observances of it I was born and bred. 
 As the large, round disk of day declined, a 
 stillness, a solemnity, a somewhat melancholy 
 hush came over us all. It was time for work 
 to cease, and for playthings to be put away. 
 The world of active life passed into the shadow 
 of an eclipse, not to emerge until the sun 
 should sink again beneath the horizon. 
 
38 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 " It was in the stillness of the world without 
 and of the soul within that the pulsating lul- 
 laby 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, 
 2vas 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 par- 
 sonage 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 
 
EARLY RECOLLECTIONS. 39 
 
 bad way with our cheery looks, and did more 
 to unchristianize us with his woebegone ways 
 than all his sermons were like to accomplish in 
 the other direction. I remember one in partic- 
 ular 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 Chris- 
 tian 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 
 ^neid, 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 1 
 
 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 1 
 
 I wield the trident and control the waves. 
 
40 t^' -i ^ noi.Mt^s, 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 OTHER KEMINISCENCBS. 
 
 IN his wi^Mtions the inquiring;- mind oi' the 
 voiiHi; s:iijciu had ni.uie *' strange .K\|naint- 
 ances*' in a eert.un book inftrnuiry up in the 
 attic ot' the i;ambrel-rooted house. 
 
 " ... -AV;,-;' /Vi>/ at Xc^ic I'c'/A" he savs. 
 " helped to implant a feeling in mo which it 
 took Mr. Garrison a good many years to root 
 out. Think's I tc './,s.-./'. M\ old novel which 
 has been attributed to a lamous statesman, in- 
 troduced me to a world of fiction which was 
 not represented on the shelves of the library 
 proper, unless perhaps b\ L\ir/cds /// search of 
 a Wife, ox allegories of the bitter tonic class " 
 
 Then there was an old, old Latin alchemy 
 book, with the manuscript annotations o\ some 
 ancient Rosicrucian. " In the pages of which," he 
 says. *• I had a vague notion that I might find 
 the mighty secret of the La/^is FhiIosa/>horHmt 
 
Otherwise called Chaos, the Dragon, the Green 
 Lion, the Quinia Essentiuy the Soap of S2igt% 
 the vinegar of Heavenly Grace, the Egg, the 
 Old Man, the Sun, the Moon, and by all man- 
 ner of odd aliases, as I am assured by the 
 plethoric little book \yc{(ixc rne, 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 bonquinistey 
 
 " I have never lost my taste for alchemy," 
 he adds, "since I first got hold of the Palla- 
 dium 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 rny lead sinkers and the weights 
 of the tall kitchen clock into good yellow gold 
 specific gravity, 19.2, and exchangeable for what- 
 ever I then wanted, and for many more things 
 than 1 was then aware of. 
 
 "One of the greatest pleasures of childhood 
 is found in the mysteries which it hides from 
 the scepticism of the elders, and works up into 
 small mythologies of its own. I have seen all 
 this played over again in adult life, the same 
 
42 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 delightful bewilderment of semi-emotional belief 
 in listening to the gaseous promises of this or 
 that fantastic system, that I found in the pleas- 
 ing mirages conjured up for me by the ragged 
 old volume I used to pore over in the south- 
 east 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 Httle 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 
 
OTHER REMINISCENCES. 48 
 
 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, bring- 
 ing their loads of oak and walnut from the 
 country, as the slow-swinging oxen trailed them 
 along over the complaining snow in the cold, 
 brown light of early morning. Lying in bed 
 and listening to their dreary music had a 
 pleasure in it akin to the Lucretian luxury, or 
 that which Byron speaks of as to be enjoyed 
 in looking on at a battle by one 'who hath 
 no friend, no brother there.' 
 
 "Yes, and there was still another sound 
 which mingled its solemn cadences with the 
 waking and sleeping dreams of my boyhood. 
 It was heard only at times, a deep, muffled 
 roar, which rose and fell, not loud, but vast ; 
 a whistling boy would have drowned it for his 
 next neighbor, but it must have been heard 
 over the space of a hundred square miles. I 
 used to wonder what this might be. Could it 
 
44 OLIVER WENDELL HOlMES. 
 
 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 Constitutioji, 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 I 
 From yon lone attic, on a summer's morn, 
 Thus mocked the spoilers with his school-boy 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 ; 
 
OTHER REMINISCENCES, 46 
 
 Beneath it rung the battle shout, 
 
 And burst the cannon's roar; 
 The meteor of the ocean air f 
 
 Shall sweep the clouds no morel 
 
 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 
 Sians 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 hand- 
 bills containing the verses were circulated in 
 
46 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 Ben- 
 jamin Pierce. 
 
 In the class just below him (1830) was 
 Charles Sumner ; and his cousin, Wendell Phil- 
 lips, with John Lothrop Motley, entered Har- 
 vard during his Junior year. George Ticknor 
 was one of his instructors, and Josiah Quincy 
 became president of the college before he grad- 
 uated. 
 
 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 
 
OTHER REMINISCENCES. 47 
 
 these was given before the " Hasty Pudding 
 Club," and another entitled ** Forgotten Days," 
 at an ** Exhibition." He was the class poet ; 
 was called upon to write the poem at Com- 
 mencement, and was one of the sixteen chosen 
 into the Phi Beta Kappa Society. * 
 
 After his graduation, he studied law one year 
 in the Dane Law School of Harvard College. It 
 was at this time that Tke Collegian, a peri- 
 odical 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 Httle journal it must 
 have been with Holmes' inimitable outbursts of 
 wit, " Lochfast's " (WilHam H. Simmons) trans- 
 lations from Schiller, and the numerous pen 
 thrusts from John O. Sargent, Robert Haber- 
 sham and Theodore William Snow, who wrote ^ 
 under the respective signatures of ''Charles 
 Sherry," "Mr. Airy" and "Geofifery La 
 Touche." Young Motley, too, was an occa- 
 sional contributor to The Collegian, and his 
 
 * From notes furnished by Dr. Holmes. 
 
48 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 brother-in-law, Park Benjamin, joined Holmes 
 and Epes Sargent, in 1833, ^^ writing a gift 
 book called ''The Harbinger," the profits of 
 which were given to Dr. Howe's Asylum for 
 \he blind. 
 
ABBOAD. 49 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 ABROAD. 
 
 AFTER a year's study of law, during which 
 time the Muses were constantly tempting 
 him to "pen a stanza when he should engross," 
 young Holmes determined to take up the study 
 of medicine, which was much more congenial 
 to his tastes than the formulas of Coke and 
 Blackstone. Doctor James Jackson and his 
 associates were his instructors for the follow- 
 ing two years and a half; and then before tak- 
 ing his degree of M. D., he spent three years 
 in Europe, perfecting his studies in the hospitals 
 and lecture-rooms of Paris and Edinburgh. 
 
 Of this European tour, we find occasional 
 allusions scattered throughout his writings. 
 Listen, for instance, to this grand description 
 of Salisbury Cathedral : 
 
 " It was the first cathedral we ever saw, 
 and none has ever so impressed us since. 
 
50 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 Vast, simple, awful in dimensions and height, 
 just beginning to grow tall at the point where 
 our proudest steeples taper out, it fills the 
 ■m 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 afiects us more than 
 one in full costume. 
 
 Is this the mighty ocean? — is this all? 
 
ABBOAD. 61 
 
 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 frag- 
 ment of broken masonry, and lo ! the World's 
 Mistress in her stone gridle — alta mcenia 
 Romcs — 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 stoop- 
 ing Samson ; and there was a marvellous stair- 
 case, like a coil of lace. These things I 
 mention from memory, but not all of them to- 
 gether 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 i6**, and 
 how during the celebration of its re-opening, 
 two girls of the parish {filles de la paroisse)^ 
 
52 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 imagina- 
 tion, 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 — 
 gome 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 pict- 
 ures of some human being in its pang of 
 struggle, reach us most nearly. I remember the 
 platform at Berne, over the parapet of which 
 Theobald Weinzapfli's restive horse sprang with 
 him and landed him more than a hundred feet 
 beneath in the lower town, not dead, but sorely 
 broken, and no longer a wild youth, but God's 
 servant from that day forward. I have forgotten 
 the famous bears and all else. I remember the 
 Percy lion on the bridge over the Httle river 
 at Alnwick — the leaden lion with his tail stretched 
 out straight like a pump-handle — and why? 
 
ABROAD. 53 
 
 Because of the story of the village boy who 
 must fain bestride the leaden tail, standing out 
 over the water — which breaking, he dropped 
 into the stream far below, and was taken out 
 an idiot for the rest of his life." 
 
 Again he says : " I once ascended the spire 
 of Strasburg Cathedral, which is the highest, 
 I think, in Europe. It is a shaft of stone 
 filigree-work, frightfully open, so that the guide 
 puts his arms behind you to keep you from 
 falling. To climb it is a noonday 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 for- 
 ward, I think he said some feet. 
 
 "Keep any line of knowledge ten years and 
 some other line will intersect it. Long aftei: 
 I was hunting out a paper of Dumeril's in an 
 old journal — the ' Magazin Encyclopedque ' — for 
 Van trois^me (1795), when I stumbled upon a 
 
54 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 fin- 
 ish 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 business- 
 like ; but the child placid, perfectly still. I 
 spoke to her, and the blessed little creature 
 answered me in a voice of such heavenly sweet- 
 ness, 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 tin- 
 serifiy said the French student at my side." 
 
 The ruins of a Roman aqueduct he describes 
 

 
 '^•ru\.j'.i' 
 
ABBOAD. 55 
 
 in another place, and now and then some inci- 
 dent that happened in England or Scotland, 
 may be found among his writings; but when, 
 after three years' absence, he returns to Cam- 
 bridge and delivers his poem l jfore 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 home- 
 ward is strikingly shown in the very first lines 
 of the poem: 
 
 Scenes of my youth ! awake its slumbering fire ! 
 Ye winds of memory, sweep tiie silent lyre I 
 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 iirst my pennons flew ! 
 
 And read yet again in another place this lov- 
 ing tribute to the home of his childhood : 
 
56 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 "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 pater- 
 nal roof and wandered in other lands, and 
 learned to think in the words of strange peo- 
 ple. 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 cyl- 
 inder 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, dark- 
 ened 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, 
 
ABROAD. 57 
 
 you remember, by pinning his head a hair at 
 a time. Even a stone, with a whitish band 
 crossing it, belonging to the pavement of the 
 back yard, insisted on becoming one of the 
 talismen of memory. 
 
 ''This intersusception of the ideas of inani- 
 mate 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 Bethle- 
 hem, of all the lesser objects, give me the 
 liveliest home-feeling." 
 
 To return to the Phi Beta Kappa poem, 
 modestly termed by the author "A Metrical 
 Essay," it is interesting to note Lowell's hearty 
 appreciation of it in his Fable for Critics: 
 
 There's Holmes, who is matchless among you for wit, 
 A Leyden jar always full-charged, from which flit 
 The electrical tingles of hit after hit. 
 In long poems 'tis painful sometimes, and invites 
 A thought of the way the new telegraph writes. 
 Which pricks down its little sharp sentences spitefully. 
 
58 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 Netv 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 Marseil- 
 laise 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 watch- 
 ing, weeping Rouget de I'lsle, 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. 
 
ABBOAD. 59 
 
 But one still watched ; no self-encircled woes 
 
 Chased from his lids the angel of repose ; 
 
 He watched, he wept, for thoughts of bitter years 
 
 Bowed his dark lashes, wet with burning tears ; 
 
 His country's sufferings and her children's shame 
 
 Streamed o'er his memory like a forest's flame, 
 
 Each treasured insult, each remembered wrong, 
 
 Rolled through his heart and kindled into song; 
 
 His taper faded; and the morning gales 
 
 Swept through the world the war song of Marseilles ! 
 
 In this same Phi Beta Kappa poem may be 
 found that beautiful pastoral, Tke 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 enuncia- 
 tion which imparted to the hearers his own en- 
 joyment of his thoughts and expressions." 
 
60 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 Went worth 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. 
 
CHANGE IK THE HOME. 61 
 
 The Poe^ 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 repro- 
 duce it from memory. It has a flooring of 
 
62 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 shroud- 
 like cobwebs and dead things they wrap in their 
 gray folds. For a garret is like a seashore, 
 where wrecks are thrown up and slowly go to 
 pieces. There is the cradle which the old man 
 you just remember was rocked in; there is the 
 ruin of the bedstead he died on ; that ugly 
 slanting contrivance used to be put under his 
 pillow in the days when his breath came hard ; 
 there is his old chair with both arms gone, 
 symbol of the desolate time when he had nothing 
 earthly left to lean on ; there is the large 
 wooden reel which the blear-eyed old deacon 
 sent the minister's lady, who thanked him gra- 
 
CHANGE IN THE HOME. 63 
 
 ciously, and twirled it smilingly, and in fitting 
 season bowed it out decently to the limbo of 
 troublesome conveniences. And there are old 
 leather portmanteaus, like stranded porpoises, 
 their mouths gaping in gaunt hunger for the 
 food with which they used to be gorged to 
 bulging repletion ; and the empty churn with 
 its idle dasher which the Nancys and Phebes, 
 who have left their comfortable places to the 
 Bridgets and Norahs, used to handle to good 
 purpose ; and the brown, shaky old spinning- 
 wheel, 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 fire- 
 locks, but this was the cause the story told 
 me in childhood, laid them to. That military 
 
64 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 bless- 
 ing 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 monu- 
 mental 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 sepul- 
 chral sadness to the house before which they 
 stood sentries. 
 
CHANGE IN THE HOME. 65 
 
 "Not so with the row of elms you may see 
 leading up towards the western entrance. I 
 think the patriarch of them all went over in 
 the great gale of 1815 ; I know I used to 
 shake the youngest of them with my hands, 
 stout as it is now, with a trunk that would 
 defy the bully of Crotona, or the strong man 
 whose liaison with the Lady Delilah proved 
 so disastrous. 
 
 " The College plain would be nothing without 
 its elms. As the long hair of a woman is a 
 glory to her, so are these green tresses that 
 bank themselves against the sky in thick clus- 
 tered 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 1 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 thunder- 
 bolt crashed upon it and set its heart on fire^ 
 like those of the lost souls in the Hall ot 
 Eblis. Heaven had twice blasted it, and the 
 axe finished what the the lightning had begun.' 
 
66 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 " 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.'* 
 
THE PROFESSOR, 67 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE PROFESSOR. 
 
 IN 1839, Doctor Holmes was appointed Professor 
 of Anatomy and Physiology in Dartmouth 
 College, and pleasantly describes in The Pro- 
 fessor, his " Autumnal sojourn by the Connec- 
 ticut, 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 Commence- 
 ment processions." And what a charming descrip- 
 tion this of the little town of Hanover, " where 
 blue Ascutney looked down from the far dis- 
 tance and the 'hills of Beulah ' rolled up the 
 opposite horizon in soft, climbing masses, so 
 suggestive of the Pilgrim's Heavenward Path 
 
68 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 sol- 
 emn 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 Jack- 
 son, 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,* 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, 
 
 *From notes furnished bj' Dr. Holmes. 
 
THE PBOFESSOB. 69 
 
 faded away, threw themselves away ; the whole 
 drama of life was played in that stock company's 
 theatre of a dozen houses, one of which was 
 his, and no deep sorrow or severe calamity ever 
 entered his dwelling in that little court where 
 he lived in gay loneliness so long." 
 
 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 Berk- 
 shire Medical School at Piftsfield, Mass., and 
 established his summer residence '^ up among 
 those hills that shut in the amber-flowing Hous- 
 atonic, 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, in- 
 cluding some twenty-four thousand acres, was 
 bought by Doctor Holmes' great-grandfather, Jacob 
 
70 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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, Tke Pioneer, 
 in 1843, he describes in his Hall of Fantasy , the 
 poets he saw '' talking in groups, with a liveli- 
 ness 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 Mel- 
 ville, Miss Sedgwick and Fanny Kemble near by 
 on those " maple-shadowed plains of Berkshire," 
 while Bryant and Ellery Channing not unfre- 
 quently joined the brilliant circle in their sum- 
 mer trips to the Stockbridge hills. 
 
 In the Boston home of Doctor Holmes, John 
 Lothrop Motley was a welcome visitor — a man 
 whose ''generous sympathies with popular liberty 
 no homage paid to his genius by the class whose 
 admiring welcome is most seductive to scholars 
 could ever spoil." Both young men were mem- 
 
THE PBOFESSOR. 71 
 
 bers of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 
 and after the death of Motley, Holmes became 
 his biographer. 
 
 Charles Sumner formed another of this pleas- 
 ant literary coterie, and is described by Doctor 
 Holmes, after a short acquaintance, as **an ami- 
 able, blameless young man ; pleasant, affable and 
 cheerful." Years after, when Sumner was as- 
 saulted in the Senate, Doctor Holmes, at a pub- 
 lic 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. 
 
72 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 I " 
 
 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. 
 
THE PROFESSOB. 73 
 
 At the annual dinner of the Phi Beta Kappa 
 Society, in 1843, Doctor Holmes read the fine 
 poem entitled Tei'psichore. 
 
 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 in- 
 tended than a suggestion of their general char- 
 acter and aim." 
 
74 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE LECTURER. 
 
 WHEN Doctor Warren gave up the Park- 
 man 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 prac- 
 tice, 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 
 
THE LECTUBEB. 75 
 
 also a show to the eyes. For ten years past 
 six or eight of the most progressive minds in 
 America have been lecturing fifty or a hundred 
 times a year." 
 
 Among the many subjects that Doctor Holmes 
 touched upon in these lyceum lectures was a 
 fine, witty, and remarkably just criticism on 
 the English Poets of the Nineteenth Century. 
 What a pity that Oscar Wilde and his brother 
 poets of this later day could not have the ben- 
 efit of just such a clear, microscopic analysis ! 
 What the Autocrat himself thought of these 
 lecturing tours through ^ 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 
 
f6 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 asso- 
 ciations of young men which are common in 
 cities, it deranges the uniformity of the assem- 
 blage. But let there be no such interfering 
 circumstances, and one knows pretty well even 
 
THE LECTUBEB. 77 
 
 the look the audience will have, before he goes 
 in. Front seats, a few old folks — shiny-headed — 
 slant up best ear toward the speaker — drop 
 off asleep after a while, when the air begins 
 to get a little narcotic with carbonic acid. 
 Bright women's faces, young and middle-aged, 
 a little behind these, but toward the front — 
 (pick out 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 with- 
 out 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 ver- 
 tebrate, as much like fifty others you have seen 
 as any two mammals of the same species are 
 like each other." 
 
78 OLIVEB WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 / "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 dis- 
 temper. 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 eider- 
 down 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 lec- 
 turin'." 
 
 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 
 
THE LECTURER, 79 
 
 I saw Doctor Holmes. It was long ago; not 
 as our Autocrat expresses it, ' in the year 
 eighteen hundred and ever so few ; ' nor, as 
 Thackeray has it, * when the present century 
 was in its teens.' It was just after the close 
 of the last half century, and on a cold winter's 
 afternoon, when the sun was fast setting behind 
 the then ungilded dome of the State House, 
 and it was in old Bromfield street. It was not 
 in the Bromfield Street Methodist Church, nor 
 in the contiguous Methodist inn, known as the 
 Bromfield House, which, for many years, might 
 have been the convenient resort of good Meth- 
 odist 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, endeavor- 
 ing 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 non- 
 sense about him, and I was not surprised, 
 
80 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 Newbury- 
 port, 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, Hoinoeopothy 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 to- 
 gether 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 
 
 ^. 
 
THE LECTURER, 81 
 
 distinguished visitor in the following beautiful 
 song : 
 
 The stars their early vigils keep, 
 
 The silent hours are near, 
 When drooping eyes forget to weep — 
 
 Yet still we linger here ; 
 And what — the passing churl may ask — 
 
 Can claim such wondrous power, 
 That Toil forgets his wonted task, 
 
 And Love his promised hour? 
 
 The Irish harp no longer thrills, 
 
 Or breathes a fainter tone ; 
 The clarion blast from Scotland's hills 
 
 Alas ! no more is blown. 
 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. 
 
82 OLIVEB WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 I 
 
NAMING THE NEW MAGAZINE. 83 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 NAMING THE NEW MAGAZINE. 
 
 IN the year 1857, Mr. Phillips, of the firm of 
 Phillips & Sampson, undertook the publica- 
 tion 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 remem- 
 bered that some twenty-five years before, he 
 had begun a series of papers for a certain Neiv 
 England Magazine, published in Boston, by J. 
 T. & E. Buckingham, with the title of Autocrat 
 
84 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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, h@ 
 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 E^igland Mag- 
 azine" 
 
 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 similie 
 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 
 
NAMING THE NEW MAGAZINE. 85 
 
 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 every- 
 body 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 Tke 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 — 
 
86 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 Bowly 
 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 humor- 
 ists, 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, 
 
NAMING THE NEW MAGAZINE. 87 
 
 as dear old friends, and not merely as nodding 
 acquaintances. 
 
 "Not at all like that ponderous and over- 
 bearing autocrat, Doctor Johnson, is our Yankee 
 friend. He has more of Goldsmith's sweetness 
 and lovability. He is as true a lover of ele- 
 gance and high bred grace, dainty fancies, and 
 all pleasurable things, as was Leigh Hunt ; he 
 has more wordly sense without the moral lan- 
 guor ; 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 hippo- 
 crene and ' winking at the brim ' with a win- 
 ning 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 v^ivelets of 
 water ; but they are there, moving in all their 
 golden life and evanescent grace. 
 
 ** Holmes may not be so recognizably national 
 
^8 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 nation- 
 ahty. 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, home- 
 spun, 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, 
 
NAMING THE NEW MAGAZINE. 89 
 
 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 " Auto- 
 crat," as he suddenly surprises the company by 
 repeating a beautiful hymn he learned in child- 
 hood ? 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 I 
 What a fine foil to this " soft-voiced little 
 woman," is the landlady's daughter — that " ten- 
 der-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 
 
90 OLIVEB WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 frizette shingling it, a sallow neck with a neck- 
 lace 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," appropri- 
 ating 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 occa- 
 sionally, " as housewives try eggs," all these 
 are so real to the reader that he can but feel 
 they were something more than imaginary char- 
 acters 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 Deacons Masterpiece, Parson Tuj^elVs 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 
 
NAMING THE NEW MAGAZINE. 91 
 
 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 pres- 
 ently 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.'* 
 
92 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 intro- 
 duced 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 him- 
 self 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 
 
ELSIE VENNEE. 93 
 
 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 bUght 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 wind- 
 ing 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, 
 
94 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 rattle- 
 snake. 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 
 
ELSIE VENNEB. 96 
 
 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 some- 
 thing — 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 brood- 
 ing 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 tender- 
 ness 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 
 
96 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 never seen, save only with the unfixed, undis- 
 tinguishable 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 be- 
 ginning the story he received the most strik- 
 ing confirmation of the possibility of the 
 existence of such a character. The reader is 
 awakened to new views of human responsibil- 
 ity in the perusal of Elsie's life, and with 
 good old pastor Honeywood learns a lesson of 
 patience with his fellow creatures in their in- 
 born peculiarities and of charity in judging 
 
ELSIE VENNEE. 97 
 
 what seem to him wilful faults of character. 
 The Professor's story while centring the in- 
 terest upon Elsie, gives numerous side glances 
 of New England village life ; and old Sophy, 
 Helen Darley, Silas Peckham, Bernard Lang- 
 don, 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 Island- 
 ers; 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 Ro wen's "tea-fight" 
 
98 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 give a vein of light comedy that rests the sym- 
 pathetic reader as a sudden merry smile upon 
 a grave and troubled face. 
 
 T/ie GiLui'dian Angela 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 in- 
 herited tendencies^ though Myrtle Hazard, the 
 heroine of The Guardian Angela 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 dif- 
 ferent 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 im- 
 pulses were therefore many, conflicting, some 
 of them dangerous. The World, the Flesh, 
 and the Devil held mortgages on her life be- 
 fore its deed was put in her hands; but 
 «weet and gracious influences were also born 
 
ELSIE VENNER. 99 
 
 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 home- 
 stead, 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 
 
100 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 doesn't have that, then look out for some hys- 
 teric 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 pri- 
 
ELSIE VENNEB. 101 
 
 vate carriage, but an omnibus," says old Byles 
 Gridley in his Thoughts on the U^iiverse — 
 dead book that was destined to so grand a 
 resurrection ! Surely no one can deny the suc- 
 cessive 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 com- 
 mon observation." 
 
 -rThe 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 chap- 
 ters. 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 aie 
 exemplified in the most mirthful manner. If 
 Doctor Holmes has more characters like Gifted 
 Hopkins in his mind, the hilarity of two con- 
 tinents is not in much danger of being extin- 
 guished." 
 
 Here is a glimpse of the young poet when 
 racked with jealousy: 
 
 " He retired pensive from the interview, and 
 
102 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 flinging himself at his desk, attempted wreak- 
 ing 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 1 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 
 
ELSIE VENNER. 103 
 
 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 hus- 
 band's razors — an affectionate, yet perhaps unnec- 
 essary 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 post- 
 poned so long as there is a poem to write or 
 a proof to be corrected." 
 
 Gifted Hopkins survives the ordeal, and com- 
 pletes 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. 
 
104 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 What a world of pathos there is in the fond 
 mother's preparations for the momentous jour- 
 ney 1 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 genera- 
 tion, 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 
 
ELSIE VENNEB. 105 
 
 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 
 
106 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 melan- 
 choly, 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 good- 
 will and fervent charity toward all mankind. 
 
FUBTHEU ACqUAINTANCE, 10\ 
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 FURTHER ACQUAINTANCE. 
 
 BETWEEN the writing of Elsie Veimer 
 and The Guardian Angel , Doctor Holmes 
 wrote a number of essays for the Atlantic 
 Monthly, some of which were afterwards col- 
 lected in the volume entitled Soundings from 
 the Atlantic. 
 
 Currents and Counter-currents was published 
 in 1 86 1, and Border-lines of Knowledge in 1862. 
 The two latter books deal with scientific sub- 
 jects, 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 pub- 
 lished 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 
 
108 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 Mo7tthly^ 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 char- 
 acters. 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 Pro- 
 fessor, the Poet ! As some one has truly said, 
 
FURTHER ACQUAINTANCE. 109 
 
 " 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 
 
110 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 question our Landlady. That worthy woman 
 was delighted to tell the history of her most 
 distinguished boarder. She was, as I had sup- 
 posed, a gentlewoman whom a change of circum- 
 stances 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 Land- 
 lady thought. 
 
 "And how did the Lady receive these valu- 
 able 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 some- 
 
FURTHER ACQUAINTANCE. HI 
 
 thing 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 for- 
 tune 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 rela- 
 tive, the Lady of our breakfast table, began to 
 find herself in a streak of sunshine she came 
 
112 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 forward with a lighted candle to show her 
 which way her path lay before her. 
 
 **The Lady saw all this, how plainly, how pain- 
 fully! 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 Land- 
 lady, "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 win- 
 dows 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 Gov- 
 ernor's lady." 
 
 The strange little man, denominated "Scara- 
 bee," 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 look- 
 ing, rosy-cheeked salesman " of very polite man- 
 
FURTHER ACQUAINTANCE. 113 
 
 ners, 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 vol- 
 ume I " 
 
lU OLJVJEB WENDELL HOLMES, 
 
 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 poster- 
 ity with all his personality blended with what- 
 ever 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. T/ie Last Leaf, 
 The Voiceless, The Chambered Nautilus, The 
 
FA VORITES OF SONG. 115 
 
 Two Armies, The Old Marts Dream, Under 
 the Violets y Dorothy Q. — but where shall we 
 stop in the long enumeration of popular favor- 
 ites 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 Stm- Worshipper s Daughter! 
 
116 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 Tke 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. 
 
FAVORITES OF SONG. 117 
 
 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, 
 
118 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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, Bil/ 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. 
 
FAVORITES OF SONG. 119 
 
 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, BilH 
 
 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 
 
120 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 octoslyllabic 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 breath- 
 ing. 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 four- 
 teen 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. 
 
FAVORITES OF SONG. 121 
 
 " There is, however, the personal equation to be 
 taken into account. A person of quiet tempera- 
 ment 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 nar- 
 row-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 melo- 
 dies 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 accom- 
 modated 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 
 
122 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 habitually more slowly than Prior, and that Anac- 
 reon 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 spe- 
 cial 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 con- 
 sciousness 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 
 
FAVOBITES OF SONG. 123 
 
 possibility of rhythm or rhyme offers itself actually 
 or potentially to the clairvoyant perception simul- 
 taneously with the thought it is to embody. Thus 
 poetical composition is the most intense, the most 
 exciting, and therefore the most exhausting of men- 
 tal exercises. It is exciting because its mental 
 states are a series of revelations and surprises ; in- 
 tense 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 win- 
 dow. 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 recover- 
 ing after an excess of the baser stimulants." 
 
 As a writer of humorous poetry, it is safe to say 
 
124 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 that Oliver Wendell Holmes is without a peer 
 Tke 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 
 
FAVORITES OF SONG, 125 
 
 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. 
 
126 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 pre- 
 
FAVORITES OF SONG. 127 
 
 sently his eyes filled with tears, his thought slides 
 into the mmor key, and his heart is full of sad and 
 plaintive melodies. Or he goes to his work, say- 
 ing— 
 / *** 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 ad 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 Newton- 
 ville. Doctor Holmes read the following witty 
 and characteristic poem ; 
 
128 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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. 
 
FAVORITES OF SONG, 129 
 
 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. 
 
130 OLIVEB WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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. 
 
FAVORITES OF SONG. 131 
 
 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 fol- 
 lowing letter and sonnet which were read at 
 the banquet : 
 
 Dear Brothers Alumni : 
 
 As I am obliged to deny myself the plea- 
 sure of being with you, I do not feel at lib- 
 erty 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 ex- 
 tended 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 signi- 
 fied to me that I should be welcome at your 
 festival. 
 
132 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 In all the rewards of a literary life none 
 is more precious than the kindly recog- 
 nition 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 compan- 
 ions. 
 
 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. 
 
FAVOBITES OF SONG. 133 
 
 POEM READ BY DOCTOR HOLMES AT THE WHIT- 
 TIER 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, 
 
134 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 We shall say, ' You can't cheat us — we know it is you — 
 There is one voice like that, but there cannot be two, 
 Meastro, 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 hypothetical 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 — 
 Alasl we remember that angels have wings — 
 
FAVOBITES OF SONG. 135 
 
 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! 
 
136 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 THE MAN OF SCIENCE. 
 
 WHAT decided me," says Doctor Holmes, 
 " to give up Law and apply myself to Medi- 
 cine, 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 in- 
 troduced 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 Hos- 
 pital found their reflection in my own cheeks which 
 
THE MAN OF SCIENCE. 137 
 
 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 con- 
 tinue 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 examin- 
 ing." Baron Larrey, the favorite surgeon of Na- 
 poleon, 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. 
 
138 OLIVEB WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 Then there was Baron Dupuytren, "ce grand 
 homme de lautre cote de la rivUre^ — with his high, 
 full-doomed head and oracular utterances; Lis- 
 f ranee, 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 ; Brous- 
 sais, the knotty-featured, savage old man who re- 
 minded 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. Sec- 
 ond, 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 MAN OF SCIENCE. 1S9 
 
 the autopsy room of La Pitie, where Louis was 
 one of the attending physicians — yes, Louis 
 did a great work for practical medicine. Mod- 
 est 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 prac- 
 titioners 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 pre- 
 serve 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 re- 
 lieve his pain, to mitigate the anguish of 
 dyspnsea, to bring back motion and sensibility 
 
140 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 to the dead limb, to still the tortures of neu- 
 ralgia. What is it to him that you can local- 
 ize and name by some uncouth term, the dis- 
 ease 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, jucundey 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 stu- 
 dents, 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." 
 
THE MAN OF SCIENCE. Ul 
 
 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 rea- 
 sonably 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, tempera- 
 ture, and the other hygienic influences. That was 
 a shrewd trick of Alexander's physician on the occa- 
 sion 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 
 has an undisguised, wholesome contempt. 
 
142 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 " Shall we try," he says, "the medicines adver- 
 tised with the certificates of justices of the peace, of 
 clergymen, or even members of Congress ? Cer- 
 tainly, 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 excep- 
 tions, 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 appro- 
 priated and comes into universal use. Take anaes- 
 thetics, 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, 
 
THE MAN OF SCIENCE. 143 
 
 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 profes- 
 sion 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 prac- 
 titioners 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 preten- 
 tions 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 lan- 
 guage. 
 
 Similia similibus curantur. Like cures like, 
 is one of the fundamental principles of Homoe- 
 
144 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 opathy, and "improbable though it may seem 
 to some," says Doctor Holmes with his usual im- 
 partial 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 state- 
 ment. 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 ex- 
 pect 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 stom- 
 ach are quieted by the agency of a drug 
 which that organ refuses to entertain upon any 
 termSi 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 so/e 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 dog- 
 ma of such sweeping extent and pregnant nov- 
 
THE MAN OF SCIENCE. 146 
 
 elty, 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 regulat- 
 ing 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 per- 
 ishing with hunger. If the patient were 
 brought into a warm room, heat would be ap- 
 plied very I'apidly, were not something inter- 
 posed 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 
 
146 OLIVEB WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 Homoeo- 
 pathic 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 fur- 
 ther notions of its efficacy must be attributed 
 merely to the vulgar love of paradox. If this 
 example affords any comfort to the Homoeopa- 
 'hist, it seems as cruel to deprive him of it 
 .vs 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. 
 
TEE MAN OF SCIENCE. 147 
 
 " 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 re- 
 member that this principle is that Like cures 
 Lzkey and not that Same cures Same; that 
 there is resemblance and not identity between 
 the symptoms of the disease and those pro- 
 duced by the drug which cures it, and none 
 have been readier to insist upon this distinc- 
 tion than the Homoeopathists themselves. For 
 if Same cures Samey 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 infec- 
 tious 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 '' In- 
 finitesimal doses," Doctor Holmes handles with 
 the same fairness and acumen ; but the absurd 
 
148 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 idea affirmed by Hahnemann that Psora is the 
 cause of the great majority of chronic diseases, 
 he treats as it deserves, with unquaUfied con- 
 tempt. 
 
 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 man- 
 kind always assailed and insulted from without 
 by such as are ignorant of its infinite per- 
 plexities 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 shape- 
 less 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 
 
THE MAN OF SCIENCE. 149 
 
 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 ques- 
 tion — 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 unpreju- 
 diced 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 antici- 
 pates and eliminates those secondary questions 
 which cannot be for a moment entertained 
 until the one great point of fact is peremp- 
 torily settled. 
 
 There are but very few subjects, indeed, in 
 medical science, that Doctor Holmes has not 
 investigated, and investigated, too, most thor- 
 oughly. . . 
 
 In his article on ** Reflex Vision," published in 
 Volume IV. of the Proceedings of the American 
 Academy, will be found a very interesting ac- 
 
150 OLIVEB WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 count 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 state- 
 ment 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 
 
THE MAN OF SCIENCE. 151 
 
 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 meas- 
 ure occupied with other duties. " I never for- 
 got 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.'" 
 
162 OLIVEB WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 THE HOLMES BREAKFAST. 
 
 AS the seventieth birthday of Doctor 
 Holmes drew near, the publishers of 
 the Atlantic Monthly resolved to give a "Break- 
 fast" in his honor. The twenty-ninth of August, 
 1879, w^S' ^^ course, the true anniversary, but 
 knowing it would be difficult to bring together 
 at that season of the year the friends and lit- 
 erary associates of Doctor Holmes^ Mr. Hough- 
 ton decided to postpone the invitations until the 
 thirteenth of November. Upon that day a bril- 
 liant company assembled at noon in the spa- 
 cious parlors of the Hotel Brunswick, in Bos- 
 ton. 
 
 Doctor Holmes and his daughter, Mrs. Sar- 
 gent, 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 
 
THE HOLMES BREAKFAST. 153 
 
 ceremony, and after a couple of hours spent in 
 sparkling converse, the company adjourned to 
 the dining-room, where a sumptuous " Break- 
 fast " 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 ; 
 
164 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, 
 
 In sermon, story, fable, picture, poem. 
 Oft have I met him from my earliest day. 
 
 In my old ^sop, 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 j 
 
 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. 
 
THE HOLMES BREAKFAST. 155 
 
 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, — 
 
156 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 follow- 
 ing 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 
 
THE HOLMES BREAKFAST. 157 
 
 to secure the services of Mr. Lowell as editor. 
 Mr. Lowell had a fancy that I could be use- 
 ful as a contributor, and woke me from a kind 
 of literary lethargy in which I was half slum- 
 bering, to call me to active service. Remem- 
 bering 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 T/ie Autocrat of the Break- 
 fast-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 encour- 
 aged 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 
 
168 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. - 
 
 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 I 
 
 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 1 
 
THE HOLMES BREAKFAST. 159 
 
 Mr. W. D. Howells then took the chair and 
 was introduced to the company as the repre- 
 sentative of the " mythical editor." 
 
 In his remarks, Mr. Howells paid the fol- 
 lowing 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 t 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 grad- 
 ually 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 
 
160 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 dif- 
 ferent 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 
 
THE HOLMES BREAKFAST. 161 
 
 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, 
 
162 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 let- 
 ter 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 
 
TBE HOLMES BREAKFAST. 163 
 
 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 ad- 
 mired it even before I saw it in Tke 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 reflec- 
 tion I said I would reprieve him for a mo- 
 ment 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 
 
164 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 nearly a basketful, though they were rather 
 reserved as to the size of the basket. How- 
 ever, 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 
 
THE HOLMES BREAKFAST. 165 
 
 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 re- 
 marks ' 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 " inex- 
 haustible kindness of Doctor Holmes to his 
 younger brothers in literature," and Mr. Wil- 
 liam Winter paid his tribute to the honored 
 
166 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 i.," to 
 grace her favorite city. She concludes her mix- 
 ture 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 phenom- 
 enon, 
 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 WWs own Breakfast-Table.^^ 
 
 C. P. Cranch then read a fine sonnet, and Col- 
 onel T. W. Higginson followed with felicitous 
 remarks, a portion of which referring to the 
 father of Doctor Holmes we have quoted else- 
 where in the book. 
 
THE HOLMES BREAKFAST. 167 
 
 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 lec- 
 ture 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 pictur- 
 esque 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, 
 
168 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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, smil- 
 ing 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 Num- 
 ber 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 
 
THE HOLMES BREAKFAST. 169 
 
 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 sor- 
 cerer 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 
 he a teacher of knowledge, and the divine gift 
 of eloquence shall be at his command, to up- 
 lift 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 daugh- 
 ters 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 
 
170 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 chil- 
 dren, 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 fa- 
 mous 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 ! 
 
OBATIONS AND ESSAYS. 171 
 
 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 delight- 
 ful 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 w» 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," 
 
172 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 " 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 repre- 
 sentative we can show of the heroes of Cr6cy 
 and Agincourt. And if one of our fine gentle- 
 men 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 T/ze Inevitable Tfial, an oration deliv- 
 ered on the 4th of July, 1863, before the 
 City Authorities of Boston, Doctor Holmes 
 who had been falsely classed among the ene- 
 mies of the Anti-slavery movement, spoke as 
 follows : — 
 
 " Long before the accents of our famous 
 statesmen resounded in the halls of the Capi- 
 tol, long before the Liberator opened its bat- 
 teries, the controversy now working itself out 
 by trial of battle was foreseen and predicted. 
 Washington warned his countrymen of the dan- 
 
ORATIONS AND ESSAYS. 173 
 
 ger of sectional divisions, well knowing the line 
 of clearage that ran through the seemingly 
 solid fabric. Jefferson foreshadowed the judg- 
 ment 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 in- 
 sight which analyzed our institutions and con- 
 ditions 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 sec- 
 tions, 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 fear- 
 fully justifying itself in the sight of his de- 
 scendants, 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 cur- 
 
 \ 
 
/ 
 
 174 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 tain 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 states- 
 men called them long ago, came at length to 
 love the institution which their fathers had 
 condemned while they tolerated. It is the fear- 
 ful 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 Declar- 
 ation of Independence trembled to anticipate. 
 And this ought to make us willing to do and 
 to suffer cheerfully. There were Holy Wars of 
 
OBATIOlSrS AND ESSAYS. 175 
 
 old, in which it was glory enough to die; wars 
 in which the one aim was to rescue the sep- 
 ulchre of Christ from the hands of infidels. 
 The sepulchre of Christ is not in Palestine! 
 He rose from that burial-place more than eight- 
 een hundred years ago. He is crucified wher- 
 ever 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 hospi- 
 tal wards ! He knew of what he spake when ap- 
 pealing 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 
 
x 
 
 176 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 bravely through the fire and smoke of the bat- 
 tle-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 grave- 
 yard 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 chil- 
 dren's children yet unborn, in the name of 
 outraged honor, in the interest of violated sov- 
 ereignty, 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." 
 
ORATIONS AND ESSAYS. 177 
 
 It will be remembered that this heart-stirring 
 oration, T/ie Inevitable Trialy 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 Volu7ne 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 per- 
 petual falling with a perpetual self-recovery. 
 It is a most complex, violent, and perilous 
 operation, which we divest of its extreme dan- 
 ger 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 dis- 
 cover how dangerous it is when we slip or 
 trip and come down, perhaps breaking or dis- 
 locating our limbs, or overlook the last step 
 of a flight of stairs, and discover with what 
 
178 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 headlong violence we have been hurling our- 
 selves 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. TAe Sea- 
 sons, and T/ie Human Body and its Management, 
 were originally published in the Atlantic Al- 
 manac. 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, conspicu- 
 ous among the schoolgirls of unlettered ori- 
 gin, by that look which rarely fails to betray 
 hereditary and congenital culture, was a young 
 person very nearly of my own age. She came 
 
OBATIONS AND ESSAYS. 179 
 
 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, aqua- 
 marine 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 
 
180 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 kindled and reddened and dilated in every feat- 
 ure 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 Mrlton 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 last- 
 ing friendship, is now the well-known Phinehas 
 Barnes. Another little fellow, with black hair 
 
OBATIONS AND ESSAYS. 181 
 
 and very black eyes, studying with head be- 
 tween 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 ''tail, lean, with strong, bold feat- 
 ures, a keen, scholarly, accipitrine nose, thin, 
 expressive lips, and great solemnity and impres- 
 siveness 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, 
 
182 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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, pos- 
 sessed by the same feeling the man had who 
 followed Van Am burgh about, with the excep- 
 tion, let us not say hope, of seeing the lion 
 bite his head off sooner or later." 
 
 In MecJimiism 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 sepa- 
 rates the sphere of human responsibility from 
 that of the Being who has arranged and con- 
 trols the order of things. 
 
 " The question of the freedom of the will has 
 been an open one, fron the days of Milton's 
 
ORATIONS AND ESSAYS. 183 
 
 demons in conclave to the noteworthy essay 
 of Mr. Hazard, our Rhode Island neighbor. 
 It still hangs suspended between the seem- 
 ingly exhaustive strongest motive argument 
 and certain residual convictions. The sense 
 that we are, to a limited extent, self-determin- 
 ing ; 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 undis- 
 charged balance in most minds. We can invoke 
 the strong arm of the De7is in machina^ as 
 Mr. Hazard, and Kant and others, before him 
 have done. Our will may be a primary initi- 
 ating cause or force, as un explainable, as un- 
 reducible, as indecomposable, as impossible if 
 you choose, but as real to our belief as the 
 cBternitas a parte ante. The divine foreknowl- 
 edge 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, 
 
184 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 attends 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 
 
ORATIONS AND ESSAYS. 185 
 
 slavery, so philosophy must rid us of chattel 
 sin and all its logical consequences. 
 
 " The notion that what we call sin is any- 
 thing 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 re- 
 ciprocal, 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 great- 
 est 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." 
 
186 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 In reviewing the life and the writings of 
 Jonathan Edwards, Doctor Hohiies with his 
 usual fairness and kindly spirit toward all man- 
 kind, 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 mys- 
 terious 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 with- 
 out 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 doc- 
 trine or practice ; indeed it may be doubted 
 whether a majority of all the spiritual natures in 
 the world would be found in Christian coun- 
 tries. 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. ....... 
 
ORATIONS AND ESSAYS. 187 
 
 "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 la- 
 borious, 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 physi- 
 cians, that where there were three of them to- 
 gether 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 physi- 
 cian 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 
 
188 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 re- 
 mains 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 pecu- 
 Harly professional virtue of charity, led upward by 
 what he sees the source of all the daily mar- 
 vels 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 'athe- 
 ists.' " 
 
 In coming back again as a regular contribu- 
 tor to the magazine which Doctor Holmes was 
 so prominently identified with a quarter of a 
 century ago, he indulges in a few entertaining 
 
ORATIONS AND ESSAYS. 189 
 
 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 gener- 
 ation 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 busi- 
 ness 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 cinquantainey 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 move- 
 ments, 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 
 
190 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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-reli- 
 ance while he has been losing force and con- 
 fidence. 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 natur- 
 ally 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. Glad- 
 
OBATIONS AND ESSAYS. 191 
 
 stone, 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 Tenny- 
 son, 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 class- 
 mate, so certain to be in every good move- 
 ment 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 Bar- 
 num, 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. 
 
192 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 
 
0BATI0N8 AND ESSAYS, 193 
 
 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 for- 
 gotten 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 
 
/ 
 
 194 OLIVEB WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 toler- 
 ance with which the rhymester or the essay- 
 ist sees himself preferred to the great masters 
 in prose and verse, and reads his name glow- 
 ing 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 
 
ORATIONS AND ESSAYS. 195 
 
 grand monarque. He saw himself but a 
 moment ago a colossal figure in a drapery of 
 rhetorical purple, ample enough for an Em- 
 peror, 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 has been able to for- 
 mulate 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 
 
196 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 has one ; if he has none, he should, if ad- 
 mitted, 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 any- 
 thing 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 ex- 
 orbitant claims of this class of virtuosos. The 
 following propositions were adopted without dis- 
 cussion : 
 
 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 gratutious concession on his part. 
 
ORATIONS AND ESSAYS. 197 
 
 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 auto- 
 graph 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 defi- 
 ciencies. [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 per- 
 sons. 
 
 Albums. An album of decent external as- 
 pect may, without impropriety, be offered 
 to an author, with the request that he will 
 
198 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 senti- 
 ment, if so disposed ; but this must be con- 
 sidered 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 in- 
 tended. 
 
 Letters of admiration. These may be ac- 
 cepted as genuine, unless they contain speci- 
 mens 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. Gen- 
 uine letters of admiration, being usually con- 
 sidered by the recipient as proofs of good 
 
ORATIONS AND ESSAYS. 199 
 
 taste and sound judgment on the part of his 
 unknown correspondent, may be safely left to 
 his decision as to whether they shall be an- 
 swered or not. 
 
 The author of B/ste Venner thus excuses 
 himself for opening the budget of the griev- 
 ances 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 gen- 
 tlemen in Boston. The Japanese department 
 at the Foreign Exhibition was closed, and in 
 the evening a banquet was given at the Par- 
 ker House, about sixty gentlemen assembling 
 in response to the invitation of Mr. S. R. 
 Takahashi, chief of the imperial Japanese com- 
 
200 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 mission to the Boston Foreign Exhibition. 
 The entrance to the banquet rooms was deco- 
 rated 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. 
 
ORATIONS AND ESSAYS. 201 
 
 " 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 litera- 
 ture, one of those * previous engagements,' 
 which crop out so opportunely, would have 
 stood between me and my present trying posi- 
 tion. I had meant, if called upon, to say a 
 few words about a Japanese youth who studied 
 law in Boston, a very cultivated and singu- 
 larly 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 nat- 
 urally think first of our historical efforts. We 
 see that books hold but a small part of Amer- 
 
202 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 ican 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 adora- 
 tion and gratitude. Within half a century the 
 railroad has ruled our broad page all over, and 
 rewritten the story, with States for new chap- 
 ters 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 his- 
 tory, 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 Franldin to the times 
 still fresh in our memory, from the Declara- 
 tion of Independence to the proclamation which 
 enfranchised the colored race, our political lit- 
 erature, 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. 
 
OBATIONS AND ESSAYS. 208 
 
 "But besides 'Congressional Documents' and 
 the like, the terror of librarians and the de- 
 light 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 al- 
 ways 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 dif- 
 ference 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 un- 
 real ones. England threw open the side doors 
 of its library to Irving. The continent flung 
 
204 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 wide its folding doors to Cooper. Laplace 
 was once asked who was the greatest mathe- 
 matician 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 mathe- 
 matician of Europe.' So, I suppose we might 
 say T/ie Pilot is or was the most popular 
 book ever written in America, but Uncle Toms 
 Cabin is the most popular story ever pub- 
 lished 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 be- 
 fore the beginning of this century, always 
 excepting, as in duty bound, the verses of 
 my manifold grandmother. The conditions of 
 
OBATIONS AND ESSAT8. 205 
 
 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 Words- 
 worth — 
 
 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 
 
206 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 civiliza- 
 tion. It costs as great an effort to human- 
 ize 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 wel- 
 comed Mr. Arnold as its worthy English rep- 
 resentative ; we could not secure our creditors 
 more handsomely than we have done by leav- 
 ing Mr, Lowell in pledge for our visitor's safe 
 return. 
 
OBATIONS AND ESSAYS. 207 
 
 " 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 hidex to Periodical Literature^ Mr. Ali- 
 bone'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 examin- 
 ation by all scholars, whatever their calling. 
 
 *'We have learned so much from our Japa- 
 nese 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 pro- 
 ducts, as well as those good wishes which 
 follow them wherever they show their beauti- 
 ful works of art and their pleasant and always 
 welcome faces." 
 
208 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 grad- 
 uating year at Harvard College (1861), he 
 joined the Fourth Battalion of Infantry, 
 commanded by Major Thomas G. Steven- 
 son. 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, 
 
THE HOME CIRCLE. 209 
 
 but a most touching revelation of fatherly love 
 and solicitude. The young captain was wounded 
 yet again at Sharpsburgh, and was after- 
 wards 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 Amer- 
 ican Law, to which he devoted three years of 
 careful labor, has received the highest encomi- 
 ums, 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 Wil- 
 liam G. Russell thus introduced the father of 
 the newly-appointed judge : 
 
 " We come now to a many-sided subject, and 
 
210 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 pow- 
 ders and his pills. I might hail him as pro- 
 fessor, 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 " (refer- 
 ring to the paper) ''all that you have to fear 
 
THE HOME CIRCLE. 211 
 
 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 dan- 
 ger of a tongue let loose you have had oppor- 
 tunity 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. 
 
212 OLIVER WEJSBELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 I 
 
 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-ccmerl 
 
 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 HOME CIRCLE. 213 
 
 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 bouna 
 
 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. 
 
 I Doctor Holmes* daughter, who bears 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 mix- 
 ture had become turbid should request him to 
 give his opinion concerning it. The fallacies 
 continually rising in such a discussion from 
 
214 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 the want of a proper understanding of terms, 
 always made him feel as if quicksilver had 
 been substituted for the odinary 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, 
 has chosen the same profession as his brother. 
 
 It is at Mrs. Sargent's home, at Beverly 
 Farms, that Doctor Holmes now passes 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 are neighbors of Doctor Holmes at Bev- 
 erly Farms, and Lucy Larcom's home is 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 present home in Boston is at No. 
 296 Beacon street. 
 
 ' We die out of houses," says the poet. 
 
THE HOME CIRCLE. 215 
 
 "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 gar- 
 ment of flesh and blood. Then his artificial 
 integuments, with their true skin of solid stuffs, 
 their cuticle of lighter tissues, and their vari- 
 ously-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 them- 
 selves 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 present home on Beacon street 
 well illustrates the above extract. I shall not"^^ 
 
216 OLIVER WE J^ DELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 " Em- 
 erson Calendar" was hanging over the mantel, 
 and after calling my attention to the excellent 
 picture upon it of the old home at Concord, 
 Doctor Holmes began to talk of his brother 
 poet in terms of warmest affection. 
 
 As he afterwards remarked at the Nineteenth 
 Century Club, the difference between Emer- 
 son's poetry and that of others with whom he 
 might naturally be compared, was that of alge- 
 bra and arithmetic. The fascination of his 
 poems was in their spiritual depth and sin- 
 cerity and their all pervading symbolism. Em- 
 erson'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 
 
DOCTOR holmes' LIBRARY, BEACON STREET. 
 
THE HOME CIRCLE. 217 
 
 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 Doc- 
 tor 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 an- 
 other 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." 
 
218 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 Belnap'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, law- 
 yer, 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 pleas- 
 ant little town in Essex County, Massachusetts, 
 the Reverend Manasseh Cutler." 
 
 Here is the Aetius found one never-to-be-for- 
 gotten rainy day, in that dingy bookshop in 
 Lyons, and here the vellum-bound TiilpiuSy "my 
 only reading," says Doctor Holmes, " when im- 
 prisoned in quarantine at Marseilles, so that the 
 two hundred and twenty-eight cases he has 
 
THE HOME CIRCLE. 219 
 
 recorded are, many of them, to this day still 
 fresh in my memory." Here, too, is the Sckenck- 
 iuSy — "the folio filled with casus rariores, which 
 had strayed in among the rubbish of the book- 
 stall on the boulevard — and here the noble old 
 Vesalins, with its grand frontispiece not unworthy 
 of Titian, and the fine old Ambroise Pari^, 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 Mas- 
 cagni, 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." 
 
220 OLIVER WENDELL HOLME 8. 
 
 At certain seasons, he observes, there will 
 now and then be captured a youthful and inex- 
 perienced 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 back- 
 ground enliven the winter landscape, but now 
 the blazing log on the hearthstone rolls over 
 and the whole study is aglow with light ! Truly 
 " winter ts 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 
 
THE HOME CIRCLE. 221 
 
 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." 
 f "All who pay their respects to the distin- 
 guished 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 snobbish- 
 ness at 296 Beacon street, he will be disap- 
 pointed. It is one of the most elegant and 
 charming residences on that broad and fashion- 
 able 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 
 
222 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 residence — for the visitor as well as the host — 
 is the magnificent and spacious library, which 
 may be more aptly termed the Autocrat's work- 
 shop. It is up one flight, and seemingly occu- 
 pies the entire rear half of the whole build- 
 ing on this floor. It is a very inviting room 
 in every respect, and from the spacious win- 
 dows overlooking the broad expanse of the 
 Charles River, there can be had an extensive 
 view of the surrounding suburbs in the north- 
 erly, 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, Maiden, 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 Oilman, 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 
 
THE HOME CIRCLE. 223 
 
 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 recog- 
 nized 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 inter- 
 viewer 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 pol- 
 iticians, 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 cham- 
 ber, the lettres de cachet, and the visits of 
 the Inquisition. The interviewer, if excluded, 
 becomes an enemy, and has the columns of a 
 
224 OLIVER Wr.NBELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 ace uracy, 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 fol- 
 lowing restrictions : * A licensed corps of in- 
 terviewers, 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 inscrip- 
 tions 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 follow- 
 ing : FcBnum halct ifi cornu ; Hunc tu Romane 
 caveto. No person to be admitted to the 
 corps of interviewers without a strict pre- 
 liminary examination. The candidate to be 
 proved free from color blindness and ambly- 
 opia, ocular and mental strabismus, double 
 refraction of memory, kleptomania, mendacity 
 
THE HOME CIRCLE. 225 
 
 of more than average dimensions, and ten- 
 dency 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 provi- 
 sions are carried out no record of an alleged 
 interview to be considered as anything more 
 than the untrustworthy gossip of an irrespon- 
 sible 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 re- 
 mark : *' Everybody that writes a book must 
 needs send me a copy. It's very good 
 of them, of course, but they're not all sue- 
 
226 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 cessful attempts at bookmaking, and most of 
 them are relegated to my hospital for sick 
 books up-stairs." 
 
 But once a young writer sent from Cali- 
 fornia 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." 
 
LOVE OF NATURE, 227 
 
 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 chil- 
 dren are thinking of May-day. 
 
 "The birds come pouring in with May. 
 Wrens, brown thrushes, the various kinds of swal- 
 lows, orioles, cat-birds, golden robins, bobo'links, 
 whippoor wills, cuckoos, yellow-birds, humming- 
 
228 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 birds, are busy in establishing their new house- 
 holds. The bumble-bee comes in with his 'mel- 
 low, 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 lit- 
 tle, and have read Darwin, and Huxley, perhaps 
 you will believe that it, and all the fruits it 
 
LOVE OF NATURE. 229 
 
 tastes of, may have come from a common pro- 
 genitor." 
 
 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 rev- 
 eries 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 Hay- 
 den 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 
 
230 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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, unchang- 
 ing 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 
 
LOVE OF NATURE, 231 
 
 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 de- 
 stroying 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 des- 
 tined to leave such mingled and lasting impres- 
 sions. 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 wan- 
 dered in the autumnal woods that crown the 
 * Indian Ridge,' much wondering at that vast 
 
232 OLIVEB WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 enbankment, which we young philosophers be- 
 lieved with the vulgar to be of aboriginal work- 
 manship, 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 Haver- 
 hill 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 fan- 
 tastic natural effect, I hate to inquire too nicely." 
 / Like all poets, Doctor Holmes has 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 gam- 
 brel-roofed house in Cambridge : 
 
 "There were old lilac bushes, at the right of 
 
LOVE OF NATURE. 233 
 
 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 speci- 
 men, at best, and was set there, no doubt, only to 
 preach its annual sermon, a sort of • Dudleian Lec- 
 ture ' 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 cli- 
 mate. 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 
 
2334 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 remem- 
 ber 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) ; lark- 
 spurs, 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 veg- 
 etable, 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 Haw- 
 thorne described them, with skins so white 
 
LOVE OF NATURE. 235 
 
 and delicate, when they are yet new-born, that 
 one thinks of little sucking pigs turned vege- 
 tables, Hke Daphne into a laurel, and then 
 of tender human infancy, which Charles Lamb's 
 favorite so calls to mind ;— these, with mel- 
 ons, 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 cus- 
 tomary 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 
 
236 OLIVEB WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 mem- 
 ory; 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 Gar- 
 den, 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 rad- 
 ishes ; I think I should have been disap- 
 pointed if they had not. The same buff-colored 
 bugs devoured my roses that I remembered of 
 
LOVE OF JSATUBE, 237 
 
 old. The aphis 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 sum- 
 mers 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 Housa- 
 tonic, 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 con- 
 tributed a couple of poems to a fancy fair 
 which was being held in the town during his 
 
238 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 poeais 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 her- 
 aldry which illuminates the gorgeous chancel 
 window of the St. Stephen's church in Pitts- 
 field. The motto of the first envelope ran thus : 
 
 Paith 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. 
 
LOVE OF NATURE. 239 
 
 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 explana- 
 tion of the poet's riddle: 
 
 Fair lady, lift thine eyes and tell 
 
 If this is not a truthful letter ; 
 This is the ( i ) thou lovest well. 
 
 And nought (o) can make thee love it better (lo). 
 
 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. 
 
240 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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, commo- 
 dious 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 Bos- 
 ton 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 His- 
 tory and of Fine Arts, and the Medical Li- 
 brary Association. The building has a front- 
 age of one hundred and twenty-two feet 
 toward the north on Boylston street, and of 
 ninety feet toward the west on Exeter street. 
 
THE BABY ABB MEDICAL SCHOOL. 241 
 
 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 Tech- 
 nology, 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 dra- 
 pery, and directly over the head of the origi- 
 nal, hung a portrait of Professor Oliver Wen- 
 dell 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 
 
242 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 in- 
 structors, 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 
 
THE BABY ABB MEDICAL SCHOOL. 243 
 
 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 pro- 
 fession 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 success- 
 
244 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 fully carried out an improvement in medical 
 education which required large expenditures. 
 This improvement is the partial substitution, 
 by every student, of personal practice in lab- 
 oratories 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 profes- 
 sion, 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 
 
THE HABVABD MEDICAL SCHOOL. 246 
 
 building ; it has increased its annual expendi- 
 ture for salaries of teachers from twenty thou- 
 sand 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 obliga- 
 tions. 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 illus- 
 trate before their students the pure scientific 
 spirit, and to hold all their attainments and 
 
246 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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, gradu- 
 ates 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 zoologist, entomologist, vet- 
 erinarian and sanitarian have just begun to 
 contribute effectively to the progress of medi- 
 cine. 
 
 "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 
 
THE HABVABI) MEDICAL SCHOOL. 247 
 
 deliverance from measles, scarlatina, and ty- 
 phoid 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 al- 
 ways 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 obser- 
 vations, research and teaching; secondly, by 
 the gradual aggregation in safe hands of per- 
 manent 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 
 
248 OLIVEE WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 reason- 
 able satisfaction in the present, and with joy- 
 ful 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 congratu- 
 lations 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 gener- 
 ation as completed in thirty years, but two 
 lives cover a whole century by an easy act 
 of memory. I, who am now addressing you. 
 
THE EABVABD MEDICAL SCHOOL. 249 
 
 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 com- 
 munity 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 
 
250 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 own recollection. In April, 1833, I had been 
 more than two years a medical student attend- 
 ing the winter lectures of this school, and 
 have therefore a vivid recollection of the pro- 
 fessors of that day. I will only briefly charac- 
 terize them by their various merits, not so 
 much troubling myself about what may have 
 been their short-comings. The shadowy pro- 
 cession moves almost visibly by me as I 
 speak : John Collins Warren, a cool and skil- 
 ful 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 pro- 
 fessional 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, 
 
THE HABVABD MEDICAL SCHOOL. 251 
 
 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 Amer- 
 ican 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 anec- 
 dote, 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 judi- 
 ciously 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 amphi- 
 theatres 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, 
 
252 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, 
 
 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 con- 
 siderate 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 lec- 
 tures. The student must himself perform the 
 analyses which he used to hear about. He 
 must not be poisoned at his work, and there- 
 fore he will require a spacious and well-venti- 
 lated room to work in. You read but the 
 
THE HABVABJJ MEDICAL SCHOOL. 253 
 
 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 under- 
 stood, never did it give such an account of 
 itself, as it now does in the legible hand- 
 writing of the cardiograph, the sphygmograph, 
 the myograph, and other self-registering contriv- 
 ances, with all of which the student of to-day 
 is expected to be practically familiar. 
 
 Among 
 
 the various apartments destined to special 
 
254 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 uses one will be sure to rivet your attention ; 
 namely, the Anthorpotomic 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 pro- 
 fessional 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 pen- 
 alties for want of that necessary knowledge. 
 Nothing is easier than to excite the odium 
 of the ignorant against this branch of in- 
 struction 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 HABVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL. 255 
 
 * 
 
 "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 intelli- 
 gence, 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 
 
256 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 he had began a course of anatomical study. 
 But we know that the great painters, Michael 
 Angelo, Leonardo and Raphael must have wit- 
 nessed 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. 
 
THE HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL. 257 
 
 "Nor are older persons always so thoughtful 
 and serious in the presence of mortality as it 
 might be supposed they would show them- 
 selves. Some of us have encountered Congres- 
 sional committees attending the remains of 
 distinguised 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 sug- 
 gest 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 
 
268 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, 
 
 of individual students, once in the presence of 
 the whole class on the human and manly sym- 
 pathy 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 consci- 
 entious 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 
 
THE HARVABD MEDICAL SCHOOL. 269 
 
 excite the feelings of the ignorant against the 
 school of the university, hundreds of sufferers 
 throughout Christendom — throughout civiliza- 
 tion — 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 wit- 
 nessed many of the experiments by which the 
 great surgeon who lately filled a chair in Har- 
 vard University, has made the world his debtor. 
 Those poor remains of mortality of which we 
 have heard so much, have been of more ser- 
 vice to the human race than the souls once 
 within them ever dreamed of conferring. Doc- 
 tor Bigelow's repeated and searching investiga- 
 tions 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 disap- 
 peared from the operating amphitheatre. 
 
 " Still more remarkable are the results obtained 
 by Doctor Bigelow in the saving of life and the 
 
260 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 lessening of suffering in the new method of op- 
 eration 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 in- 
 novation 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 contri- 
 butors, 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 
 
THE HABVABD MEDICAL SCHOOL. 261 
 
 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 
 
262 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 integ- 
 ument turned into leather. He would not 
 object, in all probability, especially if he were 
 promised that a wallet for his pocket or a slip- 
 per 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 citi- 
 zen 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 curiosit}^ as if he had 
 been a professor of anatomy. May it ever re- 
 main sacred from harm in the noble hall of 
 which it is about taking possession. If vie- 
 
THE HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL. 263 
 
 lence, 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, in- 
 tellectual, 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 med- 
 ical 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 hon- 
 ored, 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 
 
264 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 sculp- 
 ture, are close enough for agreeable companion- 
 ship. 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 trav- 
 eller as he approaches that in the home of 
 Science, Arts, and Letters, the God of our 
 
THE HABVABD MEDICAL SCHOOL. 265 
 
 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 for- 
 tunate 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 
 
266 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 sub- 
 scribers 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 corre- 
 sponds to the scene of Doctor Bigelow's long 
 
THE HARVABI) MEDICAL SCHOOL. 267 
 
 labors in the old building. It has been made 
 by the eminent sculptor, Launt Thompson of 
 New York, and is a most faithful representa- 
 tion 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 audi- 
 ence, 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 demon- 
 stration of the use of ether as a safe anaesthetic, 
 which took place at the Massachusetts General 
 
268 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 stu- 
 dents, who have graduated at the Harvard 
 Medical School, and perhaps seven thousand five 
 hundred more who have taken their degrees else- 
 where ; and by these thousands of physicians 
 now scattered throughout the land, those of 
 them who survive, Doctor Bigelow is remem- 
 bered as most eminently a practical teacher. 
 Active in his profession, clear in his instruction, 
 and enthusiastic in his investigations, he always 
 
THE HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL. 269 
 
 had the happy faculty of imparting to his 
 students a kindred spirit and zeal. Haud 
 inexpert us loquor!^ 
 
 The remainder of the exercises took place 
 in the new building. The dedicatory prayer 
 was offered by Rev. Doctor Peabody, who con- 
 secrated 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 med- 
 ical 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 dis- 
 cover, 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 
 
270 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 have not been wanting, their efforts to be use- 
 ful have been continually hindered because of 
 imperfect facilities and scanty resources. All 
 is changed. In this more wonderful than Alad- 
 din's palace, risen from the sea,* 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 struc- 
 ture, we shall ever feel that the place is dig- 
 nified 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 
 
 *The site occupied by the medical college was once covered by the tides. 
 
THE HAEVABD MEDICAL SCHOOL. 271 
 
 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 our- 
 selves 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 ^ a non-professional can judge. You 
 have assigned to me the honorable task of 
 
272 OLIVEB WENDELL ROLMMS. 
 
 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 patholog- 
 ical 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 sub- 
 
THE HABVABB MEDICAL SCHOOL. 278 
 
 stance 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 com- 
 mon 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 prog- 
 ress rest upon the advancement of sound 
 learning, and we feel assured that the increased 
 facilities furnished by this ample building for 
 
274 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 acquiring and disseminating knowledge of our 
 fearful and wonderful frame, will be improved 
 by your brethren. Some of t?ie 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 sup- 
 plied ? 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 con- 
 trasting 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 at- 
 tributes the world over. I have had occasion 
 to see a good deal of English, French, Ger- 
 man and Italian physicians under very trying 
 circumstances, and have been touched by their 
 affectionate devotion to their patients. The 
 
THE HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL. 275 
 
 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 dark- 
 ness, nor the sickness that destroyeth in the 
 noonday, deters him/ 
 
 Alike to him is time, or tide, 
 December's snow or July's pride j 
 Alike to him is tide, or time. 
 Moonless midnight, or matin prime. 
 
 "The faithful pursuit of any profession in- 
 volves 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 
 
276 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 Medi- 
 cal School. 
 
 In referring to Doctor Holmes' brave, out- 
 spoken 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 utter- 
 ance 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 sympa- 
 thize 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 
 
THE BABVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL. 277 
 
 of the aspects of the institution and of the 
 interest and confidence of our living commu- 
 nity in it during the year marking such a 
 conspicuous event for it as the inauguration of 
 the new edifice prepared for it by the munifi- 
 cence 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 constit- 
 uency, 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 
 
278 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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, preju- 
 dice 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 mis- 
 chievously asserted themselves than in opposi- 
 tion to hospitals and medical schools. When 
 that noble institution, the Massachusetts Gen- 
 eral Hospital, was devised, about three quar- 
 ters 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 home- 
 less 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, 
 
THE HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL. 279 
 
 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 treas- 
 ury, 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 ignor- 
 ance and passion has been made this year for 
 purposes which we need not search the dic- 
 tionary to characterize with fitting epithets. 
 How could Doctor Holmes on this great occa- 
 sion pass it by ? How could he have treated 
 the offence and the offender with a more fit- 
 ting 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 oc- 
 casion to which he gave such a grand inter- 
 
280 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 pretation. The century of medical history which 
 he sketched with such a nafve 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 
 
THE HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL. 281 
 
 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 Dex- 
 ter, who took the department of chemistry and 
 materia medica ; and Doctor Benjamin Water- 
 house, 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 pro- 
 cure 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 assist- 
 ant professor of anatomy and surgery. He 
 proved a most enthusiastic laborer in behalf of 
 the school and to it he gave his large anatom- 
 ical collection, which was considered the most 
 complete in the country. In his will he be- 
 queathed his body to the interest of science, 
 and provided that his skeleton be prepared and 
 mounted, to serve the uses of the demonstra- 
 
282 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 tors on anatomy. It was he, also, who took 
 the first steps that led to the establishment of 
 the Medical School in Boston. At 49 Marl- 
 borough street, he opened a room for the demon- 
 stration of practical anatomy, and here a course 
 of lectures was started in the autumn of 18 10 
 by Doctors Warren, Jackson, and Waterhouse. 
 
 In 1 8 16, 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 con- 
 sisted of Doctors Jackson, Warren, Gorham, 
 Jacob Bigelow and Walter Channing. 
 
 In 1 82 1 the Massachusetts General Hospital 
 on Allan street, was established ; the two insti- 
 tutions 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 posi- 
 tion, 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 in- 
 terests of the school for forty-one years. 
 
 In 1847, through the liberality of Doctor 
 George C. Shattuck, Sr., a professorship of patho- 
 
THE HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL, 283 
 
 logical 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 ap- 
 pointed to the chair of surgery left vacant by 
 the resignation of Doctor George Hay ward, and 
 in 1854, Doctor Walter Channing was succeeded 
 by Doctor David Humphreys Storer. In 1855 
 Doctor Jacob Bigelow resigned, and was suc- 
 ceeded 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 ^jO^ to the 
 chemical department by Doctor John Bacon, 
 and the collection of microscopes given by 
 Doctor Ellis. Since then the number of med- 
 ical students has constantly increased and the 
 accommodations becoming inadequate, steps were 
 taken for the erection of the new building. 
 
284 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 Ana- 
 tomy in Harvard University, was resigned by 
 Doctor Holmes in the autumn of 1882, that he 
 might give his time more exclusively to literary pur- 
 suits. He was immediately appointed Professor 
 
TOKENS OF ESTEEM. 285 
 
 Emeritus by the college, and Doctor Thomas 
 Dwight, a teacher in the Medical ^School, suc- 
 ceeded 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 ex- 
 quisite "Loving Cup." On one side of this 
 beautiful souvenir was the happy quotation 
 from his own writings : " Love bl^ss thee, joy 
 crown three, 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 ap/iasia 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 
 
286 OLIVFdi WENDELL LIOLMES. 
 
 studies in Paris, and added many delightful 
 reminiscences of the famous* French savans 
 whose lectures he attended at that time. A 
 full report of this address may be found in 
 the Boston Medical and Si^rgical 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 com- 
 plimentary dinner was given Doctor Holmes 
 at Delmonico's, by the medical profession of 
 V 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 hun- 
 dred 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 : 
 
TOKENS OF ESTEEM. 287 
 
 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 i, 1883. 
 The message read as follows : 
 
 The dinner bell, the dinner bell g 
 
 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. 
 
 —a w. H. 
 The back of the despatch was decorated with 
 
288 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 Wil- 
 liam Curtis, Hon. William M. Evarts, Bishop 
 Clark, Whitelaw Reid, Doctors Post, Emmett, 
 Say re, 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. 
 
 — T/ie Tempest 
 
 After a few brief words of introduction, Doc- 
 tor 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, 
 
TOKENS OF ESTEEM. 289 
 
 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, 
 
 Poe^a nascitur, you know, non fity 
 
 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 
 
290 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 I 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 
 
TOKENS OF ESTEEM. 291 
 
 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; 
 
292 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 Dr}'den 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 .-* 
 
TOKENS OF ESTEEM. 293 
 
 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; 
 W^hen 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 ull! 
 
 Good was the dinner, better was the talk ; 
 
 Some whispered, devious was the homeward walk ; 
 
294 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 — 
 
TOKENS OF ESTEEM. 295 
 
 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! 
 
296 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 ro?e, 
 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, 
 
TOKENS OF ESTEEM. 297 
 
 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 
 
298 OLIVEB WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 I 
 
 The next toast was to "The Clergy." 
 
 He was a scholar, and a ripe and good one, exceeding 
 
 wise, fair-spoken and persuading. 
 
 — JiTm^- 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 fellow- 
 ship to him." When after tracing the lineage of 
 
TOKENS OF ESTEEM. 2't)9 
 
 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 man- 
 ner. The next toast was " The Press " — 
 
300 OLIVER WEjSDELL HOLMSB. 
 
 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 con- 
 nected Doctor Holmes with the profession of 
 journalism. It was a late hour when the com- 
 pany separated, and the last toast given, found 
 a hearty, though silent response from all pres- 
 ent — 
 
 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 giv- 
 ing the following cordial tribute from John 
 Boyle O'Reilly: 
 
 " Oliver Wendell Holmes: — the wise, the 
 witty, the many idead, philosopher, poet, physi- 
 cian, novelist, essayist, professor, but, best of all, 
 the kind, the warm heart. A man of unex- 
 pected tastes, ranging in all directions from 
 song to science, and from theology to boat- 
 
TOKENS OF ESTEEM. 301 
 
 racing. He 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." 
 
 With Whittier we repeat, '' Long may he live, 
 dear Doctor Holmes, to make broader the face 
 of our care-ridden generation, and to realize for 
 himself the truth of the wise man's declara- 
 tion, that a merry heart is a continual feast." 
 
 When violets fade the roses blow ; 
 
 When laughter dies the passions wake ; 
 His royal song, that slept below, 
 
 Like Arthur's sword beneath the lake. 
 Long since has flashed its fiery glow 
 O'er all we know. 
 
 The silken tress, the mantling wine, 
 
 Red roses, summer's whispering leaves, 
 
 Th lips that kiss, the hands that twine. 
 The heart that loves, the heart that grieves. 
 
 They all have found a deathless shrine 
 In his rich line I 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 Poetical Illustrations of tH Athen^um Gallery of 
 Paintings. Boston : True & Osgood. 1827. 
 
 This book contains short poems by John Osborne Sargent and Park Benjamin, 
 besides those attributed to Doctor Holmes. 
 
 The Harbinger. A May Gift, dedicated to the ladies who have 
 
 so kindly aided the New England Institution for the Blind. 
 
 Boston : Carter, Hendee & Co 1833. 
 
 John Osborne Sargent was also a contributor to this book. 
 Poems. Boston : Otis, Broaders & Co. 1836. 
 BoYLSTON Prize Dissertations, for the years 1836 and 1837. 
 
 Boston : Charles C. Little and James Brown 1838. 
 
 The subjects of these dissertations are as follows : The first is on " Indigenous 
 Intermittent Fever in New England;" the second on " Neuralgia ;" and the 
 third on "Direct Exploration." They are all dedicated to Pierre Chas. 
 Alex. Louis, Doctor of Medicine of the faculties of Paris and St. Petersburg. 
 
 Marshall Hall's Principles of the Theory and Practice 
 OF Medicine. First American edition, revised anc enlarged by 
 Jacob Bigelow and O. W. Holmes. Boston : 1839. 
 
 HOMCEOPATHY AND ITS KiNDRED DELUSIONS. TwO leCtures 
 
 delivered before the Boston Society for the Diffusion of Useful 
 Knowledge. Boston : William D. Ticknor. 1842. 
 
 The Position and Prospects of the Medical Student. An 
 address delivered before the Boylston Medical Society of Har- 
 vard University, January 12, 1844. Boston: John Putnam, 
 Printer. 1844. 
 
 Urania: A Rhymed Lesson. Delivered before the Mercantile 
 Library Association. Boston : 1846. 
 
 Report of the Committee on Medical Literature. Pub- 
 lished in transactions of the American Medical Association, 
 Vol. I. 1847. 
 
 Introductory Lecture. Delivered at the Massachusetts Medi- 
 cal College, November 3, 1847. Boston : William D. Ticknor 
 & Co. 1847. 
 
 Astr^a: Thf Balance of Illusions. Boston: Ticknor, 
 Reed & Fields. 1850. 
 
 This Poem wa delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Yale College, 
 August 14, 1850 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY. 303 
 
 The Benefactors of the Medical School of Harvard 
 University. "With i biographical sketch of the late Doctor 
 George Parkman. Boston : Ticknor, Reed & Fields. 1850. 
 Delivered as an Introductory Lecture at the Mass. Med. College, Nov. 7, 1850. 
 
 The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever. 
 
 This lecture was read before the Boston Society for Medical Improvement 
 in 1843, and reprinted from the New England Quarterly Journal of Medicine and 
 Surgery in 1855. 
 Oration. Delivered before the New England Society in New 
 
 York City, at their Semi-Centennial Anniversary, December 22, 
 1855. New York : Wm. C. Bryant & Co. 
 
 This oration may also be found in the Society's Report of the Semi-Centennial 
 Celebration, New York, 1856. 
 
 Th> AuTOCRAi OF THE Breakfast-Table. Every man his 
 own Bosweli Boston : Ticknor & Fields. 1858. 
 
 Valedictory Address to the Medical Graduates of Harvard 
 University, March 10, 1858. Boston ; David Clapp, 184 Wash- 
 ington St. 1858. 
 
 The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. Boston : Ticknor 
 & Fields. 1859. 
 
 Currents and Counter-Currents in Medical, Science. 
 An address delivered before the Massachusetts Medical Society, 
 at the annual meeting, May 30, i860. Boston: Ticknor & 
 Fields, i860 
 
 Vive la France ! A Poem read by Doctor Holmes at the dinner 
 given to H. I. H., the Prince Napoleon, September 25, 1861. 
 Cambridge 
 
 This was privately printed, together with an address of Edward Everett's, de- 
 livered at the same time. 
 
 Elsie Venner : A Romance of Destiny. Boston : Ticknor 
 
 & Fields. 1861. 
 Songs in Many Keys. Boston : Ticknor & Fields. 1861. 
 Border Lines of Knowledge in some Provinces of Medical 
 
 Science. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1862. 
 
 An mtroductory lecture delivered before the Medical Class of Harvard Col- 
 lege, in which the work of Chemistry and the Microscope in medicine and physi- 
 ology is practically shown. 
 
 Soundings from the Atlantic. Boston : Ticknor & Fields. 
 1863. 
 
 Teaching from the Chair' and at the Bedside. An Intro- 
 ductory Lecture delivered before the Medical Class of Harvard 
 University, Nov. 6, 1867. Boston : David Clapp & Son, 1867. 
 The Guardian Angel. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1867. 
 
 Atlantic Almanac for 1868. Boston : Ticknor & Fields. 
 Office of the Atlantic Monthly. 1868. 
 Donald G. Mitchell was a joint editor of this annual, but The Seasons, and 
 
304 BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 Talk concerning the Human Body and its Management, are from the pen of 
 Doctor Holmes. 
 
 The Medical Profession in Massachusetts. A Lecture read 
 at the Lowell Institute, January 29, 1869. 
 
 Valedictory Address delivered to the Graduating Class of the 
 Bellevue Hospital College, March 2, 1871. New York: 1871. 
 
 Mechanism in thought and Morals. An address delivered 
 before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard University, June 
 29, 1870, with Notes and Afterthoughts. Boston: James R. 
 Osgood & Co. 1871. 
 
 The Claims of Dentistry. An address delivered at the Com- 
 mencement Exercises of the Dental Department in Harvard 
 University, February 14, 1872. Boston : Printed by Rand, 
 Avery & Co. 1872 
 
 The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. Boston: James R. 
 Osgood & Co. 1873. 
 
 Professor Jeffries Wyman. A Memorial Outline reprinted 
 from the Atlantic Monthly for November, 1874. Boston and 
 Cambridge. 
 
 Songs OF MANY Seasons. 1862-74. Boston: James R. Osgood 
 & Co. 1874. 
 
 Address. Delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Boston 
 Microscopical Society. Cambridge : The Riverside Press. 
 
 1877. 
 
 This address was reprinted from the Boston Medical and Surgical yournal. 
 
 May 24, 1877. 
 
 The Schoolboy. Illustrated Boston : Houghton, Osgood & 
 Co. 1878. 
 
 John Lothrop Motley. A Memoir Boston : Houghton, 
 Osgood & Co. 1878 
 
 The Iro Gate and Other Poems. Boston: Houghton, 
 Mifflin & Co. 1880 
 
 Address. Delivered at the dedication of the Hall of the Boston 
 Medical Library Association, 19 Boylston place, on December 3, 
 1878 Cambridge: The Riverside Press. 1881. 
 
 Address on Emerson. Published in the Massachusetts Histori- 
 cal Society's " Tribute to Longfellow and Emerson." Boston : 
 A. Williams & Co. 1882. 
 
 It should also be mentioned here that Doctor Holmes is the Annotator of 
 Edward Stafford's Medical Directions, written for Governor Winthrop in 1643. 
 This book was published in Boston in 1862. 
 
 He is also the editor of Visions, A Study of False Sight (Pseudopia). By 
 Edward Hammond Clarke. A Memorial Sketch of the author, by Doctor 
 Holmes, gives additional value to this book. 
 
 Medical Essays. Boston : Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1883. 
 Pages from an Old Volume of Life. Boston : Houghton, 
 Mifflin & Co. 1883.