THE DILETTANTE LIBRARY. 
 
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 cloth, each 2s. 6d. With a Portrait. 
 
 AET OF ACTING, THE. PERCY FITZGERALD, M.A. F.S.A. 
 
 BLAKE, WILLIAM. ALFRED T. STORY. 
 
 BROWNING S MESSAGE TO HIS TIME. Dr. EDWAIID 
 BERDOE. 
 
 BROWNING S CRITICISM OF LIFE. W. F. KEVELL. 
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN : a Study in Democracy. 
 OSCAR L. TRIGGS. 
 
 DANTE. OSCAR BROWNING, M.A. 
 
 DANTE AND HIS IDEAL. HERBERT BAYNES, M.R.A.S. 
 
 DOCTOR, THE : a Manx Poem. REV. T. E. BROWN, M.A. 
 
 GOETHE. OSCAR BROWNING, M.A. 
 
 GREEK COMIC POETS, FRAGMENTS OF, with render 
 ings in English Verse. F. A PALEY, LL.D. 
 
 HOLMES, OLIVER WENDELL. WALTER JERUOLD. 
 
 HUGO, VICTOR. J. PRINGLE NICHOL. 
 
 HUNT, LEIGH. REGINALD BRIMLEY JOHNSON. 
 
 IBSEN, HENRIK. Rev. P. H. WICKSTEED, M.A. 
 
 JEFFERIES, RICHARD. H. S. SALT. 
 
 KITTY OF THE SHERRAGH VANE, and other Manx 
 Poems. Rev. T. E. BROWN, M.A. 
 
 MENDELSSOHN, SELECTED LETTERS OF, with a 
 Preface by Sir George Grove. W. F. ALEXANDER. 
 
 WHITMAN, WALT. WILLIAM CLARKE, M.A. 
 
 LONDON: SWAN SO^NENSCHEIN AND CO. 
 
Reproduced in Collotype by Waterlow & Sons Ltd. 
 
3 
 
 Printed by Hazell, Watson, & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbnry. 
 
N O T 
 
 Thanks are due to Messrs. Houghton, Mijflin 
 & Co., for their kind permission to make use of such 
 extracts from Dr. Holmes works as are here quoted. 
 
 M189733 
 
OLIVER WEXDELL BODIES 
 
 BY 
 
 WALTER JERROLD 
 
 
 
 With a Portrait 
 
 LONDON : 
 
 SWAN SONNENSCHEIN AND CO. 
 
 NEW YORK : MACMILLAX AND CO 
 
 1893. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. THE MAN ..... I 
 
 II. THE POET .... <>9 
 
 III. THE NOVELIST .... ft 
 
 IV. THE AUTOCRAT AND TEACHER . . 95 
 V. THE DOCTOR . . . .129 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . .143 
 
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, 
 
 i. 
 
 THE MAN. 
 
 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 t is painful sometimes, and invites 
 A thought of the way the new Telegraph writes, 
 Which pricks down its sharp little sentences spitefully 
 As if you got more than you d title to rightfully, 
 And you find yourself hoping its wild father Lightning 
 Would flame in for a second and give you a fright ning. 
 He has perfect sway of what / call a sham metre, 
 But many admire it, the English pentameter, 
 And Campbell, I think, wrote most commonly worse, 
 With less nerve, swing, and fire in the same kind of verse, 
 Nor e er achieved aught in t so worthy of praise 
 As the tribute of Holmes to the grand Marseillaise. 
 You went crazy last year over Bulwer s New Timon ; 
 Why, if B., to the day of his dying, should rhyme on, 
 Heaping verses on verses and tomes upon tomes, 
 IIcj 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 satiiic, 
 
 I 
 
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 In a measure so kindly, you doubt if the toes 
 That are trodden upon are your own or your foes ." 
 
 LOWELL. A Fable for Critics. 
 
 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES was born on 
 August 29th, 1809, in the historic town " we 
 called it then a village " of Cambridge, Massa 
 chusetts. Cambridge then differed very widely 
 from what it is to-day ; l Lowell, ten years the 
 junior of Holmes, has described in his Fireside 
 Travels 2 the Cambridge of his boyhood ; and from 
 his descriptions we can easily conjure up a picture 
 of the " country village, with its own habits and 
 traditions," yet with " some of that cloistered quiet 
 which characterises all university towns." .Let 
 those who are greatly interested in the early life 
 of Oliver Wendell Holmes turn to the first pages 
 of The Poet at the Breakfast Table and there re 
 read the beautiful story of the " Gambr el-roofed 
 House " " my birthplace, the home of my child 
 hood, and earlier and later boyhood." 
 
 The father of Oliver Wendell was the Reverend 
 Abdiel Holmes, pastor of the first Congregational 
 Church in Cambridge, who had entered into the 
 gambrel-roofed house two years before the birth 
 of his third child and first son in the annus 
 
 1 Its population, which was then under 4000, in 1880 
 was upwards of 52,000. 
 
 2 Literary Essays, vol. i. collected edition of his works. 
 
THE MAN. 
 
 mirabilis of the nineteenth century. 1 The poet s 
 grandfather, Doctor David Holmes, had served in 
 the French and Indian wars and as a surgeon in 
 the American army during the struggle for inde 
 pendence ; his grandfather was one of the original 
 settlers of Woodstock county, and was descended 
 from Thomas Holmes, a lawyer of Gray s Inn, 
 London. Holmes s mother was a daughter of 
 Oliver Wendell, a lawyer, of Dutch descent, 2 and 
 was connected with the intellectual aristocracy 
 of New England the Wendells, the Olivers, the 
 Quinceys, and the Bradstreets. The last-named 
 family included Anne Dudley Bradstreet, who 
 
 1 1809 was also the birth year of Darwin, Gladstone, 
 Tennyson, and Lincoln. 
 
 - In Post Prandial, a poem read before the Phi Beta 
 Kappa Society in 1881, "Wendell Phillips, orator, and 
 Charles Godfrey Leland, poet," being the two men 
 specially honoured, Holmes said 
 
 " * The Dutch have taken Holland, so the schoolboys used 
 
 to say; 
 
 Tlie Dutch have taken Harvard, no doubt of that to-day ! 
 For the Wendells were low Dutchmen, and all their vrows 
 
 were Vans ; 
 And the Breitmanns are high Dutchmen, and here is 
 
 honest Hans. 
 
 Mynheers, you both are welcome ! Fair cousin Wendell P., 
 Our ancestors were dwellers beside the Zuyder Zee ; 
 I xtth Grot ins and Erasmus were countrymen of we, 
 And Vondel was our namesake, though he spelt it with 
 
 a V." Poems, iii. 155-6. 
 
4 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 occupies in her country s annals the proud position 
 of being its first poet. Her poems were published 
 in London, in 1650, under the quaint title of The 
 Tenth Muse, lately Sprung up in America, a work 
 now known but to few other than students of 
 American literature. The volume has, however, 
 some nervous, stirring lines in it among much that 
 certainly would affect us little to-day, except to 
 move us to smile at the occasional quaintness. A 
 couple of lines from A Dialogue, between Old Eng 
 land and New will sufficiently indicate the class of 
 poetry to which Anne Bradstreet s work belongs 
 
 " Farewell, dear mother, Parliament prevail, 
 And in a while you ll tell another tale." 
 
 The "Tenth Muse" is of course chiefly interesting 
 at this date as having been the great -great-grand 
 mother of Oliver Wendell Holmes s grandmother. 
 One of her poems is worthy of more than passing 
 note, for it appears to indicate a blood-connection 
 between the poet-subject of this small volume and 
 the poet-hero of Zutphen ; the poem is An Elegie 
 on .Sir Philip Sidney, and contains this couplet 
 
 "Let then, none disallow of these my straines, 
 Which have the selfsame blood yet in my veines." 
 
 In the study of the old gambrel-roofed house 
 and in a certain book- closet on which the Auto 
 crat descants, young Holmes early browsed among 
 books of all kinds, and imbibed a taste for them 
 not only the taste of the reader but that of the 
 
THE MAN. 5 
 
 bibliophile also, as is obvious in many parts of 
 his writings. We have, indeed, several references 
 more or less direct to the poet s early life and its 
 surroundings, sometimes fully as in the essay on 
 his birthplace already referred to, and in a beau 
 tiful description of the old garden which occurs 
 in some papers on The Seasons 1 published in Tlie 
 Atlantic Almanac in 1868; often as slight refer 
 ences which are none the less useful as true 
 autobiographic touches. 
 
 His early education Oliver received at dames 
 schools. Mrs. Prentiss was the name of his second 
 schoolmistress, and she appears to have been a 
 good, kindly old soul, who ruled her flock of 
 youngsters with a long willow rod which reached 
 quite across the schoolroom " reminding, rather 
 than chastening," as her young pupil later described 
 it. Having attained the mature age of ten Holmes 
 was removed from the care of Dame Prentiss and 
 sent to the Cambridgeport School, where he re 
 mained for about five years, and where he numbered 
 among his schoolmates Margaret Fuller and 
 Richard Henry Dana, junior. The next educa 
 tional advance was to Phillips s Academy, Andover, 
 whither Holmes went at the age of fifteen a 
 vivacious, bright, sensitive and imaginative boy 
 to prepare himself for the yet more advanced stage 
 of college life. His boyish character at this time he 
 
 1 Included in vol. viii. of the collected works. 
 
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 has himself summed up as " moderately studious, 
 fond of reading stories (even in school hours), also 
 of whispering and whittling his desk." And again 
 he says : " Exceptional boys of fourteen or fifteen 
 make home a heaven it is true ; but I have 
 suspected late in life that I was not one of the ex 
 ceptional kind. I had tendencies in the direction 
 of flageolets and octave flutes. I had a pistol and a 
 gun and popped at everything that stirred, pretty 
 nearly, except the house-cat. Worse than this, I 
 would buy a cigar and smoke it by instalments, 
 putting it meantime in the barrel of my pistol, by 
 a stroke of ingenuity which it gives me a grim 
 pleasure to recall, for no maternal or other female 
 eyes would explore the cavity of that dread im 
 plement in search of contraband commodities." 
 
 From all which we may gather that he was a 
 regular boyish boy. While at Andover the youth 
 first attempted poetry though not in the direction 
 in which he was destined to distinguish himself by 
 translating the first book of the sEneid into heroic 
 couplets ; the result of this bold flight may be read 
 at the end of the last volume of Holmes s collected 
 poems. 
 
 Directly after leaving the Andover Academy 
 he stayed there but for one year young Holmes 
 entered, in 1825, at Harvard, where he soon 
 became a popular member of several of the college 
 clubs and societies. His talents as versifier were 
 
THE MAN. 
 
 at once noted and made of use, and he was chosen 
 for the proud position of " class poet." At college 
 he made many friends, for although studious he 
 was no " mere bookworm," and was always ready 
 to join in the general round of youthful amusement 
 and pleasantry. 
 
 In 1827, when the first regular art exhibition 
 at Boston was opened, Holmes and a couple of his 
 young college friends John Osborne Sargent and 
 Park Benjamin produced a small volume of 
 Poetical Illustrations of the Athenceum Gallery of 
 Paintings ; the verses being, as one might imagine 
 from the authors youth fulness, mainly satirical. 
 A few years later the same trio united in writing 
 a gift-book, The Harbinger, the profits from which 
 were given to some charity. Holmes was one of 
 the members of his class distinguished by election 
 into the Phi Beta Kappa Society. During his 
 life at Harvard, Holmes contributed various poems 
 to the college periodicals, 1 and delivered others 
 before the members of the clubs or societies to 
 which he belonged or was invited. In 1829 he 
 graduated. For a year afterwards he studied law, 
 but then gave it up, determined to follow the 
 doctor s rather than the lawyer s profession. 
 
 1 To Tlie Collegian, for instance, he contributed some 
 very characteristic humorous pieces ; among others 
 The Height of tlie Ridiculous ; Evening : ly a Tailor ; and 
 
 lie Spectre Pig. 
 
8 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 In 1830, " with a pencil in the White Chamber 
 stans pede in uno pretty nearly," Oliver Wendell 
 Holmes wrote Old Ironsides, a lyrical protest 
 against the breaking up of the old frigate Con 
 stitution. It was published in the Boston Daily 
 Advertiser two days after the author had read the 
 paragraph which inspired it. The verses were ex 
 tensively copied in newspapers all over the country, 
 were even printed on handbills and circulated in 
 the streets the frigate was saved from the hands 
 of the destroyer and the young poet tasted of fame. 
 
 Having wisely decided upon medicine as a 
 pursuit more congenial than the law, Holmes im 
 mediately commenced his studies, which he pursued 
 for over two years at home, and then, in 1833, 
 went to Europe, where, after doing the " grand 
 tour," he settled down to work in the hospitals 
 and lecture-rooms of Paris and Edinburgh. Much 
 pleasant reminiscence of this first visit to Europe 
 is contained in the volume Our Hundred Days in 
 Europe which he wrote when, half a century 
 later, he again crossed the Atlantic. In 1836, he 
 returned to Harvard and took his degree as 
 Doctor of Medicine. On his return, too, he read 
 to the members of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, 
 his Poetry : A Metrical Essay ; a poem which, in 
 his own words, " presents the simple and partial 
 views of a young person trained after the school 
 of classical English verse as represented by Pope, 
 
THE MAN. 
 
 Goldsmith and Campbell, with whose lines his 
 memory was early stocked." How much more it 
 " presents " we shall more fitly consider when 
 dealing with Holmes as the poet. One who 
 listened to the delivery of this poem thus recorded 
 his impression of the speaker : " Extremely youth 
 ful in appearance, bubbling over with the mingled 
 humour and pathos that have always marked his 
 poetry, and sparkling with the coruscations of his 
 peculiar genius, he delivered the poem with a clear 
 ringing enunciation which imparted to his hearers 
 his own enjoyment of his thoughts and expressions." 
 It was in this same year, 1836, too, that Holmes 
 published his first collection of poems, a small 
 volume, of which the piece was the metrical essay 
 Poetry, but which also included some of the writer s 
 most eminently characteristic humorous verses. 
 The poet was not, however, cultivating the muse 
 at the expense of the profession which he had 
 adopted, as is sufficiently well evidenced by the fact 
 that during the two years 1836-7, of four medals 
 which were offered for medical dissertations, 
 Doctor Holmes succeeded in carrying off three. 
 The essays which gained him these honours were 
 published in 1838. 
 
 In 1837 Holmes s father, the Reverend Abdiel 
 Holmes, that most delightful of sunny old men " 
 died at the age of seventy. 
 
 After he had been practising for about a couple 
 
10 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 of years in Boston, Doctor Holmes received an 
 appointment as Professor of Anatomy and Physi 
 ology at Dartmouth College. This, however, he 
 resigned on his marriage two years later, and 
 returned once more to his well-loved Boston, where 
 he recommenced practice as physician. He 
 married June 16th, 1840 Amelia Lee Jackson, 
 daughter of Judge Jackson of the Supreme Court 
 of Massachusetts. This second term of practice 
 was not however very long continued ; for a few 
 years later, in 1847, he was appointed Parkman 
 Professor of Anatomy and Physiology in the 
 Medical School of Harvard ; in which capacity, 
 for a long series of years (he resigned in 1882), 
 Professor Holmes was in the habit of delivering 
 four lectures during each week of the eight months 
 that form the academic year. 
 
 When Charles Dickens went to America in 
 1842, he was feted at Boston as at all other 
 places which he visited ; a grand dinner was given 
 in his honour, and Holmes wrote an extremely 
 graceful song 1 of welcome for the occasion. The 
 following year the popular doctor delivered before 
 the Phi Beta Kappa Society one of his long poems 
 entitled An After Dinner Poem (Terpsichore}? 
 More particular reference to these and similar 
 works which it is necessary to mention in this 
 
 1 Poems, i. 81. 2 Poems, i. 134. 
 
THE MAN. II 
 
 chronological arrangement will be made in the- 
 next section of this book when I come to consider 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes the Poet. In 1846 A 
 Rhymed Lesson ( Urania} l was read before the 
 Boston Mercantile Library Association. In 1 85 1 , at 
 the annual gathering of the members of the class of 
 1829, the first of Holmes s long series of delightful 
 poems, which in his collected works are grouped 
 as Poems of the Class of 1829, was delivered ; 
 since then but very rarely was a year missed by 
 the poet in celebrating in fitting verse each time" 
 thinned gathering of his college contemporaries. 
 
 In 1852 Holmes commenced as a Lyceum lecturer,, 
 delivering what must have been, from him, an 
 extremely interesting course on English Poets of the 
 Nineteenth Century, concluding each lecture, char 
 acteristically enough, with a poem, on the poet of 
 whom he had been treating. The lectures have 
 never been published, so far as I am aware, but 
 the peroration poems are included in the collected 
 edition of his works. 2 The style of these lectures 
 was described by one who listened to them as " pre 
 cise and animated; the illustrations sharp and 
 clearly cut. In the criticism there was a leaning 
 rather to the bold and dashing bravura of Scott 
 and Byron than to the calm philosophical mood of 
 Wordsworth. Where there was any game on the 
 
 Poems, i. 107. - Ibid, i. 220-229. 
 
12 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 wing, when the ( servile herd of imitators and 
 poetasters came in view, they were dropped at once 
 by a felicitous shot." 
 
 For seven years from 1849 as he describes in 
 the Autocrat, Professor Holmes was wont to spend 
 the summer months in a house on the corner of 
 a large estate, which his great-grandfather had 
 bought a century earlier, among the Berkshire 
 hills " the Switzerland of New England." Here, 
 at Canoe Place, 1 Pittsfield, Holmes had as valued 
 neighbours Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Mel 
 ville, G. P. R. James, and other literary notabilities. 
 Thus, in the exercise of two professions, in each of 
 which he was a master, in the city which he loved 
 " the hub of the solar system " 2 he nicknamed its 
 chief building the much-loved friend and teacher 
 of a wide circle of his countrymen, the poet and 
 humourist, widely appreciated by all English- 
 speaking people, passed the uneventful life of a 
 literary man. 
 
 The year 1857 is a very significant one in the 
 life-story of Oliver Wendell Holmes as a man of 
 letters. In the November of that year there was 
 started, in Boston, a new periodical under the 
 editorship of James Russell Lowell, who was sup 
 ported by an able staff of contributors, both 
 
 1 So named by Holmes because of the mark, a canoe, 
 with which the Indian sachem had signed away the land. 
 
 2 Autocrat, p. 125. 
 
THE MAN. 13 
 
 American and British indeed the very first article 
 in the first number was by a British writer on a 
 British man of letters then recently deceased. 1 In 
 accepting the editorship of the new venture Lowell 
 stipulated that Holmes should be one of his principal 
 contributors, and it was Holmes who supplied the 
 title The Atlantic Monthly Magazine. In the first 
 number there appeared an article entitled The 
 Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, which began with 
 strange abruptness, thus : " I was just going to say, 
 when I was interrupted, that one way of classifying 
 minds," etc. 2 This was the first of that triple 
 series of articles which have carried the name 
 which represents the Autocrat, the Professor and 
 the Poet into millions of homes. To those of us 
 who have grown to know and love him from our 
 earliest reading days it is, indeed, difficult to realise 
 that the writer of these books was nearly half a 
 century old when he began them ; that, though 
 acknowledged as a leading Doctor and Professor 
 and as an inimitable writer of " occasional " poetry, 
 he had not struck out what is a line peculiarly his 
 own and had written none of the three remarkable 
 
 1 The writer was James Hannay (of Singleton Fontrnoi/ 
 fame), and the subject of his essay was Douglas Jerrold, 
 who had died in the previous June. 
 
 2 Holmes had contributed two papers under the same 
 title to an ephemeral periodical during ls:)2, so that the- 
 " interruption " had only lasted for a quarter of a century. 
 
14 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 novels which we always associate with his name. 
 The author was, then, close upon fifty years of age 
 before he made any considerable mark upon the 
 literature of his time. The paper in the Atlantic 
 Monthly was at once assured of success, and the 
 succeeding numbers of the magazine in which the 
 Autocrat, and, immediately after him, the Professor, 
 monopolised the talk of the breakfast-table were 
 looked for eagerly by large numbers of readers ; 
 the poetry the humour, the genial satire, all were 
 irresistible. 
 
 Towards the close of 1859 to be as exact as the 
 author himself, " in the third week of December "- 
 the author of the Autocrat appeared before the 
 readers of the Atlantic Monthly in an entirely new 
 role that of novelist. There then commenced in 
 the pages of the magazine the serial publication 
 of The Professor s Story , afterwards republished in 
 volume form under the title of Elsie Venner : a 
 Romance of Destiny. The story, despite its subtle 
 ties and unconventionalities, was a distinct success, 
 .and Oliver Wendell Holmes added the novelist s 
 laurels to those which he already wore in virtu of 
 his success as Doctor, Scientist, Poet and Essayist. 
 
 It is curious how, in speaking of each man of 
 letters with whom we become really intimate 
 through his books, we always attach an adjective- 
 label, "holy" George Herbert, " judicious" 
 Hooker, " quaint old " Izaak Walton (always a 
 
THE MAN. 15 
 
 double allowance of adjective to the author of the 
 Gompleat Angler), " gentle " Elia ; with Holmes, the 
 adjective that always unbidden rises to our lips is 
 " genial " ; and geniality is indeed a characteristic 
 of him no less as a writer than as a man ; nay, 
 even as satirist his geniality does not desert him. 
 The homes of the genial Autocrat in Boston were 
 ever places where friends of light and leading were 
 wont to congregate. Many visitors have placed 
 on record the poet s kindness and thoughtfulness 
 to and for all his visitors, whether they be his 
 illustrious friends, like Motley a frequent and 
 welcome guest or the latest caller who thinks 
 his great admiration for the writings sufficient 
 warranty for boring the writer. " He is the 
 perfect essence of wit and hospitality," wrote one 
 visitor, " courteous, amiable and entertaining to 
 a degree, which is more easily remembered than 
 imparted or described. If the caller expects to 
 find blue-blood snobbishness at 296, Beacon Street, 1 
 he will be disappointed. It is one of the most 
 elegant and charming residences on that broad 
 and fashionable thoroughfare, but far less pre 
 tentious, both inwardly and outwardly, than many 
 of the others. . . . The chief point of attraction, 
 
 1 Holmes s third Boston residence after his marriage 
 in 1840. After living for eighteen years at S, Montgomery 
 Place, Holmes spent twelve at 164, Charles Street, and 
 from there moved to Beacon Street. 
 
16 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 for the visitor as well as the host, is in the magni 
 ficent and spacious library, which may be more 
 aptly termed the Autocrat s workshop." 
 
 From the library-window of this house an ex 
 tended view is obtained over the river Charles, 
 and a wide expanse of town and country, includiDg 
 a glimpse of the poet s distant birthplace, 
 
 " 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." > 
 
 A visitor describing the same room and its view 
 says : " The ancient Hebrew always had a window 
 open towards Jerusalem, the city about which his 
 most cherished hopes and memories clustered, and 
 this window gives its owner the pleasure of look 
 ing straight to the place of his birth, and thus of 
 freshening all the happy memories of a successful 
 life." 2 The library must indeed be an interesting 
 place, not to lovers of the poet alone but also to the 
 bibliophile who it is to be hoped is no less a lover 
 of the poet, he should be rather more, for Doctor 
 Holmes is an eloquent enthusiast on the subject 
 of his book rarities. This may be seen at once 
 in many passages scattered up and down the 
 Breakfast-Table Series, passages reminiscent not 
 only of the volumes themselves but of the par- 
 
 1 " My Aviary," Poems, iii. 66. 
 
 2 Arthur Gilman, Poets Homes, second series, p. 21. 
 
THE MAN. 
 
 ticular circumstances in which they were read or 
 acquired. One old leather-bound Tulpius, for 
 instance, was, Holmes says, " my only reading 
 when in quarantine at Marseilles," another " find " 
 had " strayed in among the rubbish of the book 
 stall on the boulevard." 
 
 Like other men of mark Doctor Holmes has 
 often been troubled by autograph seekers, by 
 impertinent visitors and would-be authors, anxious 
 to obtain his opinion on their work, and his fame 
 as the " genial " Holmes has, we may be sure, not 
 tended to decrease the number of his tormentors. 
 For the guidance of authors similarly circum 
 stanced, he drew up a humorous code of rules 
 which they might follow. It does of course at 
 times happen that in the ranks of the aspiring 
 writers who send specimens of their \vork to be 
 judged may be men of distinct promise ; often it 
 is probable they get dismissed with " the ruck," 
 though not invariably so, for on one occasion a 
 young Californian writer sent a sample of his 
 poetry and asked Holmes whether he considered 
 it worth while the writer continuing. Holmes 
 was evidently in this case impressed by the pro 
 mising originality shown, and wrote the wished - 
 for letter of encouragement. Some time had 
 passed and he thought no more of his Californian 
 correspondent, when a gentleman called and asked 
 if he remembered the incident. "I do, indeed," 
 
1 8 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 replied Holmes. " Well," remarked his visitor, " I 
 am the man." It proved to be Bret Harte. 
 
 In 1862, the poems which the author had written 
 since 1849 were published together in a volume 
 entitled Songs in Many Keys, which included the 
 beautiful ballad of Agnes and many other poems 
 familiar to the lovers of Holmes. On August 1 9th 
 of the same year the poet s mother died upwards of 
 ninety years old " a bright, keen-witted, vivacious 
 woman, much beloved by her neighbours and by 
 her husband s parishioners." 
 
 During the war of attempted secession Holmes s 
 elder son who bears his father s name was twice 
 wounded in battle, once at Antietam, September 
 16th, 1862 somewhat seriously. In a delightful 
 paper contributed to the Atlantic Monthly, entitled 
 My Hunt after the Captain, x Oliver Wendell 
 Holmes " the elder " gives a graphic account of his 
 journey to the front, and back, and then forward 
 again, on an anxious, and for some time fruitless, 
 hunt for his son. On Independence Day of the 
 following year (July 4th, 1863), Holmes delivered 
 an oration before the city authorities of Boston. 
 This oration The Inevitable Trial 2 was a magni 
 ficent, stirring call to his countrymen to be true 
 to themselves and to liberty to continue the war, 
 if need were, to the bitter end, even though that 
 
 Pages from an Old Volume of Life, p. 16. 
 Pages from an Old Volume of Life, p. 78. 
 
THE MAN. 19 
 
 end were to be annihilation better annihilation, 
 than compromise with wrong. Stirring reading as 
 The Inevitable Trial forms now, when the war-scars 
 are a generation old, and to persons knowing of 
 the great struggle but by hearsay and history, it 
 must have sounded in the ears of the orator s 
 fellow-townsmen, in the mid-period of the greatly 
 significant war, with the ringing notes of a bugle - 
 call to action. It forms by no means an oration 
 of only temporary value and interest, which ceased 
 immediately upon the triumph of the cause in 
 which it was spoken, but it is a piece of sterling, 
 virile literature. 
 
 In 1866, Holmes collected several of his miscel 
 laneous writings and published them as Soundings 
 from the Atlantic. Some of the papers in this 
 volume are included in Pages from an Old Volume 
 of Life, but some of them have not been reprinted, 
 and among these there is a very amusing supposed 
 interview between a Reporter and the Autocrat s 
 landlady, and A Visit to the Asylum for Decayed 
 Punsters which is far from being in Holmes s 
 happiest vein. The first named of these two 
 papers, however, is a piece of characteristic writ 
 ing, giving the landlady s views of the Autocrat 
 and the " Schoolma ain." " This gentleman " (the 
 landlady is made to say) "warn t no great of a 
 gentleman to look at. Being of a very moderate 
 dimension five foot five, he said, but five foot four 
 
20 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 more likely, and I ve heerd him say he didn t 
 weigh much over a hundred and twenty pound. 
 He was light complected rather than darksome, 
 and was one of them smooth-faced people that 
 keep their baird and wiskers cut close, jest as if 
 they d be very troublesome if they let em grow, 
 instead of layin out their face in grass, as my poor 
 husband that s dead and gone used to say. He 
 was a well-behaved gentleman at table, only talked 
 a good deal, and pretty loud sometimes, and had 
 a way of turnin up his nose when he didn t like 
 what folks said, that one of my boarders, who is 
 a very smart young man, said he couldn t stand, 
 no how, and used to make faces and poke fun 
 at him, whenever he see him do it. ... Many s 
 the time I ve seen that gentleman keepin two or 
 three of em sittin round the breakfast-table after 
 the rest had swallowed their meal and the things 
 was cleared off and Bridget was a-waitin to get 
 the cloth away, and there that little man would 
 set with a tumbler of sugar and water, what he 
 used to call Sukray, a-talkin and a-talkin , 
 and sometimes he would laugh, and sometimes 
 the tears would come into his eyes, which was a 
 kind of grayish blue eyes, and there he d set and 
 set, and my boy Benjamin Franklin hangin round 
 and gettin late for school and wantin an excuse, 
 and an old gentleman that s one of my boarders, 
 a-listenin as if he wa n t no older than my 
 
THE MAN 21 
 
 Ben Franklin, and that schoolmistress settin 
 jest as if she d been bewitched, and you might 
 stick pins into her without her hollerin . He was 
 a master hand to talk when he got a-goin ; . . . . 
 One of my boarders used to say that he always 
 said exactly what he was a mind to, and stuck his 
 idees out jest like them that sells pears outside 
 their shop-winders, some is three cents, some is 
 two cents, and some is only one cent, and if you 
 don t like, you needn t buy, but them s the articles 
 and them s the prices, and if you want em, take 
 em, and if you don t, go about your business, and 
 don t stand melleriri of em with your thumbs all 
 day till you ve sp ilt em for other folks." l 
 
 This humorous description of himself is delight 
 ful, as is the whole paper from which it is quoted. 
 It seems a pity that the Autocrat has not seen fit 
 to include it in the collected edition of his works, 
 for it would form a most appropriate foreword or 
 afterword to the Breakfast- Table Series. As a 
 pendant to this description of himself as seen 
 through his landlady s eyes we may notice the 
 following passage, which describes him as he 
 appeared to a Scotchman who heard him as medical 
 lecturer during the sixties. " Holmes is a plain, 
 little dapper man, his short hair brushed down 
 like a boy s, but turning grey now ; a trifle of 
 
 1 Soundings from the Atlantic: Boston, 1866, p. 334, 
 
 cf .sr. 
 
22 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 furzy hair under his ears ; a powerful jaw, and a 
 thick, strong underlip that gives decision to his 
 look, with a dash of pertness. In conversation, he 
 is animated and cordial sharp, too, taking the 
 word out of one s mouth." 1 
 
 In 1867 The Guardian Angel, which had run 
 through the Atlantic Monthly in serial form, was 
 published. At the close of the same year, under 
 the part editorship of Holmes, was issued The 
 Atlantic Almanac, which is especially interesting 
 as being the medium through which the quad 
 ruple essay of The Seasons 2 was first published. 
 This essay, or set of essays, not only gives us 
 exquisite bits of prose descriptive of nature in New 
 England, but is also valuable and attractive on 
 account of the gems of reminiscence included in it 
 some particularly beautiful passages descriptive 
 of the old garden of the gambr el -roofed house, and of 
 the " September gale of 1815." 3 " I embalmed some 
 of my fresher recollections of it in a copy of verses 
 which some of my readers may have seen. I am 
 afraid there is something of what we may call, 
 indulgently, negative veracity in that youthful 
 effusion." And of the celebration of " commence 
 ment" at Cambridge in the writer s boyhood, 
 " In the last week of August used to fall Com- 
 
 1 David Macrae, The Americans at Home, ii., p. 243. 
 
 2 Pages from an Old Volume of Life, p. 132. 
 
 3 See also Poems, i.. p. 29. 
 
THE MAN. 23 
 
 mencement day at Cambridge. I remember that 
 week well, for something happened to me once at 
 that time, namely, I was born." l 
 
 In June 1870 Dr. Holmes delivered a thoughtful 
 and valuable address on the subject of Mechanism 
 in Thought and Morals 2 before the members of the 
 Phi Beta Kappa Society ; to this paper we shall 
 refer more fully in a later section. In the 
 following year the breakfast-table speaker tried 
 a dangerous experiment an experiment which 
 success alone could justify. It was over ten years 
 since the Professor had kissed an unseen farewell 
 to his breakfast-table companions after occupying 
 for twelve months the chair from which his friend 
 the Autocrat had delightfully dogmatised ; yet 
 Holmes placed the Poet at the Atlantic " breakfast- 
 table," and completed what have since come to be 
 looked upon as an inseparable trinity, the " three 
 starveling volumes bound in one " of his own 
 Epilogue. 
 
 In 1878 Holmes performed a painful task, 
 although a labour of love, in writing the biography 
 of a fellow-collegian and lifelong friend who had 
 earned a world-wide reputation as historian. This 
 friend was J. L. Motley, and the volume which 
 tells the story of his life is interesting alike from 
 its subject and its author. It must however be 
 
 1 Pages from an Old Volume of Life, p. lob. 
 J I hid., p. 260. 
 
24 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 confessed that Holmes is far from being at his best 
 in such a set task as the writing of a man s life 
 must necessarily be. 
 
 In 1879 the publishers of the Atlantic Monthly 
 determined to celebrate the seventieth birthday of 
 their invaluable supporter his " Sabbath decade " 
 as he happily termed it by a grand breakfast 
 which was duly given on December 3rd, 1 that 
 date being a more generally convenient one than 
 the true anniversary (August 29th). At this break 
 fast most of the leading luminaries of American 
 literature gathered together to do honour to Holmes 
 Emerson, Whittier and Harriet Beecher Stowe 
 were among the veterans there, while the younger 
 generation of writers was well represented. The 
 guest of the occasion read a characteristic and 
 deeply moving poem, entitled The Iron Gate, 2 
 concluding with " Thanks, brothers, sisters, 
 children, and farewell," as though his work was 
 finished. Four out of the thirteen volumes which 
 form his collected works had yet to be written, and 
 besides he was destined yet to write in years all 
 
 1 Miss E. B. Brown, in her Life of Holmes, says that it 
 tookplace on the " thirteenth of November " ; Mr. Kennedy, 
 in his Life, gives it correctly and explicitly, thus, " the 
 third day of December from one and a half to four o clock 
 
 n the afternoon." 
 
 2 Poems, in., p. 56, and quoted at the conclusion of this 
 volume. 
 
THE MAN. 25 
 
 too few the biography of the greatest of those 
 who were gathered together to do him honour 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson, and, happily, destined to 
 see his son Oliver Wendell Holmes the younger, 
 made a judge of the Supreme Court. 
 
 In 1882 after having regularly fulfilled the 
 duties of the appointment for five-and-thirty years 
 Holmes resigned his Parkman Professorship at 
 Harvard, and was immediately appointed Emeritus 
 Professor of the college. On the twenty-eighth of 
 November he delivered his farewell lecture to his 
 anatomy students ; a storm of applause greeted his 
 arrival; immediately it died away, one of the 
 members of the class came forward and presented, 
 on behalf of all the students, a beautiful loving- 
 cup, bearing engraved upon it, this line from 
 Holmes s own writings 
 
 " Love bless thee, joy crown thee, God speed thy career." 
 
 This graceful token of loving admiration so 
 deeply affected the retiring Professor, that, as he 
 wrote in acknowledging the gift by letter, it made 
 him speechless, adding, however, that he was quite 
 sure that they did not mistake aphasia for acardia 
 his heart was in its right place though his 
 tongue forgot its office. The following spring the 
 medical profession of New York gave a compli 
 mentary dinner to the Doctor, who, in reading a 
 poem to his hosts, asked them to 
 
26 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 " Deal with him as a truant, if you will, 
 But claim him, keep him, call him brother still." 
 
 In 1881 the greatest thinker, the greatest 
 litterateur that America has seen, passed away 
 in the person of Ralph Waldo Emerson, known 
 and appreciated throughout the English-speaking 
 world. Dr. Holmes was asked to undertake the 
 writing of a biography of the great Concord sage 
 for the American Men of Letters series ; this he 
 did, and in 1884 the volume was published. As 
 in his earlier volume of biography the Life of 
 Emerson, although extremely interesting, yet it does 
 not strike us as being particularly successful. The 
 author is too much cramped by limitations as to 
 subject and space for half-a-century he had been 
 writing as he chose on self-chosen subjects, and 
 the change was too great to be unusually successful. 
 The volume is, however, extremely useful, and 
 neither admirers of the Concord philosopher nor 
 of the Autocrat can afford to overlook it. Nearly 
 each year was to show how prematurely Holmes 
 had uttered his "Farewell": in 1885, the year 
 following the publication of the Life of Emerson, 
 the third of the Autocrat s novels A Mortal 
 Antipathy was issued. 
 
 In 1886, after fifty years interval, Doctor Holmes 
 paid a visit to Europe, accompanied by his daughter. 
 He was received everywhere with a delighted 
 welcome London, Oxford and Cambridge vied 
 
THE MAN. 27 
 
 with one another in seeing which could do most 
 honour to him during his short stay. Short the 
 stay was, for he remained but little over three 
 months. On his return home he prepared from 
 his diary, with reminiscences of his earlier visit, a 
 book of most delightful gossip which was published 
 in 1887, as Our Hundred Days in Europe ; a book 
 which will probably maintain popularity as long 
 as the best of Holmes s work ; not, be it understood, 
 that I rank it with the best, but it possesses that 
 charm which belongs to other frankly egoistic 
 books, and in virtue of which they continue to be 
 read. It treats largely of notable persons and 
 places " flourishing " during the eighties ; and this, 
 given in the friendly, familiar, personal style of 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes, gives the book just that 
 power of fascination, which is, perhaps, even a 
 greater passport to posterity than is greatness itself. 
 Of his account of the Hundred Days, Holmes 
 himself says : " My reader was fairly forewarned 
 that this narrative was to be more like a chapter 
 of autobiography than the record of a tourist. 
 In the language of philosophy, it is written from 
 a subjective, not an objective, point of view. It 
 is not exactly a Sentimental Journey, though 
 there are warm passages here and there which 
 end with notes of admiration. I remind myself 
 now and then of certain other travellers : of 
 Benjamin of Tudela, going from the hospitalities 
 
28 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 of one son of Abraham to another ; of John 
 Buncle, finding the loveliest of women under every 
 roof that sheltered him ; sometimes, perhaps, of 
 that tipsy rhymester l whose record of his good 
 and bad fortunes at the hands of landlords and 
 landladies is enlivened by an occasional touch of 
 humour, which makes it palatable to coarse literary 
 feeders. But in truth these papers have many 
 of the characteristics of private letters written 
 home to friends. They are written for friends, 
 rather than for a public which cares nothing 
 about the writer. I knew there were many such 
 whom it would please to know where the writer 
 went, whom he saw and what he saw, and how 
 he was impressed by persons and things." 2 
 
 In a recent letter to the writer, dated September 
 18th, 1893, Dr. Holmes says: " I send you one of 
 my printed formulae to show you how hard I treat 
 my correspondents." The enclosure is a printed 
 card, in which the venerable author says that it is 
 impossible for him to do more than acknowledge 
 the numerous communications from near and 
 distant friends, finding his time, his eyes, and his 
 hand overtaxed by an increasing correspondence. 
 Not to disappoint his correspondents, however, the 
 genial old man signs the " printed formulae." 
 
 1 Drunken Sarnabee. 
 
 - Our Hundred Days in Europe, p. 183. 
 
n. 
 
 THE POET. 
 
 THE CHIEFTAIN, BY WILLIAM WINTER. 1 
 
 Read at the " Atlantic " Festival, in Commemoration of the 
 Seventieth Birthday of Oliver Wendell Holmes, at 
 Boston, December 3, 1879. 
 
 If that glad song had ebbed away, 
 
 Which, rippling on through smiles and tears, 
 
 Has bathed with showers of diamond spray 
 The rosy fields of seventy years, 
 
 If that sweet voice were hushed to-day, 
 What should we say ? 
 
 At first we thought him but a jest 
 
 A ray of laughter, quick to fade ; 
 We did not dream how richly blest 
 
 In his pure life our lives were made : 
 Till soon the aureole shone, contest, 
 Upon his crest. 
 
 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. 
 
 1 TJie Poems of William M / ///</: Boston, 1881, p. 151. 
 29 
 
30 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 That song has poured its sacred light 
 On crimson flags in freedom s van, 
 
 And blessed their serried ranks, who fight 
 Life s battle here for truth and man 
 
 An oriflamme, to cheer the right, 
 Through darkest night ! 
 
 That song has flecked with rosy gold 
 The sails that fade o er fancy s sea ; 
 
 Kelumed the storied clays of old ; 
 Presaged the glorious life to be ; 
 
 And many a sorrowing heart consoled 
 In grief untold. 
 
 When, shattered on the loftiest steep 
 The statesman s glory ever found, 
 
 That heart, so like the boundless deep, 
 Broke, in the deep no heart can bound, 
 
 How did his dirge of sorrow weep 
 O er Webster s sleep ! 
 
 How sweetly did his spirit pour 
 
 The strains that make the tear-drops start, 
 When, on this bleak New England shore, 
 
 With Tara s harp and Erin s heart, 
 He thrilled us to the bosom s core 
 
 With thoughts of Moore ! 
 
 The shamrock, green on Liffey s side, 
 The lichen neath New England snows, 
 
 White daisies of the fields of Clyde, 
 Twined ardent round old Albion s rose, 
 
 Bloom in his verse, as blooms the bride 
 With love and pride. 
 
 The silken tress, the mantling wine, 
 Keel roses, summer s whispering leaves, 
 
THE POET. 31 
 
 The 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 ! 
 
 Ah well, that voice can charm us yet, 
 And still that shining tide of song, 
 
 Beneath a sun not soon to set, 
 In golden music flows along. 
 
 With dew of joy our eyes are wet 
 Not of regret. 
 
 For still, as comes the festal day, 
 In many a temple, far and near, 
 
 The words that all have longed to say, 
 The words that all are proud to hear, 
 
 Fall from his lips, with conquering sway, 
 Or grave or gay. 
 
 No moment this for passion s heat, 
 Nor mine the voice to give it scope, 
 
 When love and fame and beauty meet 
 To crown their Memory and their Hope ! 
 
 I cast white lilies, cool and sweet, 
 Here at his feet. 
 
 True bard, true soul, true man, true friend ! 
 
 Ah, gently on that reverend head 
 Ye snows of wintry age descend, 
 
 Ye shades of mortal night be shed ! 
 
 Peace guide and guard him to the end, 
 
 And God defend ! 
 
 is a rare pathetic touch about some of 
 -L Holmes s unique vers d occasion which, pro 
 bably entirely overlooked at the time of the verses 
 being spoken, is not too obvious even to those 
 reading the poet in their study. It is found 
 
32 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 where the poet explains how well he is aware that 
 all his listeners have come ready to smile at the 
 anticipated " funny things," to pucker their lips 
 at his first pun, and to roar with laughter at the 
 coming mot 
 
 "I know my audience. All the gay and young 
 Love the light antics of a playful tongue ; 
 And these, remembering some expansive line 
 My lips let loose among the nuts and wine, 
 Are all impatience till the opening pun 
 Proclaims the witty shamfight is begun. 
 Two-fifths at least, if not the total half, 
 Have come infuriate for an earthquake laugh. 
 ***** 
 
 " I know a tailor, once a friend of mine, 
 Expects great doings in the button line, 
 For mirth s concussions rip the outward case, 
 And plant the stitches in a tenderer place. 
 I know my audience, these shall have their due ; 
 A smile awaits them ere my song is through ! " l 
 
 They have come, that is, to be amused and 
 tickled by the humorist and wit rather than to 
 be elevated and edified by the poet and philosopher. 
 Yet though the poet recognises this, and in his 
 quiet, half -playful, half -reproving way thus tells 
 his audience that he does so, he manages to give 
 them much wisdom and much beautiful poetry, 
 along with the quaintness of expression and illus- 
 
 1 Poems, i., p. 108. 
 
THE POET. 33 
 
 tration the verbal quips and cranks which had 
 come to be looked upon as the most important of 
 his literary merchandise, and the rightful due of 
 those who listened to him. This character for 
 pleasantry which he had so early acquired 
 Urania, from which the above passage is quoted, 
 was written in 1846 has probably been largely 
 responsible for the colouring of the whole, or at 
 any rate a great part, of Holmes s poetic work. 
 Even with some of the essentially pathetic pieces, 
 there is yet an atmosphere of humour through 
 which they are seen. Take, for example, from 
 among the earlier poems, The Last Leaf, " sug 
 gested by the sight of old Major Melville in his 
 cocked hat and breeches," 1 which won the com 
 mendation of so fastidious a critic as Edgar Allan 
 Poe, who indeed made a copy of it, which copy 
 fell later into the hands of the gratified author. 
 It was this same poem, too, which so fascinated 
 Abraham Lincoln that he learned it by heart, and 
 was fond of referring to the fourth verse as one 
 of the most pathetic passages in literature : 
 
 " I saw him once before, 
 As he passed by the door, 
 
 And again 
 
 The pavement stones resound, 
 As he totters o er the ground 
 
 With his cane. 
 
 1 Mortal Antipathy, p. 8. 
 
34 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 " They say that in his prime, 
 Ere the pruning-knife of Time 
 
 Cut him down, 
 Not a better man was found 
 By the Crier on his round 
 
 Through the town. 
 
 " But now he walks the streets, 
 And he looks at all he meets 
 
 Sad and wan, 
 
 And he shakes his feeble head, 
 That it seems as if he said, 
 They are gone. 
 
 " The mossy marbles rest 
 On the lips that he has prest 
 
 In their bloom, 
 
 And the names he loved to hear 
 Have been carved for many a year 
 
 On the tomb. 
 
 " My grandmamma has said 
 Poor old lady, she is dead 
 
 Long ago 
 
 That he had a Roman nose, 
 And his cheek was like a rose 
 
 In the snow. 
 
 " But now his nose is thin, 
 And it rests upon his chin 
 
 Like a staff, 
 
 And a crook is in his back, 
 And a melancholy crack 
 
 In his laugh. 
 
 " I know it is a sin 
 For me to sit and grin 
 At him here ; 
 
THE POET. 35 
 
 But the old three-cornered hat, 
 And the breeches and all that, 
 Are so queer ! 
 
 " And if I should live to be 
 The last leaf upon the tree 
 
 In the spring, 
 
 Let them smile, as I do now, 
 At the old forsaken bough 
 
 Where I cling." l 
 
 The second and fifth verses show us the 
 humourist rather over-colouring the work of the 
 poet. " The priming-knife of Time," for instance, 
 seems to be out of keeping with the quiet pathetic 
 feeling of the greater part of the poem, which is 
 just sufficiently charged with humour to keep it 
 truly pathetic without being sentimental ; it is, 
 indeed, a very good example of that close inter 
 connection of humour and pathos which is so often 
 remarked, and to which it is, perhaps, that such 
 writers as Charles Lamb owe their peculiar place 
 in our affections. 
 
 The too-pronounced presence of the humourist, 
 although it may jar upon us in reading some of 
 Holmes s pathetic poems, is yet only an occasional 
 blemish ; generally the humour is but like the 
 glow of summer lightning, bringing what it 
 illumines nearer to us, while at times the 
 humourist is not present at all no more than 
 
 1 Poems, L, p. 3. 
 
36 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 the Thomas Hood of The Epping Hunt and The 
 Tale of a Trumpet is visible in the Thomas Hood of 
 The Bridge of Sighs and The Song of the Shirt 
 witness the short, sharp, defiant yet exultant ring of 
 Old Ironsides. The fervour of the opening line 
 
 " Ay, tear her tattered ensign down " 
 
 rings through the whole poem, making our pulses 
 leap and our blood tingle as with a sudden blare 
 of trumpet. Small wonder is it that this short 
 impromptu 2 should have echoed and re-echoed 
 throughout the States serving effectually its 
 object of saving the old frigate Constitution, 
 popularly known as Old Ironsides, from pro 
 posed destruction. In another of these earlier 
 poems also The Cambridge Churchyard -we have 
 a sustained flight of 
 
 "The lonely spirit of the mournful lay, 
 Which lives immortal as the verse of Gray." 3 
 
 How truly Gray-like in both form and spirit, for 
 instance, is this single stanza a stanza which em 
 bodies in itself the motif of the whole poem 
 
 " Hast thou a tear for buried love ? 
 
 A sigh for transient power ? 
 All that a century left above 
 Go, read it in an hour ! " 4 
 
 Poems, i., p. 2. 3 Poems, i., p. 41. 
 
 See ante, p. 8. 4 IMd., i., p. 6. 
 
THE POET. 37 
 
 It is simple in expression, yet direct in meaning 
 as Goldsmith himself might heave written. 
 
 In 1851 Mary Russell Mitford devoted a section 
 (xxxi.) of her pleasant Recollections of a Literary 
 Life to Oliver Wendell Holmes, and this she did 
 mainly on the strength of one poem, Astrcea, " a 
 little book of less than forty pages " that had 
 been delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society 
 the previous year. This instant recognition by 
 Miss Mitford of the poet from over sea is especially 
 noteworthy as taking place before the publication 
 of the first English edition of; Holmes s poems. A 
 year later that first English edition appeared, and 
 probably owed its appearance at that time to the 
 unqualified welcome extended to it by a critic of 
 such true instinct as Mary Russell Mitford. A 
 glance at these words of welcome, in the light of 
 the poet s later great success, may well interest us. 
 In introducing those passages from Astrcea which 
 had especially attracted her, the critic says : "In 
 these days of curious novelty, nothing has taken 
 me more pleasantly by surprise than the school of 
 true and original poetry that has sprung up among 
 our blood -relations (I had well-nigh called them 
 our fellow-countrymen) across the Atlantic ; they 
 who speak the same tongue and inherit the same 
 literature. And of all this flight of genuine poets, 
 I hardly know any one so original as Dr. Holmes. 
 For him we can find no living prototype ; to track 
 
38 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 his footsteps, we must travel back as far as Pope 
 or Dryden ; and, to my mind, it would be well if 
 some of our own bards would take the same 
 journey provided always it produced the same 
 result. Lofty, poignant, graceful, grand, high of 
 thought and clear of word, we could fancy our 
 selves reading some pungent page of Absalom and 
 Achitophel, or of the Moral Epistles, if it were not 
 for the pervading nationality, which, excepting 
 Whittier, American poets have generally wanted, 1 
 and for that true reflection of the manners and 
 the follies of the age, without which satire would 
 fail alike of its purpose and its name." 
 
 Poetry has probably existed as long as human 
 language, yet an adequate definition of what it 
 really is that we mean by the word is yet to seek. 
 It has been attempted numberless times by widely 
 different persons; as often has it been sought, 
 perhaps, as the true meaning of another word 
 wit. Yet, despite this, we are far from having a 
 satisfactory definition of either of them. Indeed 
 it is probable that when found it will be discovered 
 that it embraces the two. I myself do not intend 
 adding to the number of those who have sought to 
 express in an axiom what poetry exactly is and what 
 it is not, for, as quaint old Isaac Barrow expresses 
 
 1 Whitman s first volume was not issued until four 
 years later; while none of Lowell s "national" poetry 
 had been issued. 
 
THE POET. 39 
 
 it with regard to wit, " often it consisteth in one 
 knows not what, and springeth up one can hardly 
 tell how." All that we can say is, I do not know 
 what poetry is, but this is poetry, forthwith giving 
 an example of much riches of thought in a little 
 room of words. To show in Holmes s poetry the 
 simple terseness of expression with which he con 
 veys a deal of meaning, we may take such lines as 
 these on the first approach of spring, where the 
 second half of the first line in its context sug 
 gests so very much more than the words would 
 ordinarily convey : 
 
 " Doubtful at first, suspected more than seen, 
 The southern slopes are fringed with tender green." 
 
 Or, in another vein, we may take such an example 
 as this 
 
 " Alone, alone, the awful past 1 tread 
 White with the marbles of the slumbering dead." 
 
 Or this couplet from Spring, the same poem from 
 which is taken the first of the two preceding quota 
 tions, a couplet which Miss Mitford instanced as 
 being unmatched in flower painting 
 
 " The spendthrift crocus, bursting through the mould 
 Naked and shivering with his cup of gold." 2 
 
 Holmes s occasional verse and his more parti 
 cularly humorous writings we will consider later ; 
 
 1 Poems, i., p. 197. 2 Ibid. 
 
40 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 here we are more especially concerned with his 
 poetry, which has been to use a much ill-treated 
 expression inspired, that is, written not so much 
 in accordance with a request from without as in 
 fulfilment of a command from within. To seek 
 for such a poet s " models," to say he is of this or 
 that " school," a follower of this or that " leader," 
 a writer in this or the other " mould," were a 
 difficult task and a thankless. An American 
 critic, 1 who has exercised his ingenuity on this 
 question, has found Holmes s chief master, the man 
 by whom his style was most considerably influenced, 
 in Thomas Hood ! In support of his criticism, 
 Mr. Kennedy quotes some verses which he implies, 
 but does not state, are by Holmes, along with 
 some stanzas from one of Hood s comic ballads. 
 The examples given are both in common ballad 
 metre, but there all similarity ends ; the American 
 verses do not at all " show to what purpose Hood 
 was read by Boston and Cambridge people when 
 Holmes was making his first poems." 2 Hood s 
 poems might never have crossed the Atlantic for 
 any influence of his style discernible in the 
 Fashionable Eclogue quoted. 
 
 " Next year, papa ! next year, mamma ! 
 You know I m thirty-two," 
 
 is very much more in the style of Thomas Haynes 
 
 1 Mr. W. S. Kennedy. 
 2 W. S. Kennedy, 0. W. Holmes, p. 287. 
 
THE POET. 41 
 
 Bay ley, or even of Praed, than in that of Hood. 
 Both Hood and Holmes are true humourists 
 both of them have " touched alike the springs of 
 laughter and the source of tears ; " l and examples 
 might, it is true, be quoted, showing the apparent 
 influence of Hood s punning style 
 
 " Milton to Stilton would give in, and Solomon to 
 
 Salmon, 
 
 And Roger Bacon be a bore, and Francis Bacon 
 gammon ! " 2 
 
 Or, again, one might take a single poem Lexington, 
 for instance and declare that Holmes s poetry bore 
 distinct evidence of having been influenced by the 
 songs and melodies of Thomas Moore 
 
 " Slowly the mist o er the meadow was creeping, 
 
 Bright on the dewy buds glistened the sun, 
 When from his couch, while his children were sleeping, 
 Rose the bold rebel and shouldered his gun." 3 
 
 Might we not imagine that Erin s laureate him 
 self had touched the harp-strings which responded 
 thus ? Or, yet again, we might take that exquisite 
 gem, The Chambered Nautilus, and say, Here is the 
 work of a poet who must have drunk deep and 
 long at seventeenth-century founts who is closely 
 and sympathetically acquainted with Abraham 
 Cowley, Andrew Marvell, and kindred son Is. 
 
 1 Douglas Jerrold, dedication of Cakes and Ale to Hood. 
 - Poems, i. p. 88. 3 Ibid., i., p. 67. 
 
42 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 " This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign, 
 Sails the unshadowed main, 
 The venturous bark that flings 
 On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings 
 In gulfs enchanted, where the Siren sings, 
 
 And coral reefs lie bare, 
 
 Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming 
 hair." > 
 
 The task of tracing each line of a poet s work 
 to some previous writer is, however, an ungracious 
 one ; plagiarism and imitation are less common 
 than some would have us believe, and what often 
 appear as such would prove, if proof were possible, 
 nothing but mere coincidence. " Given certain 
 factors," as the Autocrat expresses it, " and a 
 sound brain should always evolve the same fixed 
 product with the certainty of Babbage s calculating 
 machine." 2 The youthful poet, with but rarest, 
 if there be any, exception, will, at first, express 
 himself in forms with which he is familiar, and the 
 attainment of a form for himself will be a mere 
 matter of evolution, as he finds for himself the 
 way in which it is best for him to give out that 
 which he has to impart. We might take various 
 isolated poems or passages from Holmes s works, 
 showing the apparent influence or imitation of 
 widely differing writers, as I have shown, yet we 
 should but little affect his title to originality; 
 
 Poems, ii., p. 107. 2 Autocrat, p. 8. 
 
THE POET. 43 
 
 indeed, early as her criticism was formulated, Miss 
 Mitford was not far wrong in hailing Holmes as 
 one of the first of America s peculiarly national 
 poets. He is not national in the sense of having 
 written for all time the legends of the Indians in 
 a Hiawatha ; yet how much more he represents 
 the peculiar temper of his countrymen than 
 Longfellow is very obvious on the slightest com 
 parison of their works. He is not national in 
 the sense of having treated of native places and 
 legends with their names ! such as we have in 
 Mogg Megone. Yet there can, I think, be little 
 doubt about his being even more national than 
 Whittier, with whom it is that Miss Mitford 
 brackets him. He is not national in the sense 
 of having caught and perpetuated in a poem the 
 dialect of a Hosea Biylow yet I should place him 
 before Lowell in this regard. He is not national 
 in the sense of having struck a new vehicle for 
 poetic expression such as is given us in The Leave? 
 of Grass ; yet it is apparent that even more than 
 Walt Whitman is Holmes peculiarly national. 
 Longfellow and Lowell, Whittier and Whitman, 
 each represents some particular phase of the 
 national life, character, traditions, or peculiarities ;. 
 but Holmes draws upon all these, and subtly, yet 
 consistently, interweaves in his work any such 
 real difference as may exist between the American 
 nation and the parent race from which it has 
 
44 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 mainly sprung. The result is a curious inter 
 weaving of shrewd Poor Eichard-like common 
 sense, with high and beautiful thoughts, the 
 texture of poetry, which, as I take it, is the most 
 peculiarly national that America has yet pro 
 duced. Pegasus has not yet been thoroughly 
 acclimatised, as yet he is only allowed to fly with 
 clipped wings, for fear he should fly beyond the 
 common bound of common sense, or to feel when 
 he tries a flight that 
 
 " The world s cart-collar hugs his throat. " * 
 
 We have, scattered throughout Holmes s three 
 volumes of poems, delicate hints of stories and tra 
 ditions of old Colonial days, along with beautiful 
 descriptive passages, and the constant recurrence of 
 a mirth -provoking humour often allied with high 
 moral truths and touching pathos, in a way that 
 is strikingly characteristic, and which is very much 
 wanting in what is called, or calls itself, " the new 
 humour." His many loving references to the old 
 days before the Declaration of Independence, and 
 also to " Mother " England, as Mistress Bradstreet 
 had called it, testify to a certain wholesome con 
 servatism in the mind of the poet, and do not one 
 whit lessen his great love and admiration for the 
 present Republic. Among his themes, dealing with 
 the old days in America, not one is more delightful 
 
 1 Coventry Patmorc : The Angel in the House. 
 
THE POET. 45 
 
 than Dorothy Q., a Family Portrait, a poem which, 
 written in 1871, has all the freshness and spirit 
 of the author s earlier works, and which is peculiarly 
 representative of his style both of thought and 
 expression. 
 
 " O Damsel Dorothy ! Dorothy Q. ! 
 Strange is the gift that I owe to you. 
 
 ***** 
 
 " What if a hundred years ago 
 Those close-shut lips had answered No, 
 When forth the tremulous question came 
 That cost the maiden her Norman name, 
 And under the folds that look so still 
 The bodice swelled with the bosom s thrill ? 
 Should I be I, or would it be 
 One-tenth another, to nine-tenths me ? 
 
 " Soft is the breath of a maiden s YES : 
 Not the light gossamer stirs with less ; 
 But never a cable that holds so fast 
 Through all the battles of wave and blast, 
 And never an echo of speech or song 
 That lives in the babbling air so long ! 
 There were tones in the voice that whispered then 
 You may hear to-day in a hundred men. 
 
 " 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 ? 
 
46 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 " It shall be a blessing, my little maid ! 
 I will heal the stab of the Ked-Coat s blade, 
 And freshen the gold of the tarnished frame, 
 And gild with a rhyme your household name." 
 
 Dorothy Q. was Dorothy Quincy, Holmes s great- 
 grandmother 
 
 " Grandmother s mother : her age, I guess, 
 Thirteen summers or something less." 2 
 
 Another delightful story-poem of the old time is 
 Grandmother s Story of Bunker-Hill Battle, as she 
 saw it from the Belfry. Curiously enough, in this 
 poem we have at the conclusion a theme similar to 
 that in the passage just quoted ; after telling her 
 grandchildren how, as a girl, she had watched the 
 fight, and fainted, and been carried home 
 
 <; When I woke from dreams affrighted the evening lamps 
 
 were lighted, 
 On the floor a youth was lying ; his bleeding breast was 
 
 bare. 
 
 ***** 
 ~" For they all thought he was dying, as they gathered 
 
 round him crying, 
 And they said, Oh, how they ll miss him ! and, What 
 
 will his mother do? 
 Then, his eyelids just unclosing like a child s that has 
 
 been dozing, 
 He faintly murmured, Mother ! and I saw his eyes 
 
 were blue. 
 
 1 Poems ii., p. 206. - Ibid., ii., p. 205. 
 
THE POET. 47 
 
 " Why, grandma, how you re winking ! Ah, my child, 
 
 it sets me thinking 
 Of a story not like this one. Well, he somehow lived 
 
 along ; 
 So we came to know each other, and I nursed him like 
 
 a mother, 
 Till at last he stood before me, tall, and rosy-cheeked, and 
 
 strong. 
 
 " And we sometimes walked together in the pleasant 
 
 summer weather, 
 4 Please to tell us what his name was ? Just your own, 
 
 my little dear, 
 There s his picture Copley painted : we became so well 
 
 acquainted, 
 That in short, that s why I m grandma, and you children 
 
 all are here ! " 
 
 Another old-world theme is touched upon in 
 Agnes, which tells, in simple ballad metre and 
 language, the pathetic story of a New England 
 knight and his humble love ; how he makes her 
 his mistress and then, she having saved his life 
 at Lisbon during the earthquake, marries her 
 
 " Thus Agnes won her noble name, 
 
 Her lawless lover s hand ; 
 The lowly maiden so became 
 A lady in the land ! " * 
 
 One of the most striking features of Holmes s 
 writings both prose and poetry is the evidence 
 of the remarkable power which he has of seizing 
 upon happy similes ; a page is often rich with a 
 
 1 Poems, iii., p. 10. * Ibid., i., p. 190. 
 
48 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 wealth of imagery that would serve a " minor " 
 writer for a volume. That Holmes is a true 
 poet is a matter about which there cannot be 
 any doubt, despite the fact that many persons 
 would add, " Yes, a true humorous poet ," implying 
 in their use of the word humorous a something 
 derogatory to the man s genius as a poet. Yes, he 
 is a humorous poet ; and in the peculiar sense of 
 being a true poet and a great humourist combined 
 we can only find his equal in Thomas Hood. 
 Although both as poets and as humourists they 
 were quite unlike, still in the peculiar combination 
 of the two functions they are the same. They are 
 not poets, without the saving quality- of humour ; 
 they are not versifying humourists like a Coleman, 
 a Hook, or a W. S. Gilbert, who are humourists 
 merely using the poetic vehicle stripped of all that 
 makes it poetry. Holmes is a didactic poet, not 
 
 " dealing counsel from a lofty height 
 That makes the lowly hate it," 
 
 but using his poetry as a means to teach men the 
 truths that have come to him as one of themselves, 
 and it is the entente cordiale consequently es 
 tablished between writer and readers that makes 
 him so widely loved. It is not often in his pages 
 that we light upon a purely imaginative poem, 
 such as The Chambered Nautilus arid Musa and a 
 few more, but when we do we are sure to find that 
 
THE POET. 49 
 
 they bear instant evidence of their origin in the 
 alembic of a pure poet s soul. Of the combination 
 of humour and pathos referred to we have frequent 
 examples in that most striking series of vers 
 d occasion entitled in the collected works, Poems of 
 the Class of 29. This series, which extended from 
 1851 until 1889, while giving us examples of many 
 different moods, has yet running like a silver thread 
 through all a bright, unfailing, humour-loving opti 
 mism. After reading, one year, a half-regretful 
 musing over their long past, their " class poet " 
 would come before " The Boys," as he called them, 
 with a rousing verse of humour : 
 
 " I like full well the deep resounding swell 
 
 Of mighty symphonies with chords inwoven ; 
 But sometimes, too, a song of Burns don t you ? 
 After a solemn storm-blast of Beethoven. 
 
 " Good to the heels the well-worn slipper feels 
 
 When the tired player shuffles off the buskin ; 
 A page of Hood may do a fellow good 
 
 After a scolding from Carlyle or Kuskin." 
 
 The very next year we have a really pathetic 
 picture called up before us of the last survivor of 
 the class : 
 
 " Yes ! the vacant chairs tell sadly we are going, going 
 
 fast, 
 And the thought comes strangely o er me, who will live to 
 
 be the last ? 
 
 ***** 
 
 1 1 Of ins, ii., j-. 73. 
 
50 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 His figure shows but dimly, his face 1 scarce can see, 
 There s something that reminds me, it looks like is it 
 
 he? 
 He ? Who ? No voice may whisper what wrinkled brow 
 
 shall claim 
 The wreath of stars that circles our last survivor s name." 
 
 Celebrated as they thus have been by the 
 greatest of their number the members of the 
 Harvard Class of 29 will enjoy a unique fame, for 
 the poems written for their anniversary meeting 
 are something far better in quality than we are 
 accustomed to associate with poetical work produced 
 in such circumstances. 
 
 " Year by year, like milestones placed, 
 Mark the record Friendship traced. 
 Prisoned in the walls of time 
 Life has notched itself in rhyme." 2 
 
 Holmes s occasional verse is really remarkable 
 for its combination of the qualities which charac 
 terise the rest of his poetry one becomes aware 
 at once that the poems are no laboured task which 
 the poet has badgered his brains to produce for the 
 stated occasion, but are the fresh outpourings of 
 a cheerful, healthy and remarkably ready poetic 
 nature. Some beautiful pieces celebrate various 
 Harvard anniversaries, other than those connected 
 with the class of 29, meetings of alumni, etc. The 
 " old boy " tells them, in verses always containing 
 
 1 Poems, ii., p. 78. * Ibid.,il, p. 201. 
 
THE POET. 51 
 
 an undercurrent of deep thought, what they 
 dreamed of when young, and what has come in 
 the shape of experience with the gathering years 
 
 " We ve seen the little tricks of life, its varnish and veneer, 
 Its stucco-fronts of character flake off and disappear, 
 We ve learned that oft the brownest hands will heap the 
 
 biggest pile, 
 And met with many a perfect brick beneath a rimless 
 
 tile. 
 
 " What dreams we ve had of deathless name, as scholars, 
 
 statesmen, bards, 
 While Fame, the lady with the trump, held up her picture 
 
 cards ! 
 Till, having nearly played our game, she gaily whispered, 
 
 Ah! 
 I said you should be something grand, you ll soon be 
 
 grandpapa. " 
 
 In 1836 on the celebration of the two-hundredth 
 anniversary of Harvard, Holmes -felix audacia 
 sang a song of his own. Fifty years later, at a 
 similar celebration, he read a long poem, full of 
 the fire, fervour, and character which we find in 
 his earlier work. Whenever such occasions have 
 arisen during his long life, Holmes has been called 
 upon to celebrate the event in verse, and not alone 
 on such occasions, but also on innumerable minor 
 and more private ones, at times when people were 
 gathered together to hail the coming, speed the 
 
 1 Poems, i., p. 2G5. 
 
52 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 parting guest. Preluding Songs of Many Seasons 
 in 1874 the poet himself said, 
 
 " Not for glory, not for pelf, 
 Not, be sure, to please myself, 
 Not for any meaner ends, 
 Always by request of friends. 
 
 " Here s the cousin of a King, 
 Would I do the civil thing ? 
 Here s the first-born of a Queen : 
 Here s a slant-eyed Mandarin. 
 
 " Would I polish off Japan ? 
 Would I greet this famous man, 
 Prince or Prelate, Sheik or Shah ? 
 Figaro c;i and Figaro la ! 
 
 " Would I just this once comply ? 
 So they teased and teased till I 
 (Be the truth at once confessed) 
 Wavered -yielded did my best." 
 
 Even in his lighter poems, those dealing with 
 essentially humorous subjects, or those with which 
 he delighted after-dinner audiences, we have 
 evidence that, as he expresses it, while his gay 
 stanzas 
 
 " pleased the banquet s lords, 
 The soul within was tuned to deeper chords ! " 
 
 Among the humorous poems which we find in 
 Holmes s three volumes several have for many 
 years been favourites of readers and reciters at 
 
 Poems, ii., p. 201. IUd., i., p. 109. 
 
THE POET. 53 
 
 popular entertainments such, for instance, as the 
 Deacon s Masterpiece ; or, The Wonderful" One-Hoss 
 >V/iy," ] a poem which may well stand as repre 
 sentative of the best expression of American 
 humour. This is, however, but one of many poems 
 which might be included in the same category. 
 In these poems humour has been the motif, while 
 in many others humour is used as a light the 
 better to throw up the meaning which the author 
 wishes to convey as the jam of sweetness in 
 which the doctor-poet often disguises a powder 
 of teaching. Humour is certainly one of the 
 essential factors in the constitution of Holmes s 
 genius, although he can at times wax deadly 
 serious when combating what appears to him as 
 humbug or meanness, writing even with scathing 
 satire at times, as when he addressed a poem, during 
 the inter- States struggle, to The Sweet Little Man, 
 and dedicated it to the " Stay-at-Home Rangers " 
 
 " Bring him the buttonless garment of woman ! 
 
 Cover his face lest it freckle and tan ; 
 Muster the Apron-String Guards on the Common, 
 That is the corps for the sweet little man ! " 2 
 
 This satiric turn to his humour is frequently 
 given in snatches of his song, as though the philo 
 sopher were driving a truth home with a weapon 
 lent him by the poet. Of the pen he says in The 
 
 1 Poems, ii., p. 1IU. - llnd., ii., p. lMt>. 
 
54 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 Schoolboy, a song which celebrated the centennial 
 of Phillips s Academy, l 
 
 " Too ready servant, whose deceitful ways 
 Full many a slip-shod line, alas ! betrays ; 
 Hence of the rhyming thousand not a few 
 Have builded worse a great deal than they knew." - 
 
 Or we may take a passage such as this from a 
 poem read at a Medical Society dinner 
 
 " Strong is the moral blister that will draw 
 Laid on the conscience of the Man of Law, 
 Whom blindfold Justice lends her eyes to see 
 Truth in the scale that holds his promised fee." 3 
 
 Or this, from verses addressed to James Russell 
 Lowell, where we have a very happy use made of 
 one of the most famous lines from Chevy Chase 
 
 " And if we lose him our lament will be 
 We have five hundred not as good as he. " 3 
 
 Of humour pure and simple, the humour of 
 extravagance or of fun, we have many examples 
 scattered up and down the pages. 
 
 " A health to stout Hans Breitmann ! How long before 
 
 we see 
 Another Hans as handsome, as bright a man as he ! " 5 
 
 Of the grand new gilded dome of Boston, " the hub 
 of the solar system," he says 
 
 1 See ante, p. 6. 3 Poems, iii., p. 112. 
 
 - Powis, iii., p. 94. 4 Ibid., iii., p. 135. 
 
 5 Ibid., iii., 157. 
 
THE POET. 55 
 
 " When first in bis path a young asteroid found it, 
 
 As he sailed through the skies with the stars in his 
 
 wake, 
 
 He thought twas the sun, and kept circling around it 
 Till Edison signalled, You ve made a mistake. " 
 
 In reading many of these purely humorous 
 ebullitions of playful fancy, it seems difficult to 
 realise that they are by the poet who could at 
 times touch the lyre with such very different effect. 
 It is interesting to notice that during the first 
 years of his poethood Holmes wrote some of the 
 most wildly humorous and at the same time some 
 of the most obviously serious of his work. The 
 transition from the one to the other is probably 
 but natural youth knows no " happy mean," if 
 the term be not inaccurate it is wildly playful, 
 or, when serious, it is so in deadly earnest. In 
 middle and later life the poet has apparently 
 realised that his work has received most attention, 
 and therefore, it is to be presumed, has had most 
 effect, when he has succeeded in subtly fusing the 
 two qualities in such a way as he has made 
 familiar to us in a great number of his poems. 
 It has been said that we have to go back to the 
 date of Dryden and Pope, or at least to that of 
 Goldsmith, for poetry to which that of Holmes 
 is most akin. In his didactic couplets we may 
 perhaps frequently find passages suggestive of the 
 
 1 Poems, iii., p. 81. 
 
56 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 earlier writers, and for forceful directness, com 
 bined with simplicity of expression, we might find 
 many lines parallel with those of Oliver Gold 
 smith. The humour of Dryden and Pope was 
 the grim humour of the satirist, and not of that 
 harmless kind whose lambent light plays around 
 so much of Holmes s writings. With Goldsmith, 
 the kinship is perhaps somewhat closer, although 
 the resources of the more modern poet-doctor 
 for did not Goldy, too, write himself M.D. ? are 
 more plentiful, and his wide and various knowledge 
 of men gives him an advantage over poor Nolly. 
 
 Holmes s faculty for seizing upon similes and 
 allusions is extraordinary and perhaps unequalled. 
 Thomas Moore plumed himself on a friend having 
 totted up the similes in his Life, of Sheridan, the 
 abundance of which, said the self-satisfied singer, 
 was strong evidence of his poetic nature ; as 
 though it was necessary that the writer of Lalla 
 Rookh and the Irish Melodies should have compiled 
 a Life of Sheridan to prove that he was a poet ! 
 The friend who should set about so thankless a 
 task for Oliver Wendell Holmes would at any rate 
 be able to produce a very large total on the com 
 pletion of his misapplied labours. In this regard, 
 Lowell, perhaps, may run Holmes rather close, for 
 he also possesses in a remarkable degree the power 
 of instantly calling up illustrations to point that 
 which he may be saying ; for instance, how very 
 
THE POET. 57 
 
 beautiful yet how unexpected is the simile in this 
 verse describing Huldy in the later versions of Tlie 
 C our tin I 
 
 " For she was jest the quiet kind 
 
 Whose naturs never vary, 
 Like streams that keep a summer mind 
 Snow-hid in Jenooary." 
 
 How happy, too, is the same writer s allusion in 
 the Biylow Papers \ 
 
 " We begin to think it s nater 
 
 To take sarse an not be riled ; 
 Who d expect to see a tater 
 All on eend at bein biled ? " 
 
 Every page that Holmes has written, of prose or 
 poetry, reveals his possession of this power in a 
 remarkable degree a power which must have gone 
 far to give his work the high place which it holds 
 in the regard of present readers, and to which it 
 will probably owe much of its fame in years to 
 come. We may glance at one or two illustrative 
 examples of what is here insisted upon. In describ 
 ing the difference between the time of youth and of 
 age he tells us that 
 
 " The hearts that were thumping like ships on the rocks 
 Beat as quiet and steady as meeting-house clocks." - 
 
 1 J. R. Lowell: Collected Work*, vol. viii., p. 45. 
 - K, ii., p. 60. 
 
58 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 " Stick to your aim : the mongrel s hold will slip, 
 But only crowbars loose the bulldog s grip." 
 
 " On the blue flower a bluer flower you spy, 
 You stretch to pluck it tis a butterfly ; 
 The flattened tree-toads so resemble bark, 
 They re hard to find as Ethiops in the dark ; 
 The woodcock, stiffening to fictitious mud, 
 Cheats the } r oung sportsman thirsting for his blood ; 
 So by long living on a single lie, 
 Nay, on one truth, will creatures get its dye." 2 
 
 " Women, with tongues 
 Like polar needles, ever on the jar ; 
 Men, plugless word-spouts, whose deep fountains are 
 Within their lungs." 3 
 
 " Time is the angel-thief which Nature sends us 
 To break the cramping fetters of our past." 4 
 
 " How the past spreads out in vision with its far-receding 
 
 train, 
 
 Like a long-embroidered arras in the chambers of the 
 brain." 5 
 
 It will be seen at once by these few examples how 
 readily the poet lays hold of similes quite apposite, 
 yet, entirely unhackneyed and unspoiled by endless 
 repetition, they come upon us as we read with all 
 the pleasure of that surprise which is said to lie at 
 the root of our delight in wit. 
 
 It is very obvious that Holmes s work contrasts 
 
 1 Poems, i., p. 121. 3 Poems, I, p. 1<>. 
 
 - Ibid., i., p. 207. 4 Ibid., ii., p. 103. 
 
 5 Ibid., ii., p. 81. 
 
THE POET. 59 
 
 very sharply with that of those morbidly melan 
 choly " albino-poets," as he terms them, " whose 
 refrain is * I shall die and be forgotten, and the 
 world will go on just as if I had never been ; 
 yet how I have loved ! how I have longed ! how 
 I have aspired ! " 1 
 
 There is, perhaps, no commoner and at the 
 same time there is no more dangerous form of 
 criticism than that which attempts to forecast the 
 view which the Future (capitalised) will take of 
 a given piece of work, or the works of a given 
 author. The criticism which consists in saying, 
 "This will live when Homer is forgotten " " and 
 not till then," as a wit is reported to have added 
 is of course sweeping, but it is if one may be 
 permitted the apparent Hibernianism sweepingly 
 inconclusive ; it is given with an air of assurance 
 which is begotten of the fact that the critic knows 
 that until the Future has become the Present in 
 other words until " Homer is forgotten " his judg 
 ment though it may be called in question cannot 
 be refuted. It is true that the work so welcomed 
 may be forgotten during the lifetime of both critic 
 and author, " tis nothing," says the critic the 
 author, of course, saying " Ditto, to Mr. Burke " 
 while triumphantly pointing to great works which 
 Fame, the jilt, has studiously neglected for long 
 
 1 .1 i/tocrat, p. 185. 
 
60 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 periods and then welcomed with a smile of recogni 
 tion and taken into her favour. The work hailed 
 with delight and ranked with the greatest is per 
 chance soon forgotten, it becomes that nine-days 
 wonder, that thing for which the writer for cash 
 must pray day and night, and for which the 
 true literary artist must as earnestly pray may 
 not be his " the book of the season." Such as a 
 topical song is to music, as a daily illustrated paper 
 is to art, so is, most often, the book of the season 
 to literature it is for a season and not for all 
 time. Another book, published it may be at the 
 very same time, has fallen foul of the critics, or has 
 fallen, apparently, stillborn from the press, and is 
 yet destined to be one of the books of the world. 
 
 I will not say of Holmes that he will be remem 
 bered when Homer is forgotten ; we may, however, 
 consider the position which he occupies among his 
 contemporaries the leading men of letters of 
 America. " Who " asked Sydney Smith, in a 
 famous review "Who in all the four Continents 
 reads an American book? " The century has seen 
 great changes, and to-day we ask, " What English 
 publisher does not profit by pirating American 
 books for British readers 1 " Holmes s works alone 
 are procurable from half a dozen publishers other 
 than the firm which issues his authorised collected 
 edition. As a poet, the position which rightfully 
 belongs to Holmes is immediately after Long- 
 
THE POET. 6 1 
 
 fellow in point of fame, while in point of popu 
 larity he is probably to-day the very first. It 
 may yet be true, as has been suggested, that his 
 work is less likely to live through being scat 
 tered over so many short pieces through there 
 being no one great poem to remember him by and 
 through so much of it being written for certain 
 stated occasions. 
 
III. 
 
 THE NOVELIST. 
 FILLING AN ORDER. 
 
 (Read at the Holmes Breakfast, December 3rd, 1879.) 
 BY J. T. TROWBEIDGE. 
 
 To Nature, in her shop one day, at work compounding 
 simples, 
 
 Studying fresh tints for Beauty s cheeks, or new effects in 
 dimples, 
 
 An order came : she wiped in haste her fingers and un 
 folded 
 
 The scribbled scrap, put on her specs, and read it while 
 she scolded. 
 
 " From Miss Columbia ! I declare ! of all the upstart 
 
 misses ! 
 What will the jade be asking next ? Now what an order 
 
 this is ! 
 Where s Boston ? Oh, that one-horse town out there beside 
 
 the ocean ! 
 She wants of course, she always wants another little 
 
 notion ! 
 
 " This time, three geniuses, Al ! to grace her favourite 
 
 city : 
 The first, a bard ; the second, wise ; the third, supremely 
 
 witty ; 
 
 62 
 
THE NOVELIST. 63 
 
 None of the staid and hackneyed sort, but some peculiar 
 flavour. 
 
 Something unique and fresh for each will be esteemed a 
 favour ! 
 
 Modest demands ! as if my hands had but to turn and 
 toss over 
 
 A Poet veined with dew and fire, a Wit, and a Philo 
 sopher ! 
 
 " But now, let s see ! " She put aside her old, outworn 
 
 expedients, 
 
 And in a quite unusual way began to mix ingredients, 
 Some in the fierce retort distilled, some pounded by the 
 
 pestle, 
 And set the simmering souls to steep, each in its glowing 
 
 vessel. 
 In each, by turns, she poured, she stirred, she skimmed 
 
 the shining liquor, 
 Threw laughter in to make it thin, or thought, to make it 
 
 thicker. 
 But when she came to choose the clay, she found, to her 
 
 vexation, 
 
 That, with a stock on hand to fill an order for a nation, 
 Of that more finely tempered stuff, electric and ethereal, 
 Of which a genius must be formed, she had but scant 
 
 material 
 For three ? For one ! What should be done ? A bright 
 
 idea struck her : 
 Her old witch-eyes began to shine, her mouth began to 
 
 pucker. 
 
 t jays she, " The fault, I m well aware, with genius is the 
 presence 
 )f altogether too much clay, with quite too little 
 essence, 
 ind .sluggish atoms that obstruct the spiritual solution ; 
 k> now, instead of spoiling these by over much dilution, 
 
64 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 With their fine elements I ll make a single, rare pheno 
 menon, 
 
 And of three common geniuses concoct a most uncommon 
 one, 
 
 So that the world shall smile to see a soul so universal. 
 
 Such poesy and pleasantry, packed in so small a parcel." 
 
 So said, so done ; the three in one she wrapped, and 
 
 stuck the label : 
 Poet, Professor, Autocrat of Wit s own Breakfast-Table. 
 
 IN glancing over the facts of Holmes s life it was 
 seen that he did not become a novelist until he 
 had reached the mature age of half a century an 
 almost unprecedented instance of deferred develop 
 ment of a talent. It is, of course, true that during 
 the two years which preceded the first appearance 
 of Elsie Venner, the author had been writing a 
 kind of fiction in the first two-thirds of the Break 
 fast-Table Series. He had, however, made no 
 effort at a sustained plot and the consecutive 
 arraying of events round certain individuals 
 which we have come to look upon as essential in 
 the novel ; therefore, despite the Professor s and 
 Schoolmistress s romance we can scarcely classify 
 the earlier works with the three volumes of fiction, 
 although we find in the former many of the dis 
 tinguishing qualities of the latter. It is, however, 
 just those qualities of the causeur which charm 
 us in the Breakfast-Table speaker that, on the 
 whole, detract from the value of the novel, both as 
 
THE NOVELIST. 65 
 
 an example of the art of fiction, and as a mere story. 
 The most obvious of these qualities is discursiveness 
 the discursiveness of desultory conversation which 
 from one subject passes on to another with such 
 fine connecting threads, that those who are speak 
 ing are often ignorant of the conversational short 
 cuts which have taken them, perchance within 
 three minutes, from discussing the dresses worn 
 at the Drawing Room to the prospects of the 
 whale fishery. This method of telling a story a 
 perennial source of delight in the gossiping philo 
 sophy of the Autocrat and the Professor borders 
 upon the irritating when we are reading Elsie 
 Venner, The Guardian Angel, and, most of all, 
 A Mortal Antipathy. 
 
 A series of articles appeared in a London maga 
 zine several years ago in which the writer 
 appropriately named N. E. Howe started off 
 with the intention of getting to Tottenham 
 Court Road ; one subject led to another, until he 
 found himself very far afield at the conclusion 
 of each article, and in each succeeding paper made 
 a fresh start, with, of course, a similar result. 
 This went on for many weeks, but whether Mr. 
 N. E. Howe succeeded eventually in reaching 
 Tottenham Court Road my memory refuses to 
 livulge. I am often reminded in reading Holmes 
 of those Higgledy-Pigyledy Papers, for at times the 
 story gets almost lost sight of while the raconteur 
 
 5 
 
66 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 indulges himself in a bit of more or less relevant 
 scientific disquisition, personal reminiscence, or 
 curious book-lore ; the chapter is then brought to 
 an end and the thread of the story retaken up at 
 the commencement of the next. Although this is, 
 artistically, a fault, it is one which the charm of 
 Holmes s style helps to minimise, and which to a 
 certain extent his readers anticipate from him as 
 the dilettante speaker of the breakfast-table. Woe 
 unto the young fictionist who should essay the 
 same discursiveness ! 
 
 Holmes s novels form three of the thirteen volumes 
 of his collected works; they are, Elsie Venner : 
 a Romance of Destiny (originally called The Pro 
 fessor s Story), 1860; The Guardian Angel (in a 
 subtle sense a sequel to the earlier work), 1867 ; 
 and, nearly twenty years later, A Mortal Antipathy 
 in 1885. Each of these three books is remarkable, 
 and each more or less in the same ways remark 
 able, that is, in the bold originality of plot for 
 stories dealing with modern life, in the delicate 
 and skilful handling of delicate subjects, in the 
 strong portrayal of individual characters, and in 
 the thought-laden sentences which build up the 
 story and which may often be read by the seeker 
 for a mere story oblivious of the fact that they are 
 any more significant than the sentences which build 
 up the average three-volume novel such readers, 
 that is, as would, to use Doctor Holmes s own illus- 
 
THE NOVELIST. 67 
 
 
 tration, read JEsop s Fables and skip the morals. 
 The novels are obviously the work of a doctor 
 and of a poet though the young aspirant to the 
 poet s bays gets somewhat severely treated in 
 the character of Gifted Hopkins in The Guardian 
 A ngel. The professional man has not only supplied 
 the leading idea for each story, but here and there 
 the reader observes in every chapter the technical 
 knowledge cropping out. The ready profusion 
 of imagery and similes, a characteristic which 
 we have treated earlier, is essentially that of a 
 poetic nature. 
 
 In saying that the doctor has supplied the 
 leading idea for each of these three stories, we have 
 already indicated that they are " novels with a 
 purpose." Now this class of fiction has to-day 
 become so common, and, perhaps, so abused, an 
 institution, that if on picking up a new work we 
 find it stated early in the preface that " through 
 all the disguise of fiction a grave scientific (social, 
 moral or theological, according to the bent of 
 the writer) doctrine may be detected," most of 
 us, it is to be suspected, would drop the book in 
 disgust, and take up by preference a story that 
 aimed at being nothing more. The " novel with 
 a purpose " during the first half of the present 
 century had been mainly concerned with showing 
 how, despite all trials, goodness and virtue were 
 sure to triumph over badness and vice ; that 
 
68 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 although the course of true love never did run 
 smooth during the first four hundred and ninety- 
 nine pages, so soon as the hero and heroine had 
 reached the five-hundredth page they got on to a 
 perfectly level track, and all went smoothly after 
 wards; the path to the church door was shown 
 full of deadly dangers, the road was of the 
 roughest, storms lowered, villains and false lovers 
 were at every turn ready to effect some (always 
 foiled) deadly purpose to thwart the onward journey 
 of the devoted lovers; stern, unsympathising 
 parents and guardians with their attendant tools 
 grew "thick as weeds" on the way; but the 
 church door once attained, the hero and heroine 
 when they came out again found all was changed ; 
 the sun shone brilliantly, the birds sang, the easy 
 pleasant path " wound on through vistas of the 
 future " (whatever that might mean), while every 
 person that was met proved a friend and a bene 
 factor, and and " they all lived happily ever 
 after." Such was the novel that gladdened the 
 hearts and improved the morals of our great- 
 grandparents ; but, nous avons change tout cela ; 
 now the novel with a purpose gives us an unimpeded 
 short-cut through the first three chapters to the 
 church (or registry office), the hero and heroine are 
 married, or perhaps one of them to the wrong person, 
 and then begins the course that is not smooth. 
 This is, perhaps, taking somewhat extreme 
 
THE NOVELIST. 69 
 
 instances, for it is an undoubted fact that many 
 novels with a purpose have effectively fulfilled 
 that purpose. Novels of this order are, however, 
 of widely differing varieties. From the social 
 reform novels of some years ago inaugurated, or 
 at any rate considerably strengthened, by Charles 
 Dickens we have at length got to the fashionable 
 religious-problem, or marriage- problem novel of 
 recent date. It is an interesting question 
 although one which the critic of the future will 
 alone be competent to answer satisfactorily as 
 to how far a novelist curtails his fame, in point of 
 time, by dealing with problems of the moment. 
 It seems reasonable to suppose that the genera 
 tions of readers who come after the solution of 
 the problem will take but a slight, and ever 
 lessening, interest in works the reason for whose 
 being is the statement of a position which they 
 probably are unable to realise. To put the ques 
 tion shortly, and by example, will not the novels 
 told for the sake of the romance, say those of 
 Walter Scott, outlast in popularity the novels 
 with a purpose, to give another foremost example, 
 of Charles Dickens ? 
 
 Doctor Holmes s are essentially novels with a 
 purpose; though the problems with which they 
 deal are of much more than mere temporary 
 interest ; yet the fact that they are such, is likely 
 to militate against them as living works of art. 
 
70 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 The problem which is dealt with in the first of 
 the three novels Elsie Venner is as to how far 
 an individual, suffering from hereditary or other 
 pre-natal bias, is a responsible being and answer 
 able to ordinary moral or human law as a free 
 agent. In a note in a late edition of the Pro 
 fessor at the Breakfast-Table, the author evidenced 
 his lasting interest in such a problem. A dis 
 cussion had arisen at the breakfast-table over a 
 line in one of Holmes s own poems, 
 
 " Don t be consistent but be simply true." l 
 
 " The more I have observed and reflected," he 
 went on to say, "the more limited seems to me 
 the field of action of the human will. Every act 
 of choice involves a special relation between the 
 ego and the conditions before it. But no man 
 knows what forces are at work in the determina 
 tion of his ego. The bias which decides his choice 
 between two or more motives, may come from 
 some unsuspected ancestral source, of which he 
 knows nothing at all. He is automatic in virtue 
 of that hidden spring of reflex action, all the time 
 having the feeling that he is self -determining. 
 The story of Elsie Venner, written soon after this 
 book was published, illustrates the direction in 
 which my thought was moving. The imaginary 
 subject of the story obeyed her will, but her will 
 
 Poems, i., p. 121. 
 
THE NOVELIST. /I 
 
 obeyed the mysterious ante-natal poisoning influ 
 ence." This passage is also worth remembering 
 in reading The Guardian Angel. The story of 
 Elsie Venner ran in serial form through the pages 
 of the Atlantic Monthly as The Professor s Love 
 Story, and only received its present name on 
 republication as a volume. The story seems in 
 its main theme to be wildly improbable, if not 
 impossible ; it, however, enabled the author, as 
 he expressed it later, " to suggest the limitations 
 of human responsibility in a simple and effective 
 way " ; l it reads like some old legend such as that 
 dealt with by Keats in Lamia, or, more recently, 
 by Dr. Garnett in The Poison Maid in fact, some 
 readers have imagined it to be a modern romance 
 structure erected on an ancient foundation. 
 However, the author himself says, " My poor 
 heroine found her origin, not in fable or romance, 
 but in a physiological conception fertilised by a 
 theological dogma." 2 
 
 The idea of an animal nature subtly blent 
 with the human is a very old one. Holmes, in 
 his second preface to this book, refers to Haw 
 thorne s Marble Faun, written about the same time 
 and published while Elsie Venner was appearing 
 in the Atlantic Monthly, and also to Keats s Lamia. 
 Keats s story is taken from a passage in Burton s 
 
 1 The Guardian Angel, p. vii. 2 Elsie Venner, p. x. 
 
72 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 Anatomy of Melancholy, which again is taken 
 from Philostratus fourth book, De Vita Apollonii, 
 so that the idea is a sufficiently old one. Holmes, 
 however, as will be shown, writes on this subject 
 not so much with the object of telling an intensely 
 tragical story, as of putting a definite problem. 
 
 When this work was published Doctor Holmes 
 had turned his half-century, and although it may 
 appear remarkable that a man should commence 
 being novelist at so mature an age, it must be 
 borne in mind that the book, although a novel a 
 romance of destiny as it is called is yet something 
 more and at the same time something less than 
 a novel as that term is generally accepted. The 
 author had shown himself in the Autocrat and the 
 Professor as a delightful raconteur, and really in 
 the novel we can see the Professor behind it all. 
 The strangely mysterious destiny of Elsie herself 
 is terribly tragic; the steady diamond glitter of 
 her eyes is present to the reader all through the 
 work. Where the author can give his pathetic 
 humour play we get some beautiful pieces of 
 character drawing ; even though the persons por 
 trayed are but minor individuals in the action, 
 yet they live for us more really than do some of 
 the more fully developed ones ; the unrelievedly 
 pathetic side of life is not quite so successfully 
 dealt with, except perhaps in the case of poor, 
 long-suffering Helen Darley, who is made to live 
 
THE NOVELIST. 73 
 
 for us, and to claim our sympathy, as only genius 
 can make its puppets. As with the characters, so 
 with the book as a piece of literary workmanship, 
 looking at the words in which the story is told 
 it is most excellent where humour and pathos 
 are delicately intermingled one with the other. 
 Another striking feature, here as elsewhere, is 
 Holmes s extraordinary wealth of similes, and the 
 depth of thought which he shows throughout in 
 dealing with such difficult subjects as heredity, sin, 
 and other phases of moral responsibility. 
 
 " It is very singular that we recognise all the 
 bodily defects that unfit a man for military service, 
 and all the intellectual ones that limit his range of 
 thought, but always talk at him as if all his moral 
 powers were perfect. I suppose we must punish 
 evil-doers as we extirpate vermin ; but I don t 
 know that we have any more right to judge them 
 than we have to judge rats and mice, which are 
 just as good as cats and weasels, though we think 
 it necessary to treat them as criminals." l This 
 passage, both in thought and feeling, is expressive 
 of much which we shall find in the novels of Oliver 
 Wendell Holmes. 
 
 Elsie Venner opens, characteristically enough, 
 with a dissertation on the state of caste which has 
 gradually grown up in democratic America by 
 
 1 Elsie Venner, p. 22(5. 
 
74 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 which an observer may know at once whether a 
 given man belongs to the classes whose members 
 have been educated for centuries, or whether he is 
 one of the many who have not had generations of 
 University training it is, indeed, an insistence 
 upon the fact of there being in the States both 
 classes and masses. This is merely preliminary 
 to the introduction of Bernard Langdon, a young 
 medical student who is just giving up his studies, 
 owing to family misfortunes, and is about to go 
 forth into the world. The Professor, who tells the 
 story, gives his whilom pupil a certificate stating 
 that he is a fit and proper individual to teach 
 persons of either sex, and from these two words 
 "either sex" the writer spins a whole chapter. 
 This is probably but the result of the habit which 
 he must have acquired during the previous years 
 of writing (Breakfast-Table Series} on subjects in 
 a conversational manner. Langdon, then, goes off 
 to a boys school where the scholars are in a state 
 of rebellion owing to the moral and physical 
 weakness of previous masters Langdon, as befits 
 the hero of a novel, is as strong physically and 
 athletically as he is morally and intellectually ; the 
 result is that he very soon restores order in the 
 rebellious school. Before his month of trial is over 
 he gets a better offer, and goes to the Apollinean 
 Institute at Kocklands, where the greater part 
 of the story centres. The assistant teacher of 
 
THE NOVELIST. 75 
 
 English at the Institute is Miss Helen Darley, and 
 among the pupils is the strangely afflicted girl, or 
 young woman, who gives her name to the story. 
 
 Elsie is the only child of Dudley Venner, of the 
 Dudley Mansion, a retired, taciturn man, whose 
 wife had died in giving birth to their daughter. 
 A short while before that happened, the young 
 wife had been bitten fatally by a crotalus or 
 rattlesnake, and the child was partially endowed 
 with a serpent nature from the moment of her 
 birth. The peculiar influence which, owing to her 
 thus ophidianised character, Elsie is capable of 
 exercising over those persons with whom she is 
 brought into contact is more particularly observable 
 in regard to the patient, overworked and sensitive 
 schoolmistress Helen Darley. No one can help 
 noticing that there is a peculiar repellent fascina 
 tion in the girl though only her father and old 
 Sophy the black nurse are aware of the reason for it. 
 The general opinion is that she is, to a certain extent, 
 mad, and so she is in being an extraordinary 
 individuality unable to control her actions by any 
 ordinary distinctions as to right and wrong. None, 
 however, even suspect the terrible nature of the 
 tragedy which is the cause of the semi-solitary life 
 led by the occupants of the Dudley Mansion. Elsie 
 goes and comes and does as she pleases ; visits with 
 impunity the crotalus-haunted heights of " the 
 mountain," even on one occasion stayed there the 
 
76 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 whole night, causing much anxiety and alarm to 
 her father and old Sophy the nurse. 
 
 It is, of course, inevitable that the fascinating 
 and afflicted Elsie shall develop a passion for the 
 young master, Bernard Langdon ; it is also as 
 inevitable that the passion shall not be reciprocated, 
 and that Elsie shall die. The romance is, indeed, a 
 tragedy of which the fifth act is foreshadowed by 
 the first. What more especially perhaps concerns 
 us here in treating of Holmes s contributions to 
 fictional literature is not so much the story as the 
 working out of the root-problem from which the 
 story grew. The author of Elsie Venner, in pen 
 ning a second preface, says that a dear old lady 
 friend of his declared that she would never read 
 the book because it was " a medicated novel " ; he 
 then goes on to say, " I was always pleased with 
 her discriminating criticism. It is a medicated 
 novel, and if she wished to read for mere amuse 
 ment and helpful recreation there was no need 
 of troubling herself with a story written with 
 a different end in view." 
 
 " The real aim of the story " (to use the author s 
 own exposition) "was to test the doctrine of original 
 sin and human responsibility for the disordered 
 volition coming under that technical denomination. 
 Was Elsie Venner, poisoned by the venom of a 
 crotalus before she was born, morally responsible 
 or the volitional aberrations, which, translated 
 
THE NOVELIST. 77 
 
 into acts, become what is known as sin, and, it may 
 be, what is punished as crime ? If, on presentation 
 of the evidence, she becomes by the verdict of the 
 human conscience a proper object of divine pity 
 and not of divine wrath, as a subject of moral 
 poisoning, wherein lies the difference between her 
 position at the bar of judgment, human or divine, 
 and that of the unfortunate victim who received 
 a moral poison from a remote ancestor before he 
 drew his first breath ? " 
 
 It is, of course, both psychologically and morally, 
 a most important problem which the doctor- 
 novelist has set, and which he has answered, in 
 this volume. Can this woman poisoned before 
 birth be held, either by God or man, entirely 
 responsible for her actions? Surely not. That 
 which is sin when conceived or performed by other 
 persons is nothing but the outcome of her natural 
 endowments natural, that is, in the sense of 
 being entirely from under her own individual 
 control. She has no perception of moral right 
 or wrong. If crossed in anything she gives way 
 to paroxysms of rage, and attempts to bite or de 
 liberately to poison whosoever shall have offended. 
 It is, taking such a case as is here indicated, 
 impossible to make Elsie morally guilty of the 
 crimes she may commit or attempt to commit. 
 Having granted this it is of course inevitable that 
 we should go one step farther, as Doctor Holmes 
 
78 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 points out, a step which, though it may still be 
 startling to some readers, is this if Elsie Venner 
 is to be pitied, not condemned, for her actions, 
 then the doctrine of individual answerability for 
 " original sin " is no longer tenable ; and, more 
 than that, in any given case of crime and wrong 
 doing we must be careful to make all due allowances 
 for transmitted tendencies in the criminal. We 
 must, indeed, carry the theory if we are yet to 
 call it but a theory of heredity to its only 
 logical conclusion; and, unless we are to punish 
 the hunchback for his hunch, the child born blind 
 for his want of sight, or the one born lame for his 
 lameness, we shall have to find some other method 
 than that of punishment for moral as well as 
 physical deformities. We shall have to deal with 
 most classes of wrong-doers as persons who are 
 not morally whole. This may to readers of to 
 day sound somewhat trite teaching, but it must 
 be borne in mind that this novel was pub 
 lished a generation ago and that the awaken 
 ing of the public interest in such questions 
 during the last quarter of a century has been 
 very sudden. Those who have grown up during 
 the change are probably but slightly aware of 
 how great it has been. 
 
 This is dealing with the germinal idea of the 
 book, but apart from this, as a novel to be " read 
 for mere amusement and helpful recreation " it 
 
THE NOVELIST. 79 
 
 calls for a few words. Those persons like Doctor 
 Holmes s lady-friend whose dislike of " medicated 
 novels" is so strong as to make them refuse to 
 read it, will lose a great deal of enjoyment both of 
 literary style and of sharply drawn characterisa 
 tion. Some of the chapters in the book, despite 
 the intensely tragic motive of the work, are pure 
 comedy those, for example, that deal with Colonel 
 Sprowle and his family all of whom are ap 
 parently introduced merely for the purpose of 
 giving the author an opportunity of heightening 
 the effect of the money-making meanness of Silas 
 Peckham, the ignorant, vulgar, and calculating 
 manager of the Rocklands Apollinean " In- 
 stitoot." The Sprowles had given a great and 
 ostentatious party to which " everybody was in 
 vited," when on the following morning Silas 
 Peckham goes round to " the Colonel s " 
 
 " Colonel Sprowle, said he, * there s meat and 
 cakes and pies and pickles enough on that table to 
 spread a hahnsome eolation. If you d like to trade 
 reasonable, I think perhaps I should be willin to 
 take em off your hands. There s been a talk about 
 our havin a celebration in the Parnassian Grove, 
 and I think I could work in what your folks don t 
 want and make myself whole by chargin a small 
 sum for tickets. Broken meats, of course, a n t 
 of the same valoo as fresh provisions ; so I think 
 you might be willin to trade reasonable. 
 
SO OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 " Mr. Peckham paused and rested on his pro 
 posal. It would not, perhaps, have been very 
 extraordinary, if Colonel Sprowle had entertained 
 the proposition. There is no telling beforehand 
 how such things will strike people. It didn t 
 happen to strike the Colonel favourably. He had 
 a little red-blooded manhood in him. 
 
 " Sell you them things to make a eolation out 
 of ? the Colonel replied. * Walk up to that table, 
 Mr. Peckham, and help yourself ! Fill your pockets, 
 Mr. Peckham ! Fetch a basket, and our hired 
 folks shall fill it full for ye ! Send a cart, if 
 y like, n. carry off them leavin s to make a cele 
 bration for your pupils with ! Only let me tell 
 ye this : as sure s my name s Hezekiah Spraowle, 
 you ll be known through the taown, n through 
 the caounty, from that day forrard, as the Principal 
 of the Broken -Victuals Institoot ! 
 
 " Even provincial human nature sometimes has 
 a touch of sublimity about it. Mr. Silas Peckham 
 had gone a little deeper than he meant, and come 
 upon the hard pan, as the well-diggers call it, 
 of the Colonel s character, before he thought of it. 
 A militia colonel standing 011 his sentiments is not 
 to be despised. . . . 
 
 " Mr. Silas Peckham said little or nothing. His 
 sensibilities were not acute, but he perceived that 
 he had made a miscalculation. He hoped that 
 there was no offence, thought it might have been 
 
THE NOVELIST. 8 1 
 
 mutooally agreeable, conclooded he would give up 
 the idee of a eolation, and backed himself out as 
 if unwilling to expose the less guarded aspect of 
 his person to the risk of accelerating impulses. 
 
 " The Colonel shut the door, cast his eye on 
 the toe of his right boot, as if it had had a strong 
 temptation, looked at his watch, then round the 
 room, and, going to a cupboard, swallowed a glass of 
 deep-red brandy and water to compose his feelings." 1 
 
 The whole of the long chapter which describes 
 the Sprowles party is deliciously humorous, 
 though its connection with the story is but very 
 slight. Contrasting passages of pathos are more 
 numerous in the romance than these comedy 
 scenes ; this however is not suprising, for out of 
 the four heroes and heroines in whom our interest 
 chiefly centres, one alone Bernard Langdon can 
 be called a normally healthy individual ; Elsie, we 
 have seen, was sorely afflicted ; her father was 
 forced, by grief for his young dead wife and living 
 daughter, to the life of a solitary and recluse ; 
 Helen Darley led an overworked and unloved life 
 of loneliness. Besides these leading characters, 
 however, Elsie Venner presents us with quite a 
 number of persons of minor import who are yet 
 sharply and completely characterised by their 
 author they stand clearly in our memory as 
 
 Vernier, pp. 131-3. 
 
82 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 though we had met and conversed with them in 
 the flesh. Such characters, for example, as the 
 Yankee school principal, Silas Peckham, ever 
 thinking of profit-making ; Colonel Sprowle and his 
 family, again, with their moneyed vulgarity, are 
 portrayed with the satiric realism of a Thackeray ; 
 then there are the two antipodean reverends Dr. 
 Honeywood and Chauncey Fairweather, each of 
 whose characters and teaching is slightly indicated 
 in his name, the former being the kindly, brotherly 
 pastor man first, and then clergyman, while the 
 other is a strict dogmatist, shivering ever on the 
 brink of Romanism ; Abel Stebbins the Doctor s 
 Man, Widow Marilla Rowens, Elsie s Cousin 
 Richard, Old Sophy the black nurse, are all 
 clearly individualised and well-rounded character- 
 conceptions which serve to impart much interest 
 and amusing by-play to the more sombre central 
 features of the volume. 
 
 In The Guardian Angel we are again brought 
 face to face with a novel, the story of which is the 
 working out of a curious problem in psychology. 
 In the preface the author refers to the various 
 readers of fables the many that read for the sake 
 of the story to the one who reads for the sake of 
 the moral. It is as easy, he suggests, to read his 
 novels and ignore the problems, as it is to read 
 JZsop s Fables and skip the morals. With some 
 readers they must be accomplished " skippers," 
 
THE NOVELIST. 83 
 
 this may be, but Doctor Holmes has paid no very 
 great compliment to their perspicacity in saying so, 
 especially when we consider the various references 
 which are made to the problem lying at the root 
 of the story. For example, of the infant Myrtle 
 Hazard, we are told that "the instincts and qualities 
 belonging to the ancestral traits which predomi 
 nated in the conflict of mingled lives lay in this 
 child in embryo, waiting to come to maturity. 
 It was as when several grafts, bearing fruit that 
 ripens at different times, are growing upon the 
 same stock. Her earlier impulses may have been 
 derived directly from her father and mother, but 
 all the ancestors who have been mentioned, and 
 more or less obscurely many others, came upper 
 most in their time, before the absolute and total 
 result of their several forces had found its equili 
 brium in the character by which she was to be 
 known as an individual. These inherited impulses 
 were therefore many, conflicting, some of them 
 dangerous. The World, the Flesh, and the Devil 
 held mortgages on her life before its deed was put 
 in her hands ; but sweet and gracious influences 
 were also born with her ; and the battle of life 
 was to be fought between them, God helping her 
 in her need, and her own free choice siding with 
 one or the other." 1 Every reader even one who 
 
 1 The Guardian Angel, pp. 26-7. 
 
84 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 leaves the reading of the preface until he has 
 finished the story has very frequently brought to 
 his consciousness the nature of the problem which 
 is stated. 
 
 Writing in 1891 the author says, " The principle 
 of heredity has been largely studied since this 
 story was written. This tale, like Elsie Venner, 
 depends for its deeper significance on the ante- natal 
 history of its subject. But the story was meant to 
 be readable for those who did not care for its under 
 lying philosophy." 1 Probably Doctor Holmes is 
 right : to that section of readers who do not seek 
 for deeper thought, who take short swallow-flights 
 of reading, and dip their wings in fiction and fly 
 away, the story, apart from its philosophy, has 
 doubtless proved, and will yet prove, attractive ; 
 some, like the lady who declined to read Elsie Venner, 
 will probably refuse to read this also, because it 
 seeks to be something more than a novel. 
 
 This story as a story has not the tragic in 
 terest of the earlier one. The terrible " destiny " 
 overshadowing Elsie Venner does not influence the 
 life of the heroine of this book ; the germ theme 
 of the earlier work, was a consideration of how far 
 the individual was himself responsible for thoughts 
 and actions, the direct outcome of an extraordinary 
 pre-natal influence. In The Guardian Angel, on the 
 
 1 The Guardian Angel, p. xiv. 
 
THE NOVELIST. 85 
 
 other hand, though the question of responsibility 
 is yet the root one it is pictured in the actions 
 of a girl who shows in a remarkable degree the 
 various qualities and characteristics of a mixed 
 ancestry. It is a more familiar case of hereditary 
 predisposition or a more familiar exposition of 
 the science of heredity. The chief idea out of 
 which The Guardian Angel arose is given thus, 
 early in the story : " It is by no means certain 
 that our individual personality is the single in 
 habitant of these our corporeal frames. Nay, 
 there is recorded an experience of one of the living 
 persons mentioned in this narrative which, so far 
 as it is received in evidence, tends to show that 
 some, at least, who have long been dead, may 
 enjoy a kind of secondary and imperfect, yet self- 
 conscious life, in these bodily tenements which we 
 are in the habit of considering exclusively our own. 
 There are many circumstances, familiar to common 
 observers, which favour this belief to a certain 
 extent. Thus, at one moment we detect the look, 
 at another the tone of voice, at another some 
 characteristic movement of this or that ancestor, 
 in our relations or others. There are times when 
 our friends do not act like themselves, but appa 
 rently in obedience to some other law than that 
 of their own proper nature. We all do things 
 both awake and asleep which surprise us. Perhaps 
 we have co-tenants in this house we live in. No 
 
86 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 less than eight distinct personalities are said to 
 have co-existed in a single female mentioned by an 
 ancient physician of unimpeachable authority. In 
 this light we may perhaps see the meaning of a 
 sentence, from a work which will be repeatedly 
 referred to in this narrative viz. : This body 
 in which we journey across the isthmus between 
 the two oceans is not a private carriage, but an 
 omnibus " l 
 
 The " Guardian Angel " is " Ann Holyoake, 
 burned by y e bloudy Papists, aiio 15 ," as she is 
 described on an old picture. Her spirit is said to 
 exercise over her descendants a kindly watchful 
 ness ; and Myrtle Hazard, the heroine of the story, 
 places an especial faith in this family superstition 
 owing to a resemblance between the portrait and a 
 miniature which she possesses of her dead mother. 
 Several of her ancestors are described, and one 
 grandmother was " said to have a few drops of 
 aboriginal blood in her veins." She is born in 
 India and sent back, an orphan infant, to New 
 England to the care of an aunt entirely unfitted 
 for the charge. 
 
 It is the story of the life and love of this girl 
 
 1 The Guardian Angel, pp. 22-3. The supposititious 
 work from which this sentence is taken is by Byles 
 Gridley, A.M. This kind of literary fiction had already 
 been most successfully inaugurated and employed by Mr. 
 George Meredith in The Egoist, Richard Feverel, etc. 
 
THE NOVELIST. 8? 
 
 which is told in this volume a story less tense 
 in its tragic interest, but certainly more pleasant, 
 and from a " medicated " point of view more 
 satisfactory than its predecessor. Every person 
 with whom we are brought into contact we our 
 selves are each representative, so to speak, of any 
 number of ancestors. " Live folks are only dead 
 folks warmed over," as old Doctor Hurlbut is made 
 to say ; l and every one of us probably shows this 
 more or less definitely, more especially perhaps 
 during the earlier part of our lives, before the sum of 
 inherited characteristics has been correctly totalled 
 up into a distinct individuality. 
 
 The various sides of Myrtle s character the 
 contribution of this or that forebear are of course 
 so brought out as to serve the purpose of the story. 
 But with the story as such it treats of the 
 courses of true love which, naturally, did not run 
 smooth I am not here concerned ; to detail the 
 plot and, in short, to summarise the story comes 
 not within the scope of my criticism. Those who 
 have read the book will know it, those who have 
 not will scarcely like to have the edge taken off 
 their interest in the work as a piece of fiction. 
 
 The motive of The Guardian Angel is less fre 
 quently insisted upon than is that of Elsie Venner, 
 and this it is which tends to make the later the 
 
 1 The Guardian Angel, p. 129. 
 
88 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 more effective piece of artistic work. We are not so 
 often pulled up to consider the different hereditary 
 influences acting upon the lovable Myrtle Hazard 
 at various crises in her career as we are by refer 
 ences to the ophidianised nature of poor afflicted 
 Elsie Venner. Yet the varying character of the 
 girl is so subtly portrayed that we do not consider 
 the changes as inconsistencies so much as develop 
 ments. Even when in the school tableaux she 
 is almost betrayed by passion she is posing as 
 Pocahontas into murdering one of her schoolmates, 
 we do not feel so shocked as we should have done 
 if the author s treatment of his subject had not 
 prepared us for such a proof of the survival in her 
 of something of an aboriginal ancestor. We get 
 so far carried away as to go the whole length of 
 denying the individual responsibility, and this of 
 course is precisely what the theorist of heredity 
 in the guise of a tale-teller has wished us to do. 
 
 As a story the second is more interesting than 
 the first, it is more artistically complete in its 
 working ; less broken up by only slightly pertinent 
 matter ; it has more humanity in it, and, though 
 less tragic, appeals more successfully to our sym 
 pathies and interests. 
 
 In A Mortal Antipathy, daringly called by its 
 seven ty-five-y ear-old author " First Opening of the 
 New Portfolio," we have, as he calls it, a truly 
 hazardous experiment. Again, a strange psycho- 
 
THE NOVELIST. 89 
 
 logical and pathological problem serves as the main 
 spring for the volume ; a problem which has long 
 exercised the minds of men. As old probably as 
 any of the stories of foreign natures mixed with 
 the human is that of " antipathies," the instinctive 
 and unreasonable dislike of some persons to some 
 other persons or things 
 
 " Some men there are love not a gaping pig ; 
 Some that are mad if they behold a cat." l 
 
 The first of Oliver Wendell Holmes s novels, as 
 we have seen, treated of the influence of extra 
 natural pre-natal influence on the life of a human 
 being, while the second was concerned with the 
 actual controlling influence of various ancestors 
 on one descendant a more familiar problem in 
 heredity ; in the last of the series, we have a 
 work treating of the influence on the after life 
 of a man of an antipathy arising from a severe 
 shock suffered during early childhood. 
 
 Maurice Kirk wood, the hero of A Mortal Anti 
 pathy, was, as an infant, taken from his nurse s 
 arms by a grown girl cousin so suddenly as to 
 startle him into throwing himself from her arms 
 over the parapet of the balcony on which they 
 were. He was saved from death by falling into a 
 rose-bush. The accident, however, so affected the 
 
 1 Merchant of Venice, Act iv.. sc. 1. 
 
90 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 nerves of the child, that from that time he 
 grew up with a "mortal antipathy" towards 
 all womankind, and especially towards women 
 at that time of life when they should naturally 
 prove most attractive to the opposite sex. The 
 antipathy is a purely physical one, for as he 
 grows up to manhood, Maurice tries to reason him 
 self out of it, but to no purpose. When he is by 
 accident brought into the presence of a young 
 woman, the result is invariably the same, a sudden 
 faintness, which threatens to destroy his life. The 
 consequence is that, with otherwise normally con 
 stituted social sympathies, he is yet compelled to 
 lead an almost solitary life, merely on the borders 
 of society. When the story commences which is 
 some time after the beginning of the book he 
 has taken up his residence near a small watering- 
 place, Arrowhead Village, on the shore of a New 
 England lake. He becomes, of course, an object 
 of curiosity, and gives rise to much speculation 
 among the Arrowhead inhabitants and visitors, 
 more especially to some of the girl students at the 
 Corinna Institute at the end of the lake. Two 
 girls at the Institute more particularly interest 
 themselves in the " Enigma." One of them, indeed, 
 a very learned young lady known as " the Terror," 
 from her way of carrying off all the prizes, so 
 far interests herself as to determine to fathom the 
 mystery surrounding the handsome young stranger. 
 
THE NOVELIST. 91 
 
 The other of these two girls, " the Wonder," is so 
 named on account of her great physical strength 
 and athletic skill ; from the first, the reader feels 
 confident such are the inexorable laws under 
 which the novelist works that Euthymia is not 
 an Amazon in form and training to no purpose ; 
 and her strength is brought into play when Maurice 
 Kirk wood is alone on a sick bed, helpless in a 
 burning house; she fearlessly enters the building 
 and carries him out, to life and safety not alone 
 from the fire, but also from his antipathy, for the 
 severe shock and the method of his rescue serve 
 to bring his organism back to a normal condition. 
 The sequel is what might be expected. 
 
 The story is told with much amusing character 
 isation and much of the author s accustomed 
 delightful gossip, but it is yet, as a whole, quite 
 the least successful of Holmes s three novels. It 
 is perhaps more " medicated " than either of its 
 predecessors. It is more broken up with chapters 
 and passages only partially pertinent to the story. 
 The professional man is more than ever evident, 
 philosophising over various matters more or less 
 intimately connected with his art. The book is, 
 however, charged with thought throughout, and is 
 full of the amusing incidents and careful thought 
 which go to the building up of each of our genial 
 Autocrat s works. 
 
 A most amusing chapter describes a boat-race 
 
92 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 between eight girls from the Institute and eight 
 young students from the college at Arrowhead. 
 Maurice Kirkwood in his canoe watches the race 
 through field-glasses at a distance. The Terror 
 is coxswain of her boat, with the Wonder as 
 stroke. A stratagem on the part of the former, 
 makes the girls victorious. When they are hard 
 pressed by their opponents, Lurida throws a bunch 
 of roses within reach of the coxswain of the boat ; 
 he pauses momentarily to seize them. 
 
 " The bow of the Algonquin passes the stern of 
 the Atalanta ! 
 
 a The bow of the Algonquin is on a level with 
 the middle of the Atalanta ! 
 
 " Three more lengths rowing, and the college 
 crew will pass the girls ! 
 
 " * Hurrah for the Quins ! The Algonquin 
 ranges up alongside of the Atalanta ! 
 
 " Through with her ! shouts the captain of the 
 Algonquin. 
 
 " Now, girls ! shrieks the captain of the 
 Atalanta. 
 
 " They near the line, every rower straining 
 desperately, almost madly. 
 
 " Crack goes the oar of the Atalanta s captain, 
 and up flash its splintered fragments, as the stem 
 of her boat springs past the line, eighteen inches 
 at least ahead of the Algonquin. 
 
 " Hooraw for the Lantas ! Hooraw for the 
 
THE NOVELIST. 93 
 
 Girls ! Hooraw for the Institoot ! shout a 
 hundred voices. 
 
 " Hurrah for woman s rights and female suf 
 frage ! pipes the small voice of the Terror, and 
 there is loud laughing and cheering all round. 
 
 " She had not studied her classical dictionary and 
 her mythology for nothing. I have paid off one 
 old score, she said. Set down my damask roses 
 against the golden apples of Hippomenes ! 
 
 " It was that one second lost in snatching up the 
 bouquet which gave the race to the Atalantas." l 
 
 Of short, pertinent, and epigrammatic sayings 
 and happy allusions, this one of the very latest of 
 Holmes s works is as full as the earliest ones. 
 One or two examples will suffice to indicate the 
 quality of these sayings " The rector maintained 
 that physicians contracted a squint, which turns 
 their eyes inwardly, while the muscles which roll 
 their eyes upward become palsied. The doctor 
 retorted that theological students developed a third 
 eyelid the nictitating membrane, which is so well 
 known in birds, and which serves to shut out, 
 not all light, but all the light they do not 
 want." 
 
 " When gratitude is a bankrupt, love only can 
 pay his debts." 
 
 " Wealth is a steep hill, which the father climbs 
 
 1 Mortal Antipathy, p. 52. 
 
94 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 slowly, and the son often tumbles down pre 
 cipitately." 
 
 " I cannot help thinking that we carry our 
 childhood s horizon with us all our days, . . . The 
 clouds of glory which we trail with us in after 
 life need not be traced to a pre-natal state." 
 
 In his reminiscent introduction to this story 
 Holmes very happily describes N. P. Willis as 
 " something between a remembrance of Count 
 D Or say and an anticipation of Oscar Wilde." 
 
 These three novels, to sum up, are all more 
 remarkable as character studies, and as the 
 forcible literary expression of important and 
 curious psychological and physiological problems 
 than as dramatic creations. They are none of 
 them, however, so exclusively this as to destroy 
 our interest in the story, although it cannot be 
 denied that that interest is lessened by the didactic 
 object of \ the volumes in other words, the moral 
 has been pointed at the expense of art. 
 
IV. 
 
 THE AUTOCRAT AND TEACHER. 
 
 THE AUTOCRAT. 
 (Read at the Holmes Breakfast, Dec. 3, 1879.) 
 
 BY J. G. WHITTIEE. 
 
 His laurels fresh from song and lay, 
 Romance, art, science, rich in all, 
 
 And young of heart, how dare we say 
 We keep his seventieth festival ? 
 
 No sense is here of loss or lack ; 
 
 Before his sweetness and his light 
 The dial holds its shadow back, 
 
 The charmed hours delay their flight. 
 
 His still the keen analysis 
 Of men and moods, electric wit, 
 
 Free play of mirth, and tenderness 
 To heal the slightest wound from it. 
 
 And his the pathos touching all 
 Life s sins and sorrows and regrets, 
 
 Its hopes and fears, its final call 
 And rest beneath the violets. 
 
 His sparkling surface scarce betrays 
 The thoughtful tide beneath it rolled 
 
 The wisdom of the latter days, 
 And tender memories of the old. 
 95 
 
96 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 What shapes and fancies, grave or gay, 
 Before us at his bidding come ! 
 
 The treadmill tramp, the One-Horse Shay, 
 The dumb despair of Elsie s doom ! 
 
 The tale of Avis 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 honoured name, 
 The wealth of all his varied powers; 
 
 A stronger claim has love than fame, 
 And he himself is only ours ! 
 
 fTIHE first four volumes of Holmes s collected 
 JL writings belong to that side of his work for 
 which he is at present, and will probably remain, 
 most noted. As a poet, he may meet with the fate 
 of those who treat chiefly of but occasional or 
 humorous subjects ; as a novelist, he may but have 
 the temporary fame of one who writes with the 
 object of pointing a present-day lesson ; as doctor 
 and college professor, his work is of necessity of 
 
THE AUTOCRAT AND TEACHER. 97 
 
 local interest though of long lasting import. 
 None of these drawbacks attach to the four 
 volumes of indescribable gossip which I have 
 grouped together, in the title of this section, as 
 the Autocrat. These are the books in which, over 
 the breakfast -table and over the teacups, the 
 Autocrat under his various aliases discourses on 
 every subject that comes uppermost in conversation, 
 or which he, as conversational leader, can initiate. 
 The volumes are certainly most representative 
 of all that is greatest and most original in the 
 writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes indeed, in the 
 first three of them, the Breakfast-Table Series, we 
 undoubtedly have him at his best. We have his 
 rich witty style, his deep thought, his genial 
 satire, his far-reaching discursiveness ranging over 
 all subjects, his happy and entertaining wealth 
 of illustration, along with his occasional gems 
 of humour, pathos and poetry. It is all these 
 combined qualities which go to make these volumes 
 members of that small collection of best-loved 
 books which most book-lovers have a tendency to 
 form. Many of the qualities which make for the 
 success of Doctor Holmes as Autocrat I use this 
 title, as I have hinted, for convenience, as inclu 
 sive of the others are just those which militate, 
 as we have seen, against the success of such single 
 sustained effort as is required in a long story. 
 From its abrupt commencement, in 1857, in the 
 
 7 
 
98 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 pages of the Atlantic Monthly s initial number, the 
 Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table was hailed with 
 delight; it has since become, with its later com 
 panion volumes, a recognised classic in the world 
 of belles-lettres. 
 
 It was an audacious, though, as it proved, happy, 
 idea of the author to thinly disguise himself and 
 then dogmatise on all matters through a series of 
 volumes; for the boarders around the table are 
 scarcely ever allowed a word, and if they are it is 
 only, as in the Platonic dialogues, as a leading up 
 to some utterance of the principal speaker. Our 
 knowledge of the Autocrat s satellites is gathered 
 less from what they say than from what he says of 
 them in his numerous asides to the reader. It was 
 because it so very admirably suited the style of 
 his genius that it was a happy audacity of Doctor 
 Holmes, who, unequalled literary Autolycus, here 
 provides us with philosophy and literature, aesthetics 
 and humour, moral maxims and general criticism, 
 with as ready a lavishness as ever the famous 
 pedlar offered his miscellaneous wares. It has been 
 objected against the Autocrat that he is too didactic, 
 too prone to sermonise ; but the occasional tendency 
 towards this is far outweighed by the satire, wit and 
 wisdom which play over the pages on all subjects, 
 from that of the Universe to Lord Timothy 
 Dexter. Among those few discursive books which 
 charm us on account of their " style," their egotism, 
 
THE AUTOCRAT AND TEACHER. 99 
 
 their very discursiveness on the same shelf, that 
 is, with Montaigne, Bacon, Walton, Fuller, Sir 
 Thomas Browne and Elia we may find fitting- 
 companionship for the breakfast-table trinity of 
 Autocrat-Professor-Poet, " three starveling volumes 
 bound in one." 
 
 The commencement of the second section of the 
 Autocrat is delightful in pointing, with a very 
 happy illustration, precisely what it is that the 
 author does in his thoughtful, witty talks in type, 
 as these papers may be termed. " I really believe 
 some people save their bright thoughts as being 
 too precious for conversation. What do you 
 think an admiring friend said the other day to one 
 that was talking good things, good enough to 
 print ? * Why, said he, you are wasting mer 
 chantable literature, a cash article, at the rate, 
 as nearly as I can tell, of fifty dollars an hour. 
 The talker took him to the window and asked him 
 to look out and tell what he saw. 
 
 " Nothing but a very dusty street, he said, 
 * and a man driving a sprinkling-machine through 
 it. 
 
 " * Why don t you tell the man he is wasting 
 that water ? What would be the state of the 
 highways of life, if we did not drive our thouyht- 
 sprinklers through them with the valves open, 
 sometimes ? 
 
 " Besides, there is another thing about this 
 
100 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 talking, which you forget. It shapes our thoughts 
 for us; the waves of conversation roll them as 
 the surf rolls the pebbles on the shore. Let me 
 modify the image a little. I rough out my 
 thoughts in talk as an artist models in clay. 
 Spoken language is so plastic, you can pat and 
 coax, and spread and shave, and rub out, and fill 
 up, and stick on so easily, when you work that 
 soft material, that there is nothing like it for 
 modelling. Out of it come the shapes which you 
 turn into marble or bronze in your immortal books, 
 if you happen to write such. Or, to use another 
 illustration, writing or printing is like shooting 
 with a rifle ; you may hit your reader s mind, or 
 miss it; but talking is like playing at a mark 
 with the pipe of an engine ; if it is within reach, 
 and you have time enough, you can t help hitting 
 it. " l The Autocrat s " thought-sprinkler " is in 
 cessantly at work; while it is, undoubtedly, his 
 use in writing of the full play of conversational 
 freedom which makes him so often hit the mark 
 at which he aims. 
 
 " It is very difficult," said an early reviewer 
 of the Autocrat, and every critic must "echo the 
 conceit," " to describe that which defies description." 
 It is. And now, with the critic s accustomed 
 confidence having pronounced a thing impossible, 
 
 The Autocrat, pp. 27-8. 
 
THE AUTOCRAT AND TEACHER. IOI 
 
 let me attempt its performance. It is, perhaps, 
 easier to indicate what these books are by quotation 
 from them than to describe them in a definition. 
 In all four volumes we have Holmes, disguised as 
 we have seen, talking in type with severe yet 
 kindly satire, with wit " as polished and supple as 
 a Damascus blade." Month after month for four 
 different years, the last separated by nearly thirty 
 years from the first, did he keep up the flow of 
 his delightful talks. To turn, again, to his pages 
 for an illustration " The whole force of con 
 versation depends on how much you can take for 
 granted. Vulgar chess-players have to play their 
 game out ; nothing short of the brutality of an 
 actual checkmate satisfies their dull apprehensions. 
 But look at two masters of that noble game ! 
 White stands well enough, so far as you can see ; 
 but Red says, Mate in six moves ; -White looks, 
 nods ; the game is over. Just so in talking with 
 first-rate men ; especially when they are good- 
 natured and expansive, as they are apt to be at 
 table. That blessed clairvoyance which sees into 
 things without opening them, that glorious 
 licence, which, having shut the door and driven 
 the reporter from its keyhole, calls upon Truth, 
 majestic virgin ! to get down from her pedestal 
 and drop her academic poses, and take a festive 
 garland and the vacant place on the niedius lectus, 
 that carnival-shower of questions and replies and 
 
102 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 comments, large axioms bowled over the mahogany 
 like bomb-shells from professional mortars, and 
 explosive wit dropping its trains of many-coloured 
 tire, and the mischief-making rain of bon-bons 
 pelting everybody that shows himself, the picture 
 of a truly intellectual banquet is one which the 
 old Divinities might well have attempted to 
 reproduce in one of their 
 
 " Oh, oh, oh ! cried the young fellow whom they 
 call John, that is from one of your lectures ! 
 
 " I know it, I replied, I concede it, I confess 
 it, proclaim it. 
 
 " The trail of the serpent is over them all ! 
 
 " All lecturers, all professors, all schoolmasters, 
 have ruts and grooves in their minds into which 
 their conversation is perpetually sliding." l 
 
 " Questions and replies and comments, large 
 axioms bowled over the mahogany " ; the sentence 
 might stand as a motto to the four volumes ; the 
 whole passage applies admirably to the conversation 
 of the Autocrat in all of his Protean performances 
 in these gossip-volumes. We have questions, re 
 plies and comments on all kinds of subjects in all 
 manner of styles treating now of the fascinating 
 mysteries of life and death in the strain of a poet, 
 and again of hats in the manner of a humorist. 
 " When we think of the familiar confidences of 
 
 1 The Autocrat, pp. 64-5. 
 
THE AUTOCRAT AND TEACHER. 103 
 
 the Autocrat," says a critic, " we might liken him 
 to Montaigne. But when the parallel is being 
 considered we come upon passages so full of 
 tingling hits or rollicking fun that we are sure 
 we are mistaken, and that he resembles no one 
 so much as Sydney Smith." Let us contrast, for 
 example, the widely differing styles of the following 
 passages culled almost at random. First we have 
 a poetic-reminiscent passage, suggestive of no other 
 writer so much as of Charles Lamb, " Ah me ! 
 what strains and strophes 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 who 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." l Let us then refer to 
 the Poet, and read such a clinching statement as 
 this : " These people have always been shy of the 
 astronomers, they were shy, you know, of the 
 
 1 The Autocrat, p. 78. 
 
IO4 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 Copernican system, for a long while; well they 
 might be with an oubliette waiting for them if 
 they ventured to think that the earth moved 
 round the sun. Science settled that point finally 
 for them, at length, and then it was all right, 
 when there was no use in disputing the fact 
 any longer. By-and-by geology began turning up 
 fossils that told extraordinary stories about the 
 duration of life upon our planet. What subter 
 fuges were not used to get rid of their evidence ! 
 Think of a man seeing the fossilised skeleton of an 
 animal split out of a quarry, his teeth worn down 
 by mastication, and the remains of food still 
 visible in his interior, and, in order to get rid of 
 a piece of evidence contrary to the traditions he 
 holds to, seriously maintaining that this skeleton 
 never belonged to a living creature, but was created 
 with just those appearances ; a make-believe, a 
 sham, a Barnum s-mermaid contrivance to amuse its 
 Creator and impose upon His intelligent children ! 
 And now people talk about geological epochs and 
 hundreds of millions of years in the planet s 
 history as calmly as if they were discussing the 
 age of their deceased great-grandmothers. Ten 
 or a dozen years ago, 1 people said Sh ! Sh ! 
 if you ventured to meddle with any question 
 supposed to involve a doubt of the generally ac- 
 
 This was written, it must be borne in mind, in 1872. 
 
THE AUTOCRAT AND TEACHER. IO 
 
 cepted Hebrew traditions. To-day such questions 
 are recognised as perfectly fair subjects for general 
 conversation ; not in the basement story, perhaps, 
 or among the rank and file of the curbstone con 
 gregations, but among intelligent and educated 
 persons. You may preach about them in your 
 pulpit, you may lecture about them, you may talk 
 about them with the first sensible-looking person 
 you happen to meet, you may write magazine 
 articles about them, and the editor need not expect 
 to receive remonstrance from angry subscribers 
 and withdrawals of subscriptions, as he would 
 have been sure to not a great many years ago. 
 Why, you may go to a tea-party where the 
 clergyman s wife shows her best cap and his 
 daughters display their shining ringlets, and you 
 will hear the company discussing the Darwinian 
 theory of the origin of the human race as if it 
 were as harmless a question as that of the lineage 
 of a spinster s lapdog. You may see a fine lady 
 who is as particular in her genuflections as any 
 Buddhist or Mahometan saint in his manifestations 
 of reverence, who will talk over the anthropoid 
 ape, the supposed founder of the family to which 
 we belong, and even go back with you to the 
 acephalous inollusk, first cousin to the clams and 
 mussels, whose rudimental spine was the hinted 
 prophecy of humanity ; all this time never dream 
 ing, apparently, that what she takes for a matter 
 
IO6 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 of curious speculation involves the whole future of 
 human progress and destiny." l 
 
 Or, taking up The Professor, we find a passage 
 in which observation, thought, humour and sly 
 sarcastic reproof are delightfully blent : " I find 
 that there is a very prevalent opinion among 
 the dwellers on the shores of Sir Isaac Newton s 
 Ocean of Truth, that salt fish, which have been 
 taken from it a good while ago, split open, cured 
 and dried, are the only proper and allowable food 
 for reasonable people. I maintain, on the other 
 hand, that there are a number of live fish still 
 swimming in it, and that every one of us has a 
 right to see if he cannot catch some of them. Some 
 times I please myself with the idea that I have 
 landed an actual living fish, small, perhaps, but 
 with rosy gills and silvery scales. Then I find the 
 consumers of nothing but the salted and dried 
 article insist that it is poisonous, simply because it 
 is alive, and cry out to people not to touch it. I 
 have not found, however, that people mind them 
 much." 2 
 
 It is true, we may recognise a similarity between 
 Holmes and Sydney Smith ; not alone on account 
 of the "tingling hits," but also on account of the 
 wonderful blending of the truest wisdom with the 
 brightest wit. The Autocrat has himself recognised 
 
 The Poet, pp. 180-2. 2 Tlie Professor, pp. 92-3. 
 
THE AUTOCRAT AND TEACHER. IO/ 
 
 wh.it a dangerous thing it is for a literary man to 
 indulge in a love of the ridiculous, which he may 
 possess. " People laugh with him just so long as 
 he amuses them ; but if he attempts to be serious, 
 they must still have their laugh, and so they laugh 
 at him." Once a funny man, always a funny man. 
 Sydney Smith himself is a leading example ; the 
 man who could write as he did write in the Edin- 
 burylt, Review and in Peter Plymley s Letters, the 
 Churchman, who was yet one of the staunchest 
 supporters of an enlightened religious freedom, a 
 Catholic emancipator, when such were all too few 
 this man is known to his contemporaries grand 
 children, almost exclusively as " a diner-out," " a 
 joker of jokes," "a wit of the first water." He 
 was all these, but he was, also, very much more. 
 Smith is far from being a solitary example of this 
 treatment of a great writer by posterity. To give 
 a man the name of wit, as a wit himself has said, 
 is as fatal as to give a dog a bad name. It 
 would be a great loss to serious, thoughtful, litera 
 ture, if Doctor Holmes s humour were allowed 
 to eclipse his really greater work. He is un 
 doubtedly a philosopher, and it would indeed be 
 regretable that we should ignore his philosophy, 
 while we applauded his fun. 1 These volumes are 
 
 1 I have recently heard one critic put this case very 
 strongly : he stated that, had the Jireal fast-Table Series 
 been minus eighty per cent, of its humour, it would have 
 
108 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 full of true gems of thought on all questions 
 concerned with the conduct of life. Doctor 
 Holmes s religion, we have seen, is, so far as it is 
 listable at all, a kind of broad Unitariaiiism ; his 
 philosophy is thoroughly optimistic ; he does not, 
 it is true, say that all is for the best in this best of 
 all possible worlds, but he does point out that there is 
 always a best which we may make our own. The 
 wisdom of these volumes is really startling both in 
 its wealth in point of quantity, and in its fulness 
 of meaning in point of quality. Profound or 
 suggestive utterances on all subjects are found 
 scattered throughout. Often, however, and it is 
 to this that some readers object, this thoughtful 
 writing is " sandwiched in " between passages 
 either of wild humour or impertinent interruption 
 on the part of " the young man called John " or 
 another of the boarders. 
 
 These books are admirably fitted, on account of 
 the broad humanitarianism of the Autocrat, to 
 be companion volumes to men and women of most 
 diverse tastes and opinions, from those who read 
 merely for amusement, probably a vast majority, 
 to those who seek chiefly for stimulating thoughts. 
 It is the great catholicity of the author s knowledge 
 and interests, that doubtless gained for the work 
 
 at once been widely recognised as containing that great 
 amount of wisdom now, to many readers, eclipsed by " fun " 
 throughout. 
 
THE AUTOCRAT AND TEACHER. IOQ 
 
 such instant and such wide .acceptance. With a 
 university training, he studied first for the law, 
 and afterwards for medicine ; he practised as a 
 physician, and as scientific professor; he had 
 travelled while, as a ground for the various 
 knowledge thus attained by a penetrating, inquisi 
 tive mind in all these conditions, he had been born 
 into and brought up in a minister s family. The 
 result of this study of life from so many points of 
 view, on a mind naturally quick and imaginative, 
 is that which we now recognise as characteristic of 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes as writer. 
 
 It has become too much the fashion, nowadays, 
 so soon as a man makes any considerable stir in 
 the world be the sphere in which he makes it 
 what it may, that of poet or preacher, dramatist 
 or novelist to refer to his " teaching," his " mes- 
 saiiv," as a something definite and concrete. It has 
 become, perhaps, something more than a fashion, it 
 has become a habit of mind, so that when we are 
 about to consider a man and his work we naturally 
 find ourselves asking What is his message? Has 
 he a message differing from those of writers and 
 workers who have preceded him ? If not, to what 
 already established class of teachers does he belong, 
 or what common message does he mainly insist 
 upon ? This has been for some time our position 
 when considering poets and their works now we 
 are getting messages concocted from our novelists 
 
1 10 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 and dramatists. The "messages" of Browning 
 and Tennyson are giving way to those of Meredith 
 and Ibsen. Art for art s sake meets with but scant 
 courtesy at the hands of the many. Any such 
 teaching as Doctor Holmes may have to convey to 
 his generation and his position as teacher is surely 
 no secondary one is spread over his writing in all 
 its branches, his poems, his novels, his medical 
 essays and far from in the smallest degree over 
 the Breakfast -Table series. 
 
 It is, perhaps, no particularly new message which 
 he has to impart, but yet, like his own " female 
 Katydid," 
 
 "He says an undisputed thing 
 In such a solemn way," 
 
 that he often succeeds in impressing a truth upon 
 his readers which has been placed before them 
 often enough before but in such a manner that it 
 has been easiest to ignore it. On questions con 
 cerning religion, for example, the truth which he 
 points may have been insisted upon before, but he 
 succeeds in making the question clear by the point 
 of view from which he looks at it. There is a story 
 told of Sydney Smith to the effect that he once 
 proposed that Government should pay the Irish 
 Catholic priests. 
 
 " They would not take it," said Doctor Doyle. 
 
 "Do you mean to say that if every priest in 
 Ireland received to-morrow morning a Government 
 
THE AUTOCRAT AND TEACHER. I I I 
 
 letter with a hundred pounds, first quarter of their 
 year s income, that they would refuse it ? " 
 
 " Ah, Mr. Smith," said Doctor Doyle, " you ve 
 such a way of putting things." 
 
 It is the same with Doctor Holmes : he has 
 " such a way of putting things." 
 
 The chief line of his teaching, so far as religion 
 is concerned, might well be indicated by two stanzas 
 of Whittier s 
 
 " I have no answer for myself or thee, 
 Save that I learned beside my mother s knee ; 
 All is of God that is, and is to be ; 
 And God is good. " 
 
 " I pray the prayer of Plato old : 
 God make thee beautiful within, 
 And let thine eyes the good behold 
 In everything save sin ! " - 
 
 Doctor Holmes long attended King s Chapel, Boston, 
 and is considered one of the most liberal-minded of 
 Unitarians. As it is shown to us in his writings, 
 his theology might certainly be summed up in those 
 two lines of the Quaker poet s just quoted 
 
 " All is of God that is, or is to be, 
 And God is good." 
 
 When, in the year 1877, Dr. Holmes was acting 
 as President of the Boston Unitarian Festival he 
 repeated a list of theological beliefs which he felt 
 
 - My Namesake. 
 
112 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 called upon to combat. This list may best be given 
 bere in his own words as illustrating his position in 
 this regard. 
 
 " May I," he began, " without committing any 
 one but myself, enumerate a few of the stumbling- 
 blocks which still stand in the way of some who 
 have many sympathies with what is called the 
 liberal school of thinkers ? 
 
 " The notion of sin as a transferable object. As 
 philanthropy has ridded us of chattel slavery, so 
 philosophy must rid us of chattel sin and all its 
 logical consequences. 
 
 " The notion that what we call sin is anything 
 else than inevitable, unless the Deity had seen fit 
 to give every human being a perfect nature, and 
 develop it by a perfect education. 
 
 " The oversight of the fact that all moral rela 
 tions betw r een man and his Maker are reciprocal, 
 and must meet the approval of man s enlightened 
 conscience before he can render true and heartfelt 
 homage to the power that called him into being. 
 And is not the greatest obligation to all eternity 
 on the side of the greatest wisdom and the greatest 
 power ? 
 
 " The notion that the Father of mankind is 
 subject to the absolute control of a certain malig 
 nant 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- 
 
THE AUTOCRAT AND TEACHER. 113 
 
 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." 1 
 
 As a supplement to these beliefs which Doctor 
 Holmes strongly protested against, we may refer 
 to a page of the Professor, where we are given a 
 number of axiomatic sentences on matters con 
 nected with the subject here treated. They were 
 written, according to the author, after seeing 
 something of a great many kinds of folks. 
 
 " Of a hundred people of each of the different 
 leading religious sects, about the same proportion 
 will be safe and pleasant persons to deal and to 
 live with. 
 
 " There are, at least, three real saints among the 
 women to one among the men, in every denomination. 
 
 " The spiritual standard of different classes I 
 would reckon thus : 
 
 1. The comfortably rich. 
 
 2. The decently comfortable. 
 
 3. The very rich, who are apt to be irreligious. 
 
 4. The very poor, who are apt to be immoral. 
 
 " The cut nails of machine-divinity may be 
 driven in, but they won t clinch. 
 
 "The arguments which the greatest of our 
 
 1 W. S. Kennedy, Oliver Wendell Holmes, pp. 2G2-3. 
 
 8 
 
114 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 schoolmen could not refute were two : the blood in 
 men s veins, and the milk in women s breasts. 
 
 " Humility is the first of the virtues for other 
 people. 
 
 " Faith always implies the disbelief of a lesser 
 fact in favour of a greater. A little mind often 
 sees the unbelief, without seeing the belief of a 
 large one. . . . 
 
 " Which seems to you nearest heaven, Socrates 
 drinking his hemlock, Regulus going back to the 
 enemy s camp, or that old New England divine 
 sitting comfortably in his study and chuckling 
 over his conceit of certain poor women, who had 
 been burned to death in his own town, going 
 roaring out of one fire into another ? " J 
 
 The theological aspect of the works of a non- 
 theological writer is one on which nowadays 
 somewhat too much stress is often laid owing 
 largely, perhaps, to the growth of the " theological 
 problem " novel. At times, it is true, lay writers 
 thrust their theology or no theology at us through 
 their novels with a purpose ; but after all the 
 beliefs or no beliefs of a writer, except in so far as 
 they are really insisted upon in the writings, 
 should not concern his readers. What does it 
 matter to us that Montaigne was a Romanist, and 
 Fuller a Church of England divine, or what Charles 
 
 1 Professor, pp. 121-2. 
 
THE AUTOCRAT AND TEACHER. 115 
 
 Lamb was. when we are reading their entertaining 
 literary bequests? We are perhaps more justified 
 in searching the works of a didactic writer like 
 Holmes to acquaint ourselves with what may be 
 his hopes and beliefs, his aspirations and religion. 
 Throughout his writings we are conscious of a spirit 
 of true reverence, though he speaks with scathing 
 scorn, again and again, of any narrowing sects 
 and creeds. Be religious, by all means, but be not 
 blindly religious, 
 
 " Be not like dumb driven cattle. 
 
 Think and believe for yourself let not others 
 do the thinking and believing for you. As he 
 pertinently expresses it, in the early pages of the 
 Professor, " If a human soul is necessarily to be 
 trained up in the faith of those from whom it 
 inherits its body, why, there is the end of all 
 reason. If, sooner or later, every soul is to look 
 for truth with its own eyes, the first thing is to 
 recognise that no presumption in favour of any 
 particular belief arises from the fact of our in 
 heriting it. Otherwise you would not give the 
 Mahometan a fair chance to become a convert to 
 a better religion." 2 The same idea has, of course, 
 been stated before, notably, in the well-known 
 lines 
 
 1 Longfellow, Ptalm of Life. - Professor, p. C. 
 
Il6 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 " Many a man 
 
 Owes to his country his religion ; 
 And in another would as strongly grow, 
 Had but his nurse and mother taught him so." 
 
 On the same page with the passage I have just 
 quoted, Doctor Holmes well says, in a sentence 
 fraught with deep meaning, " the religious cur 
 rency of mankind, in thought, in speech, and in 
 print, consists entirely of polarised words." l That 
 is to say, words which have lain long in the mind 
 have undergone a change " like that which rest in 
 a certain position gives to iron " ; they have become 
 magnetic in their relations and are traversed by 
 forces not belonging to them. This eminently 
 happy "way of putting things" is illustrated by 
 the use of the sacred word " O m " from Hindoo 
 mythology, a word which it is a great sin to 
 pronounce. " What do you care for O m ? " the 
 Autocrat continues. " If you wanted to get the 
 Pundit to look at his religion fairly, you must first 
 depolarise this and all similar words for him. 
 The argument for and against new translations 
 of the Bible really turns on this. Scepticism is 
 afraid to trust its truths in depolarised words, and 
 so cries out against a new translation. I think, 
 myself, if every idea our Book contains could be 
 shelled out of its own symbol and put into a new, 
 clean, unmagnetic word, we should have some 
 
 1 Professor, p. 6. 
 
THE AUTOCRAT AND TEACHER. 1 1/ 
 
 chance of reading it as philosophers, or wisdom- 
 lovers, ought to read it, which we do not and 
 cannot now any more than a Hindoo can read the 
 Gayatri, as a fair man and lover of truth should 
 do. When society has once fairly dissolved the 
 New Testament, which it never has done yet, it 
 will perhaps crystallise it over again in new forms 
 of language." l 
 
 This is but one of very many of the Autocrat s 
 utterances on similar subjects utterances which 
 are extremely valuable on account of their great 
 lucidity and suggestiveness. There is nothing 
 narrowing and dogmatic in his teaching " I have 
 known and loved to talk with good people, all the 
 way from Rome to Geneva in doctrine, as long as 
 I can remember." 2 This passage shows the extreme 
 tolerance of his view, which has been indicated 
 earlier. Yet once again he says in the same volume, 
 and in saying it, clinches for himself that sturdy 
 independence of position which he looks upon as 
 essential for all " We are false to our new con 
 ditions of life, if \ve do not resolutely maintain our 
 religious as well as our political freedom, in the 
 face of any and all supposed monopolies. Certain 
 men will, of course, say two things, if we do not 
 take their views : first, that we don t know any 
 thing about these matters ; and, secondly, that we 
 
 1 Profesxor, p. 7. 2 Ibid., p. 124. 
 
IlS OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 are not so good as they are. They have a polarised 
 phraseology for saying these things, but it comes 
 to precisely that. To which it may be answered, 
 in the first place, that we have good authority for 
 saying that even babes and sucklings know some 
 thing and, in the second, that, if there is a mote 
 or so to be removed from our premises, the courts 
 and councils of the last few years have found 
 beams enough in some other quarters to build 
 a church that would hold all the good people in 
 Boston, and have sticks enough left to make a 
 bonfire for all the heretics." l 
 
 On other great questions we find the same clear 
 independent statement, and in his latest as in his 
 earlier works. In Over the Teacups, Doctor Holmes 
 gives an amusing abridged history of two worlds, 
 this and the next, thus, 
 
 His interpretation of this hieroglyphic is as 
 follows : 
 
 " Two worlds, the higher and the lower, separated 
 by the thinnest of partitions. The lower world is 
 that of questions ; the upper world is that of 
 answers. Endless doubt and unrest here below ; 
 
 ] Professor, pp. 125-G 
 
THE AUTOCRAT AND TEACHER. I 
 
 wondering, admiring, adoring certainty above." l 
 This is amusing, but very far from conclusive. 
 Suppose we reverse the positions of the signs, we 
 should have the lower world, an exclamation ; 
 as Lord Byron says, " all present life is but an 
 interjection " 2 and the higher world, what 1 One 
 of his finest utterances on this question is to be 
 found in the concluding stanzas of The Chambered 
 Nautilus, 
 
 "Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee, 
 Child of the wandering sea, 
 Cast from her lap, forlorn ! 
 From thy dead lips a clearer note is born 
 Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn ! 3 
 
 While on mine ear it rings, 
 
 Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that 
 sings : 
 
 Build thee more stately mansions, my soul, 
 
 As the swift seasons roll ! 
 
 Leave thy low- vaulted past ! 
 Let each new temple, nobler than the last, 
 Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, 
 
 Till thou at length art free, 
 Leaving thine outgrown shell by life s unresting sea! " 4 
 
 The kindly treatment by the author of the poor, 
 hesitating, doubting Reverend Mr. Chauncey Fair- 
 
 1 Teacups, p. 117. - Don Juan, Canto XV. 
 
 3 This is, obviously, an echo of the concluding line of 
 Wordsworth s famous sonnet, 
 
 " The world is too much with us." 
 
 4 Poems, ii., p. 108. 
 
120 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 weather is but another aspect of that toleration 
 towards all shades of belief which Doctor Holmes 
 himself exercises. Indeed, in the scene in which 
 Mr. Fairweather goes to Doctor Kittredge for ad 
 vice, we feel that we have the writer himself "a 
 sermon by a lay-preacher may be worth listening 
 to " 1 addressing all who are hesitating, not so 
 much between two opinions, as on the point of 
 taking a step which they wish to take, but about 
 which they fear to be severely criticised. 2 He says 
 to them, even though you have gone so far with 
 me, if you see cause to change your views do so. 
 He feels for, and sympathises with, the convert 
 from one belief to another too often impudently 
 dubbed pervert by those whom he leaves. 
 
 " Deal meekly, gently, with the hopes that guide 
 The lowliest brother straying from thy side : 
 If right, they bid thee tremble for thine own ; 
 If wrong, the verdict is for Goal alone ! " 3 
 
 In the scene to which I have referred, between 
 the minister drifting Rome-wards, and the dear, 
 humane and sensible old medico, Doctor Holmes, 
 with his usual clear way of seeing and saying things, 
 points out how it is that men who see into others 
 are apt to be contemptuous, while men who see 
 through them find something behind each human 
 
 1 Professor, p. 7. z Elsie Venner, chap. 27. 
 
 3 Poems, i., p. 119. 
 
THE AUTOCRAT AND TEACHER. 121 
 
 soul which it is not for them to sit in judgment 
 upon nor to sneer at as out of the order of things. 
 
 The modern spirit in which Doctor Holmes 
 treats of nineteenth -century scientific research and 
 its resultant teaching was shown in the section 
 devoted to his work as novelist. On one subject. 
 which is a manifestation of the modern spirit 
 brought to bear upon the conditions of human life, 
 Doctor Holmes is curiously in harmony with two 
 men who differ as widely from each other in manner 
 as they both do from him. These men are Walt 
 Whitman and Henrik Ibsen. In addressing a 
 working men s club at Drontheim in 1885 the 
 Norwegian dramatist said : " The revolution in the 
 social condition, now preparing in Europe, is chiefly 
 concerned with the future of the workers and the 
 women. In this I place all my hopes and ex 
 pectations ; for this I will work with all my life 
 and with all my strength." 1 While Whitman 
 has numerous passages, such as this from the Sony 
 of Myself- 
 
 " I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, 
 And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man, 
 And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of 
 men." 2 
 
 Doctor Holmes has frequent passages the idea 
 
 1 The Pillars of Society, etc., edited by Havelock Ellis, 
 p. xii. 
 
 - Leaves of Grass : Sony of Myself, 21. 
 
122 OLIVER \\ENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 in which may claim kinship with that in the 
 utterances of Ibsen and Whitman. 
 
 " Would that the heart of woman warmed our creeds ! 
 Not from the sad-eyed hermit s lonely cell, 
 Not from the conclave where the holy men 
 Glare on each other, as with angry eyes 
 They battle for God s glory and their own, 
 Till, sick of wordy strife, a show of hands 
 Fixes the faith of ages yet unborn, 
 Ah, not from these the listening soul can hear 
 The Father s voice that speaks itself divine ! 
 Love must be still our Master ; till we learn 
 What he can teach us of a woman s heart, 
 We know not his whose love embraces all." l 
 
 And yet again he says, " I have been ready to 
 believe that we have even now a new revelation, 
 and the name of its Messiah is WOMAN ! " 2 This 
 passage, written over thirty years ago, might be 
 called almost prophetic. For along with the oft- 
 times raucous cry of " woman s rights " has un 
 questionably come a tendency more fittingly to 
 acknowledge woman s true sphere in civilised 
 society. 
 
 Throughout his writings Holmes is inculcating 
 the same lessons of self-reliant optimism "we 
 carry happiness into our condition, but must not 
 expect to find it there." " To thine own self be 
 true," he says again and again ; in other words, " If 
 you would be happy in Berkshire, you must carry 
 
 1 Poems, ii., p. 195. 2 Professor, p. 125. 
 
THE AUTOCRAT AND TEACHER. 123 
 
 mountains in your brain ; and if you would enjoy 
 Nahant, you must have an ocean in your soul. 
 Nature plays at dominos with you ; you must 
 match her piece, or she will never give it up to 
 you." 1 What an excellent way of putting what 
 has been said often enough, and never better, 
 perhaps, than in that epigram, " The eye sees 
 that which it brings with it the power of seeing." 
 What wholesome advice, too, is contained in the 
 whole of A Rhymed Lesson ! How well pointed are 
 these lines addressed to " Poor Richard s fellow- 
 citizens " ! 
 
 " Yet in opinions look not always back, 
 Your wake is nothing, mind the coming track ; 
 Leave what you ve done for what you have to do ; 
 Don t be consistent, but be simply true. 
 Don t catch the fidgets ; you have found your place 
 Just in the focus of a nervous race, 
 Fretful to change and rabid to discuss, 
 Full of excitements, always in a fuss. 
 Ilun, if you like, but try to keep your breath ; 
 Work like a man, but don t be worked to death ; 
 And with new notions, let me change the rule, 
 Don t strike the iron till it s slightly cool." 2 
 
 " It isn t what a man thinks or says, but when 
 and where and to whom he thinks and says it." 
 I have heard it objected to Doctor Holmes that 
 he is guilty of saying what he thinks not at the 
 right moment, that, in fact, his didactic writing 
 
 Autocrat, p. 2G5. 2 Poems, i., pp. 121-2. 
 
124 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 is out of place in humorous papers such as the 
 Breakfast-Table Series. I must confess that when 
 I heard this I felt that the criticism of another 
 friend (referred to earlier, see p. 107) was justified, 
 that the volumes would be better or more 
 properly appreciated if they were minus a goodly 
 percentage of the humorous writing. The lighter 
 style may, on the whole, predominate, but I should 
 imagine that the author set out not to write 
 humour, but to express his thoughts amid a 
 humorous setting, the better to get them read, 
 in the same manner as he set out in each of his 
 novels to discuss a definite psychological or 
 pathological problem. In the former case the 
 teaching was probably much less definite even in 
 the mind of the author than in the latter. Of 
 his listeners he says on one occasion, " I know 
 well enough that there are some of you who had 
 a great deal rather see me stand on my head 
 than use it for any purpose of thought. . . . Well, 
 I can t be savage with you for wanting to laugh, 
 and I like to make you laugh well enough, when I 
 can. But then observe this : if the sense of the 
 ridiculous is one side of an impressible nature, 
 it is very well \ but if that is all there is in a man, 
 he had better have been an ape at once, and so 
 have stood at the head of his profession." 1 In 
 
 Autocrat, p. 90. 
 
THE AUTOCRAT AND TEACHER. 125 
 
 defending his changeableness from serious thought 
 to entertaining humour, Holmes says, and gives 
 the quotation all the importance which capital 
 letters can impart, and at the same time gives us 
 a summing-up in brief of what his own teaching 
 may be said to represent, " I know nothing in 
 English or any other literature more admirable 
 than that sentiment of Sir Thomas Browne, 
 EVERY MAN TRULY LIVES, so LONG AS HE ACTS HIS 
 
 NATURE, OR SOME WAY MAKES GOOD THE FACULTIES 
 OF HIMSELF. " 
 
 A few words may here be devoted to the volume 
 of essays entitled Pages from an Old Volume of 
 Life, a volume which includes the very striking 
 address The Inevitable Trial to which I have 
 referred earlier, and also the beautiful quadruple 
 essay entitled The Seasons. In an all-too-short 
 chapter of reminiscence called Cinders from the 
 Ashes, Doctor Holmes tells of his early schooling 
 and of his early schoolfellows some of whom had 
 since become famous, and describes how at the end 
 of August 1867, he made a sentimental journey to 
 old haunts at Andover. "The ghost of a boy was 
 at my side as I wandered among the places he 
 knew so well. I went to the front of the house. 
 There was the great rock showing its broad back 
 in the front yard. I used to crack nuts on that. 
 whispered the small ghost. I looked in at tin 
 upper window in the farther part of the house. J 
 
126 OI.T\TK \\TNI >KLL 
 
 looked out of tiuai oti j t r ln<i cktMffing *v^ 
 
 -aid the ghost. . . . And here is the back road 
 that will lead me round by the old Academy 
 building. Could I believe my sense* when I found 
 that it was turned into a gymnasium, and heard 
 the low thunder of ninepin-balls, and the crash <>f 
 tumbling pins from those precincts? The little 
 ghost said. AVw/ It cannot be. But it wa>. 
 Have they a billiard-room in the upper story I 
 asked myself. Do the theological profe>sois take 
 a hand at all-fours or poker on week-days, now and 
 then, and read the secular column of the Bottom 
 Recorder on Sundays ? I was demoralised for the 
 moment, it is plain ; but now that I have recovered 
 from the shook. 1 must say that the fact mentioned 
 seems to show a great advance in common sense 
 from the notions prevailing in my time." 1 
 
 Thus round all the old spots terming with associa 
 tions goes the man accompanied by the ghost of his 
 
 boyhood until it is time to return, when Two 
 
 ticket- - I- fltoo, 1 1 said to the man at the station. 
 
 " But the little ghost whimpered, Jf7<eu you leave 
 this place you leave me behiml you. 
 
 (.hi? ticket to Boston, if you plea>e. (Sood-bye. 
 little ghost. 
 
 " I believe the boy-shadow still lingers around 
 the well -remembered scenes I traversed on that 
 
 1 Pag ft from an Old Voluwic of L -5. 
 
THE AUTOCRAT AND TEACHER. I2/ 
 
 day, and that, whenever I revisit them. I shall 
 find him again a* my companion*" l 
 
 The whole of this volume cf / > a^r is made up of 
 eminently instructive, thoughtful, and at the same 
 time entertaining matter, varied it is true as 
 may be een from a glance at the contents from 
 papers such a that from which I have just quoted 
 to such subjects as Crime and Automatism and 
 Jfofanum m 77i*t<?/<< awt J/orZ. This last- 
 Mentioned eway was delivered as an address before 
 . : hi Beta Kappa Society in 1670. 2 Its line of 
 thought may be jniefcsed at once from that of the 
 novels which we have already considered. It is. 
 in a measure, a re-stating of the same problem* 
 which had fascinated the author earlier, and 
 should be read by all who take an interest in 
 questions of morals and individual responsibility. 
 Doctor Holmes claims that a large part of our 
 mental a* of our physical life is mechanical, that 
 is, independent of our volition, and goes on to say 
 that " our natural instincts and tastes have a ba>is 
 which can no more be reached by the will than 
 the sense of light and darkness or that of heat 
 and cold." 3 Later on in the essay the author 
 illustrates in a very happy manner the position 
 
 an Old Volume of Life, pp. 2 
 2 Thi* paper i* published as a mall volume, apart from 
 the U orkt, both in England and America. 
 Page* from an Old Volume <f Life, p. 261. 
 
128 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 which he takes up. " The misfortune of perverse 
 instincts, which adhere to us as congenital 
 inheritances, should go to our side of the account, 
 if the books of heaven are kept, as the great 
 Church of Christendom maintains they are, by 
 double entry. But the absurdity which has been 
 held up to ridicule in the nursery has been enforced 
 as the highest reason upon older children. Did 
 our forefathers tolerate sEsop among them ? * I 
 cannot trouble the water where you are, says 
 the lamb to the wolf : i don t you see that I am 
 farther down the stream ? But a year ago you 
 called me ill-names. Oh, sir ! a year ago I was 
 not born ! Sirrah, replies the wolf, if it 
 wasn t you it was your father, and that is all one, 
 and finishes with the usual practical application." 1 
 
 1 Pages from an Old Volume of Life, pp. 304-5. 
 
V. 
 
 THE DOCTOR. 
 
 VERSES. 
 
 (Read at the Complimentary Dinner given to Dr. Holmes 
 by tlte Medical Profession of New York on April 12, 1883.) 
 
 ])Y DR. A. H. SMITH. 
 
 YOU VE heard of the deacon s one-hoss shay 
 
 Which, finished in Boston the self-same day 
 
 That the city of Lisbon went to pot, 
 
 Did a century s service and then was not. 
 
 But the record s at fault which says that it bust 
 
 Into simply a heap of amorphous dust, 
 
 For after the wreck of that wonderful tub 
 
 Out of the ruins they saved a hub ; 
 
 And the hub has since stood for Boston town, 
 
 Hub of the Universe, note that down. 
 
 But an orderly hub, as all will own, 
 
 Must have something central to turn upon, 
 
 And, rubber cushioned, and true and bright, 
 
 We have the axle here to-night. 
 
 Thrice welcome then to our festal board 
 
 The doctor-poet, so doubly stored 
 
 With science as well as with native wit, 
 
 Poeta miscitur, you know, non fit, 
 
 Skilled to dissect with knife or pen 
 
 His subjects dead or living men ; 
 
 129 9 
 
130 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 With thought sublime on every page 
 To swell the veins with virtuous rage, 
 Or with a syringe to inject them 
 "With sublimate, to disinfect them ; 
 To show with demonstrator s art 
 The complex chambers of the heart ; 
 Or armed with a diviner skill 
 To make it pulsate at his will ; 
 With generous verse to celebrate 
 The loaves and fishes of some giver; 
 And then proceed to demonstrate 
 The lobes and fissures of the liver : 
 To soothe the pulses of the brain 
 With poetry s enchanting strain, 
 Or to describe to class uproarious 
 Pes hippocampi accessorious ; 
 To nerve with fervour 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 humour 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. 
 
 IN this presentment of the life and work of Oliver 
 Wendell Holmes as a literary man it is not 
 necessary to treat at any length of his work as 
 a scientist as student, physician and professor ; 
 
THE DOCTOR. 131 
 
 except in so far as that scientific work and know 
 ledge have influenced or coloured the literary work, 
 and this has already been done incidentally in the 
 preceding pages. 
 
 On returning from his European studies, and 
 taking his medical degree, as we saw earlier, young 
 Doctor Holmes distinguished himself by carrying 
 off three out of four medals offered for essays on 
 certain medical subjects. These essays were pub 
 lished in 1838, but have not been included by the 
 author in his collected writings, though he tells us 
 in a " Second Preface " to the volume of Medical 
 Essays that he felt tempted to include the Essay 
 on Intermittent Fever in New England. The essays 
 which he has included in this volume are named 
 the list at the conclusion of this book. As 
 Professor of Anatomy and Physiology, first at 
 Dartmouth and then, for upwards of thirty years, 
 at Harvard, Holmes s influence for good must have 
 been incalculable. A man thoroughly versed in 
 the branches of science which it was his province 
 to teach, of keen insight into facts, both of char 
 acter and of knowledge, gifted with a remarkable 
 power of literary expression, with an epigrammati- 
 cally clear and concise way of putting things, of 
 wide culture, in keen sympathy with those whom 
 he was teaching, and of strong personal charm, 
 it is difficult to conceive of a man more fitted for 
 the role of teacher. 
 
132 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 Several of the essays in Pages from an Old 
 Volume of Life are inspired by the author s pro 
 fessional studies; essays such as those on the 
 Physiology of Walking and of Versification. We 
 shall, however, best know the doctor- writer in the 
 volume which he has named Medical Essays. The 
 first paper in this book is on Homoeopathy and 
 its Kindred Delusions, and in it Doctor Holmes 
 treats to " critical martyrdom " a craze which he 
 says is not entitled, by anything it has done or said, 
 to even so much notoriety as a public rebuke. This 
 essay was delivered, in the form of two lectures, 
 before the Boston Society for the Diffusion of 
 General Knowledge. Needless to say that it was 
 treated to many " counterblasts " from the voices 
 and pens of the followers of Samuel Hahnemann. 
 Doctor Holmes cited cases and references innu 
 merable proving the delusion under which the 
 supporters of Homoeopathy were labouring. " Not 
 one statement shall be made which cannot be 
 supported by unimpeachable reference. ... I have 
 no quibbles to utter, and shall stoop to answer 
 none ; but, with full faith in the sufficiency of a 
 plain statement of facts and reasons, I submit the 
 subject." l The following is an amusing example 
 of the cases cited by the indignant attacker of 
 Homoeopathy. " A young woman affected with 
 
 Medical Essays, p. 40. 
 
THE DOCTOR. 133 
 
 jaundice is mentioned in the German Annals of 
 Clinical Homoeopathy as having been cured in 
 twenty-nine days by pulsatilla and mix voinica. 
 Hummel, a well-known writer of the same school, 
 speaks of curing a case of jaundice in thirty- four 
 days by Homoeopathic doses of pulsatilla, aconite, 
 and cinchona. I happened to have a case in my 
 own household a few weeks since, which lasted 
 about ten days, and this was longer than I have 
 repeatedly seen it in hospital practice, so that it 
 was nothing to boast of." l This case well points the 
 one valuable thing which Doctor Holmes iinds that 
 Homoeopathy has taught, namely, the wonderful 
 restorative and curative power of Nature herself, 
 a power which, by the way, Hahnemann and his 
 disciples explicitly deny. With regard to the sur 
 vival of Homoeopathy at all, Doctor Holmes says, 
 leaving his readers to supply italics to the latter 
 half of his sentence, "It takes time for truth 
 to operate as well as Homoeopathic globules." 2 
 Throughout a hundred pages the doctor adduces 
 arguments, cases and reasons against this delusion, 
 and treats it to the scorn and sarcasm of which he is 
 no insignificant master. His opposition to Homceo 
 pathy is again shown in the latest of his volumes, 
 Our Hundred ])ays in Europe. Indeed, he tells us 
 that when at Stratford-on-Avon he had to change 
 
 AW//*, ].]>. 7U-7. - Ibid., p. 78. 
 
134 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 bis room at the hotel, because the window of the 
 first one which was given to him looked straight 
 across the street at a chemist s shop where was 
 displayed a large cast of the head of the " old hum 
 bug " Hahnemann. The Essay first spoken of is 
 thus summed up : " Such is the pretended science 
 of Homoeopathy, to which you are asked to trust 
 your lives and the lives of those dearest to you. 
 A mingled mass of perverse ingenuity, of tinsel 
 erudition, of imbecile credulity, and of artful 
 misrepresentation, too often mingled in practice, 
 if we may trust the authority of its founder, with 
 heartless and shameless imposition. Because it 
 is suffered so often to appeal unanswered to the 
 public, because it has its journals, its patrons, its 
 apostles, some are weak enough to suppose it can 
 escape the inevitable doom of utter disgrace and 
 oblivion. Not many years can pass away before 
 the same curiosity excited by one of Perkins s 
 Tractors will be awakened at the sight of one of 
 the Infinitesimal Globules. If it should claim a 
 longer existence, it can only be by falling into the 
 hands of the sordid wretches who wring their bread 
 from the cold grasp of disease and death in the 
 hovels of ignorant poverty." l 
 
 The essay on The Contagiousness of Puerperal 
 Fever, is probably the most valuable contribution 
 
 1 Medical Essays, p. 101. 
 
THE DOCTOR. 135 
 
 to medical literature which Doctor Holmes has 
 made. It was no new theory which he pressed 
 forward now just half a century since l but an 
 eloquent insistence upon a fact which, while care 
 lessly overlooked by the majority of practitioners, 
 was even denied by one or two leading men in the 
 profession. This paper, proving conclusively the 
 contagiousness which had already been imagined, 
 roused a wider attention to the facts of the case. 
 
 In Currents and Counter Currents, addressed 
 (1860) to the members of the Massachusetts 
 Medical Society, we have a plea, practically, for 
 less medicine and more sanitation ; a little more 
 prevention, that attempted cure may be unnecessary 
 it is so much simpler to take the button from 
 the child before he has swallowed it than after. 
 The essay constitutes a claim for medicine, that it 
 shall not necessarily follow the lines of Galen and 
 Hippocrates, because at one time those lines were 
 the best known ; that the physician shall not re 
 commend calomel, because, like the landlord when 
 he recommends eggs and bacon, "it is handy." 
 This essay contains, also, passages reminiscent of 
 the two preceding ones, showing that the author 
 still felt as strongly as ever on the subjects therein 
 considered. One sly reference to Hahnemann is 
 amusing : " I confess that I should think my 
 chance of recovery from illness less with Hippo - 
 
 1 The paper \v;is first printed in 184:;. 
 
136 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 crates for ray physician and Mrs. Gamp for my 
 nurse, than if I were in the hands of Hahnemann 
 himself, with Florence Nightingale or good Rebecca 
 Taylor to care for me." 1 
 
 The third essay in this volume is especially inter 
 esting to students of Holmes s works ; it is entitled 
 Border Lines in Medical /Science, and was delivered 
 as the introductory lecture to the medical class of 
 Harvard in 1861. In it the author says that his 
 task is " only that of sending out a few pickets 
 under the starry flag of science to the edge of that 
 dark domain where the ensigns of the obstinate 
 rebel, Ignorance, are flying undisputed." 2 Much 
 of Doctor Holmes s writing may be said to take us 
 to the border line of science, not so much on the 
 side of ignorance, as on the side of the partially 
 known. We feel that, though treating of various 
 abstruse problems in his novels, for example, he is 
 yet of that minority which we have been recently 
 taught to believe " is always right." He is with 
 the very advanced guard of thinkers on the border 
 line, and the messages which he sends back to the 
 main column, although at first, perhaps, scouted 
 and disbelieved, are none the less true therefore. 
 
 In a valedictory address to a class of graduating 
 students The Young Practitioner Doctor Holmes 
 gives some excellent advice, pointed with all his 
 accustomed humour; again he insists upon a 
 
 1 Medical Essay x p. 204. 2 IMcl.. p. 212. 
 
THE DOCTOR. 137 
 
 matter to which he refers several times elsewhere, 
 the duty of a physician not to tell a patient the 
 truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. 
 "Your patient has no more right to all the 
 truth you know than he has to all the medicine in 
 your saddlebags, if you carry that kind of cartridge- 
 box for the ammunition that slays disease. He 
 should get only just so much as is good for him. 
 I have seen a physician examining a patient s 
 chest stop all at once, as he brought out a 
 particular sound with a tap on the collar-bone, 
 in the attitude of a pointer who has just come on 
 the scent or sight of a woodcock. You remember 
 that Spartan boy, who, with unmoved countenance, 
 hid the fox that was tearing his vitals beneath his 
 mantle. What he could do in his own suffering 
 you must learn to do for others on whose vital 
 organs disease has fastened its devouring teeth. 
 It is a terrible thing to take away hope, even 
 earthly hope, from a fellow-creature. Be very 
 careful what names you let fall before your 
 patient. He knows what it means when you tell 
 him he has tubercles or Bright s disease, and, if he 
 hears the word carcinoma, he will certainly look it 
 out in a medical dictionary, if he does not interpret 
 its dread significance on the instant. Tell him he 
 has asthmatic symptoms, or a tendency to the 
 gouty diathesis, and he will at once think of all 
 the asthmatic and gouty old patriarchs he has 
 
138 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 ever heard of, and be comforted. You need not 
 be so cautious in speaking of the health of rich 
 and remote relatives, if he is in the line of 
 succession." l 
 
 The essay on Medical Libraries is valuable, not 
 alone to medical readers indeed none of these 
 papers appeal purely to specialists but to all as a 
 delightful gossip about books, with some excellent 
 remarks on the subject of indexing. Just as we 
 found the doctor colouring the work of the poet and 
 novelist, so we find the poet and novelist in their 
 turn contributing something to the medical papers 
 which papers are hence very pleasant reading to 
 all. One of the students of Doctor Holmes s last 
 class at Harvard, in speaking of his influence as 
 lecturer, points very well the influence which, in 
 virtue of the same qualities, he exercises over his 
 readers. " We always " (wrote this student) " wel 
 comed Professor Holmes with enthusiastic cheers 
 when he came into the class-room, and his lectures 
 were so brimful of anecdote 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 know 
 ledge and what a clear insight upon difficult points 
 in medical science had been imparted to us through 
 the sparkling medium." 
 
 1 Medical Essays, pp. 388-9. 
 
THE IRON GATE. 
 BY OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 WHERE is this patriarch you are kindly greeting ? 
 
 Not unfamiliar to my ear his name, 
 Nor 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 greybeard ! Well, indeed, I know 
 him, 
 
 Shrunk, tottering, bent, of aches and ills the prey; 
 In sermon, story, fable, picture, poem, 
 
 Oft have I met him from my earliest day : 
 
 In my old ^Esop, 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. 
 39 
 
140 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 And sad " Ecclesiastes, or the Preacher," 
 Has he not stamped the image on my soul, 
 
 In that last chapter, where the worn-out Teacher 
 Sighs o er the loosened cord, the broken bowl ? 
 
 Yes, long, indeed, I ve known him at a distance, 
 And now my lifted door-latch shows him here ; 
 
 I take his shrivelled hand without resistance, 
 And find him smiling as his step draws near. 
 
 What though of gilded baubles he bereaves us, 
 Dear to the heart of youth, to manhood s prime ; 
 
 Think of the calm he brings, the wealth he leaves 
 
 us, 
 The hoarded spoils, the legacies of time ! 
 
 Altars once naming, still with incense fragrant, 
 Passions uneasy nurslings rocked asleep, 
 
 Hope s anchor faster, wild desire less vagrant, 
 Life s flow less noisy, but the stream how deep ! 
 
 Still as the silver cord gets worn and slender, 
 Its lightened task- work tugs with lessening strain, 
 
 Hands get more helpful, voices, grown more tender, 
 Soothe with their softened tones the slumberous 
 brain. 
 
 Youth longs and manhood strives, but age remem 
 bers, 
 
 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. 
 
THE IRON GATE. 141 
 
 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 labours 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 nying 
 
 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 wintry landscape and the summer skies. 
 
 So when the iron portal shuts behind us, 
 And life forgets us in its noise and whirl, 
 
 Visions that shunned the glaring noonday find us, 
 And glimmering starlight shows the gates of 
 pearl. 
 
 I come not here your morning hour to sadden, 
 A limping pilgrim, leaning on his staff, 
 
 I, who have never deemed it sin to gladden 
 This vale of sorrow with a wholesome laugh. 
 
142 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 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 
 releas- 
 
 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 cheerfub 
 
 And warmer heart than look or word can tell, 
 In simplest phrase these traitorous eyes are 
 
 tearful 
 
 Thanks, Brothers, Sisters, Children, and fare 
 well ! 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 THE WRITINGS OF OLIVER WENDELL 
 HOLMES, IN THIRTEEN VOLUMES, 
 
 1891. 
 
 VOLUMK 
 
 I. THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
 II. THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
 
 III. THE POET AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
 
 IV. OVER THE TEACUPS. 
 V. ELSIE VENNER. 
 
 VI. THE GUARDIAN ANGEL. 
 VII. A MORTAL ANTIPATHY. 
 
 VIII. PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE : 
 Bread and the Newspaper; My Hunt 
 after "The Captain"; The Inevitable Trial ; 
 The Physiology of Walking ; The Seasons ; 
 The Human Body and its Management; 
 Cinders from tfie Ashes ; Mechanism in 
 Thought and Morals ; The Physiology of 
 Versification ; Crime and Automatism ; 
 Jonathan Edwards; The Pufyit and the 
 
 Pew. 
 
1 44 BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 Touno: 
 
 IX. MEDICAL ESSAYS : Homoeopathy and its 
 . "/. : I*-: > .: > ~ : -: : f.y > -> 
 of Puerperal Fever ; Current* and Counter- 
 Current* in Medical Science; Border 
 Lima of Knowledge in, tome Province* of 
 Medical Science; Scholastic and Bedside 
 Teaching; The Medical Profession in 
 Massachusetts; The Young Practitioner; 
 Medical Libraries; Some of my Early 
 Teachers. 
 
 X. Oor HTJSDBED DATS o: ECBOFE. 
 
 XL POEMS (L): Earlier Poems (1830-1836), 
 Additional Poems (1837-1848); Medical 
 Poems; Songs in Many Keys (1849- 
 1861). 
 
 XII. POEMS (iL): Poem* of the Class of 29 
 (1851-1889) / Poems from Oc" Autocrat" 
 (1857-1858) / Poems from the Professor " 
 (1858-1859)/ Poem* from the "Poet" 
 (1871-1872),* Songsof Many Seasons. 
 
 XIIL POEMS (iiL): Bunker-Hill Battle and other 
 Poems; The Iron Gate and other Poems; 
 Before the Curfew; Poem* from "Over 
 the Tcacup*"; Readings from "Over the 
 Teacups"; Verse* from, the Oldest Portr 
 foUo. 
 
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