has written a burlesque, such as he might think fit to send to one of
the comic papers, if these were not so commonly cemeteries of hilarity
interspersed with cenotaphs of wit and humor. These strange hysterics of
the intelligence which make us pass from weeping to laughter, and from
laughter back again to weeping, must be familiar to every impressible
nature; and all this is as automatic, involuntary, as entirely
self-evolved by a hidden, organic process, as are the changing moods of
the laughing and crying woman. The poet always recognizes a dictation
_ab extra_; and we hardly think it a figure of speech when we talk of
his inspiration."

Of Doctor Holmes' inimitable _vers d'occasion_ we select the following:

At the reception given to Harriet Beecher Stowe on her seventieth
birthday, at Governor Claflin's beautiful summer residence in
Newtonville, Doctor Holmes read the following witty and characteristic
poem:

    If every tongue that speaks her praise
    For whom I shape my tinkling phrase
      Were summoned to the table,
    The vocal chorus that would meet
    Of mingling accents harsh or sweet
    From every land and tribe would beat
      The polyglots of Babel.

    Briton and Frenchman, Swede and Dane,
    Turk, Spaniard, Tartar of Ukraine,
      Hidalgo, Cossack, Cadi,
    High Dutchman and Low Dutchman, too,
    The Russian serf, the Polish Jew,
    Arab, Armenian and Mantchoo
      Would shout, "We know the lady."

    Know her! Who knows not Uncle Tom
    And her he learned his gospel from
      Has never heard of Moses;
    Full well the brave black hand we know
    That gave to freedom's grasp the hoe
    That killed the weed that used to grow
      Among the Southern roses.

    When Archimedes, long ago,
    Spoke out so grandly "_dos pou sto_,--
      Give me a place to stand on,
    I'll move your planet for you, now,"
    He little dreamed or fancied how
    The _sto_ at last should find its _pou_
      For woman's faith to land on.

    Her lever was the wand of art,
    Her fulcrum was the human heart
      Whence all unfailing aid is;
    She moved the earth! its thunders pealed,
    Its mountains shook, its temples reeled,
    The blood-red fountains were unsealed,
      And Moloch sunk to Hades.

    All through the conflict, up and down
    Marched Uncle Tom and Old John Brown,
      One ghost, one form ideal,
    And which was false and which was true.
    And which was mightier of the two,
    The wisest sibyl never knew,
      For both alike were real.

    Sister, the holy maid does well
    Who counts her beads in convent cell,
      Where pale devotion lingers;
    But she who serves the sufferer's needs,
    Whose prayers are spelt in loving deeds
    May trust the Lord will count her beads
      As well as human fingers.

    When Truth herself was Slavery's slave
    Thy hand the prisoned suppliant gave
      The rainbow wings of fiction.
    And Truth who soared descends to-day
    Bearing an angel's wreath away,
    Its lilies at thy feet to lay
      With heaven's own benediction.

The following poem was read by Doctor Holmes at the Unitarian Festival,
June 2, 1882.

    The waves upbuild the wasting shore:
      Where mountains towered the billows sweep:
    Yet still their borrowed spoils restore
      And raise new empires from the deep.
    So, while the floods of thought lay waste
      The old domain of chartered creeds,
    The heaven-appointed tides will haste
      To shape new homes for human needs.
    Be ours to mark with hearts unchilled
      The change an outworn age deplores;
    The legend sinks, but Faith shall build
      A fairer throne on new-found shores,
    The star shall glow in western skies,
      That shone o'er Bethlehem's hallowed shrine,
    And once again the temple rise
      That crowned the rock of Palestine.
    Not when the wondering shepherds bowed
      Did angels sing their latest song,
    Nor yet to Israel's kneeling crowd
      Did heaven's one sacred dome belong--
    Let priest and prophet have their dues,
      The Levite counts but half a man,
    Whose proud "salvation of the Jews"
      Shuts out the good Samaritan!
    Though scattered far the flock may stray,
      His own the shepherd still shall claim,--
    The saints who never learned to pray,--
      The friends who never spoke his name.
    Dear Master, while we hear thy voice,
      That says, "The truth shall make you free,"
    Thy servant still, by loving choice,
      O keep us faithful unto Thee!

Doctor Holmes being unable to attend the annual reunion of the Harvard
Club in New York City, February 21, 1882, sent the following letter and
sonnet which were read at the banquet:

    DEAR BROTHERS ALUMNI:

    As I am obliged to deny myself the pleasure of being with you, I do
    not feel at liberty to ask many minutes of your time and attention.
    I have compressed into the limits of a sonnet the feelings I am sure
    we all share that, besides the roof that shelters us we have need of
    some wider house where we can visit and find ourselves in a more
    extended circle of sympathy than the narrow ring of a family, and
    nowhere can we seek a truer and purer bond of fellowship than under
    the benignant smile of our _Alma Mater_. Let me thank you for the
    kindness which has signified to me that I should be welcome at your
    festival.

    In all the rewards of a literary life none is more precious than the
    kindly recognition of those who have clung to the heart of the same
    nursing mother, and will always flee to each other in the widest
    distances of space, and let us hope in those unbounded realms in
    which we may not utterly forget our earthly pilgrimage and its dear
    companions.

                                        Very sincerely yours,
                                                  OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.

SONNET.

    Yes, home is sweet! and yet we needs must sigh,
      Restless until our longing souls have found
      Some realm beyond the fireside's narrow bound,
    Where slippered ease and sleepy comfort lie,
    Some fair ideal form that cannot die,
      By age dismantled and by change uncrowned,
      Else life creeps circling in the self-same round,
    And the low ceiling hides the lofty sky.
    Ah, then to thee our truant hearts return,
      Dear mother, Alma, Casta--spotless, kind!
      Thy sacred walls a larger home we find,
    And still for thee thy wandering children yearn,
    While with undying fires thine altars burn,
      Where all our holiest memories rest enshrined.

POEM READ BY DOCTOR HOLMES AT THE WHITTIER CELEBRATION.

    I believe that the copies of verses I've spun,
    Like Scheherazade's tales, are a thousand and one,
    You remember the story--those mornings in bed--
    'Twas the turn of a copper--a tale or a head.

    A doom like Scheherazade's falls upon me
    In a mandate as stern as the Sultan's decree;
    I'm a florist in verse, and what _would_ people say
    If I came to a banquet without my bouquet?

    It is trying, no doubt, when the company knows
    Just the look and the smell of each lily and rose,
    The green of each leaf in the sprigs that I bring,
    And the shape of the bunch and the knot of the string.

    Yes, 'the style is the man,' and the nib of one's pen
    Makes the same mark at twenty, and threescore and ten;
    It is so in all matters, if truth may be told;
    Let one look at the cast he can tell you the mould.

    How we all know each other! No use in disguise;
    Through the holes in the mask comes the flash of the eyes;
    We can tell by his--somewhat--each one of our tribe,
    As we know the old hat which we cannot describe.

    Though in Hebrew, in Sanscrit, in Choctaw, you write,
    Sweet singer who gave us the Voices of Night,
    Though in buskin or slipper your song may be shod,
    Or the velvety verse that Evangeline trod.

    We shall say, 'You can't cheat us--we know it is you--
    There is one voice like that, but there cannot be two.
    _Maëstro_, whose chant like the dulcimer rings;
    And the woods will be hushed when the nightingale sings.

    And he, so serene, so majestic, so true,
    Whose temple hypæthral the planets shine through,
    Let us catch but five words from that mystical pen
    We should know our one sage from all children of men.

    And he whose bright image no distance can dim,
    Through a hundred disguises we can't mistake him,
    Whose play is all earnest, whose wit is the edge
    (With a beetle behind) of a sham-splitting wedge.

    Do you know whom we send you, Hidalgos of Spain?
    Do you know your old friends when you see them again?
    Hosea was Sancho! you Dons of Madrid,
    But Sancho that wielded the lance of the Cid!

    And the wood-thrush of Essex--you know whom I mean,
    Whose song echoes round us when he sits unseen,
    Whose heart-throbs of verse through our memories thrill
    Like a breath from the wood, like a breeze from the hill.

    So fervid, so simple, so loving, so pure,
    We hear but one strain and our verdict is sure--
    Thee cannot elude us--no further we search--
    'Tis Holy George Herbert cut loose from his church!

    We think it the voice of a cherub that sings--
    Alas! we remember that angels have wings--
    What story is this of the day of his birth?
    Let him live to a hundred! we want him on earth!

    One life has been paid him (in gold) by the sun;
    One account has been squared and another begun;
    But he never will die if he lingers below
    Till we've paid him in love half the balance we owe!

CHAPTER XIII.

THE MAN OF SCIENCE.

"What decided me," says Doctor Holmes, "to give up Law and apply myself
to Medicine, I can hardly say, but I had from the first looked upon my
law studies as an experiment. At any rate, I made the change, and soon
found myself introduced to new scenes and new companionships.

"I can scarcely credit my memory when I recall the first impressions
produced upon me by sights afterwards become so familiar that they could
no more disturb a pulse-beat than the commonest of every-day
experiences. The skeleton, hung aloft like a gibbeted criminal, looked
grimly at me as I entered the room devoted to the students of the school
I had joined, just as the fleshless figure of Time, with the hour-glass
and scythe, used to glare upon me in my childhood from the _New England
Primer_. The white faces in the beds at the Hospital found their
reflection in my own cheeks which lost their color as I looked upon
them. All this had to pass away in a little time; I had chosen my
profession, and must meet all its aspects until they lost their power
over my sensibility....

"After attending two courses of lectures in the School of the
University, I went to Europe to continue my studies. I can hardly
believe my own memory when I recall the old practitioners and professors
who were still going round the hospitals when I mingled with the train
of students in the École de Médicine."

Of the famous Baron Boyer, author of a nine-volumed book on surgery,
Doctor Holmes says, "I never saw him do more than look as if he wanted
to cut a good collop out of a patient he was examining." Baron Larrey,
the favorite surgeon of Napoleon, he describes as a short, square,
substantial man, with iron-gray hair, red face, and white apron. To go
round the Hotel des Invalides with Larrey was to live over the campaign
of Napoleon, to look on the sun of Austerlitz, to hear the cannon of
Marengo, to struggle through the icy waters of the Beresina, to shiver
in the snows of the Russian retreat, and to gaze through the battle
smoke upon the last charge of the red lancers on the redder field of
Waterloo.

Then there was Baron Dupuytren, "_ce grand homme de lautre côté de la
rivièrè_,--with his high, full-doomed head and oracular utterances;
Lisfrance, the great drawer of blood and hewer of members; Velpeau, who,
coming to Paris in wooden shoes, and starving, almost, at first, raised
himself to great eminence as surgeon and author; Broussais, the
knotty-featured, savage old man who reminded one of a volcano, which had
well-nigh used up its fire and brimstone, and Gabriel Audral, the rapid,
fluent, fervid and imaginative speaker.

"The object of our reverence, however, I might almost say idolatry,"
adds Doctor Holmes, "was Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis, a tall, rather
spare, dignified personage, of serene and grave aspect, but with a
pleasant smile and kindly voice for the student with whom he came into
personal relations.

"If I summed up the lessons of Louis in two expressions, they would be
these: First, always make sure that you form a distinct and clear idea
of the matter you are considering. Second, always avoid vague
approximations where exact estimates are possible....

"Yes, as I say, I look back on the long hours of the many days I spent
in the wards and in the autopsy room of La Pitié, where Louis was one
of the attending physicians--yes, Louis did a great work for practical
medicine. Modest in the presence of nature, fearless in the face of
authority, unwearying in the pursuit of truth, he was a man whom any
student might be happy and proud to claim as his teacher and his friend.
And yet, as I look back on the days when I followed his teachings, I
feel that I gave myself up too exclusively to his methods of thought and
study. There is one part of their business that certain medical
practitioners are too apt to forget; namely, that what they should most
of all try to do is to ward off disease, to alleviate suffering, to
preserve life, or at least to prolong it if possible. It is not of the
slightest interest to the patient to know whether three or three and a
quarter inches of his lungs are hepatized. His mind is not occupied with
thinking of the curious problems which are to be solved by his own
autopsy, whether this or that strand of the spinal marrow is the seat of
this or that form of degeneration. He wants something to relieve his
pain, to mitigate the anguish of dyspnæa, to bring back motion and
sensibility to the dead limb, to still the tortures of neuralgia. What
is it to him that you can localize and name by some uncouth term, the
disease which you could not prevent and which you can not cure? an old
woman who knows how to make a poultice and how to put it on, and does it
_tuto_, _cito_, _jucunde_, just when and where it is wanted, is
better--a thousand times better in many cases--than a staring
pathologist who explores and thumps and doubts and guesses and tells his
patient he will be better to-morrow, and so goes home to tumble his
books over and make out a diagnosis.

"But in those days I, like most of my fellow students, was thinking much
more of 'science' than of practical medicine, and I believe if we had
not clung so closely to the skirts of Louis, and had followed some of
the courses of men like Rousseau,--therapeutists, who gave special
attention to curative methods, and not chiefly to diagnosis--it would
have been better for me and others. One thing, at any rate, we did learn
in the wards of Louis. We learned that a very large proportion of
diseases get well of themselves, without any special medication--the
great fact formulated, enforced and popularized by Doctor Jacob
Bigelow."

It is well known that Doctor Holmes detests the habit of drugging
practised by so many physicians of the "old school," and in his address
before the Massachusetts Medical Society, entitled Currents and Counter
Currents in Medical Science, he makes a severe attack upon the
inordinate use of medicines.

"What is the honest truth," he says at another time, "about the medical
art? By far the largest number of diseases which physicians are called
to treat will get well at any rate, even in spite of reasonably bad
treatment. Of the other fraction, a certain number will inevitably die,
whatever is done: there remains a small margin of cases where the life
of the patient depends on the skill of the physician. Drugs now and then
save life; they often shorten disease and remove symptoms; but they are
second in importance to food, air, temperature, and the other hygienic
influences. That was a shrewd trick of Alexander's physician on the
occasion of his attack after bathing. He asked three days to prepare his
medicine. Time is the great physician as well as the great consoler.
Sensible men in all ages have trusted most to nature."

Of quacks and other humbugs, Doctor Holmes had an undisguised, wholesome
contempt.

"Shall we try," he says, "the medicines advertised with the certificates
of justices of the peace, of clergymen, or even members of Congress?
Certainly, it may be answered, any one of them which makes a good case
for itself. But the difficulty is, that the whole class of commercial
remedies are shown by long experience, with the rarest exceptions, to be
very sovereign cures for empty pockets, and of no peculiar efficacy for
anything else. You may be well assured that if any really convincing
evidence was brought forward in behalf of the most vulgar nostrum, the
chemists would go at once to work to analyze it, the physiologists to
experiment with it, and the young doctors would all be trying it on
their own bodies, if not on their patients. But we do not think it worth
while, as a general rule, to send a Cheap Jack's gilt chains and lockets
to be tested for gold. We know they are made to sell, and so with the
pills and potions.... Think how rapidly any real discovery is
appropriated and comes into universal use. Take anæsthetics, take the
use of bromide of potassium, and see how easily they obtained
acceptance. If you are disposed to think any of the fancy systems has
brought forward any new remedy of value which the medical profession has
been slow to accept, ask any fancy practitioner to name it. Let him
name one,--the best his system claims,--not a hundred, but one. A single
new, efficient, trustworthy remedy which the medical profession can test
as they are ready to test before any scientific tribunal, opium,
quinine, ether, the bromide of potassium. There is no such remedy on
which any of the fancy practitioners dare stake his reputation. If there
were, it would long ago have been accepted, though it had been flowers
of brimstone from the borders of Styx or Cocytus."

Homoeopathy is classed by Doctor Holmes among such "Kindred Delusions"
as the Royal Cure for the King's Evil, the Weapon Ointment, the
Sympathetic Powder, the Tar-water mania of Bishop Berkeley, and the
Metallic Tractors, or Perkinsism.

In making a direct attack upon the pretentions of Homoeopathy, Doctor
Holmes declares at the outset that he shall treat it not by ridicule,
but by argument; with great freedom, but with good temper and in
peaceable language.

_Similia similibus curantur._ Like cures like, is one of the fundamental
principles of Homoeopathy, and "improbable though it may seem to
some," says Doctor Holmes with his usual impartial fairness, "there is
no essential absurdity involved in the proposition that diseases yield
to remedies capable of producing like symptoms. There are, on the other
hand, some analogies which lend a degree of plausibility to the
statement. There are well-ascertained facts, known from the earliest
periods of medicine, showing that under certain circumstances, the very
medicine which from its known effects, one would expect to aggravate the
disease, may contribute to its relief. I may be permitted to allude, in
the most general way, to the case in which the spontaneous efforts of an
over-tasked stomach are quieted by the agency of a drug which that organ
refuses to entertain upon any terms. But that _every_ cure ever
performed by medicine should have been founded upon this principle,
although without the knowledge of a physician, that the Homoeopathy
axiom is, as Hahnemann asserts, "the _sole_ law of nature in
therapeutics," a law of which nothing more than a transient glimpse ever
presented itself to the innumerable host of medical observers, is a
dogma of such sweeping extent and pregnant novelty, that it demands a
corresponding breath and depth of unquestionable facts to cover its vast
pretensions."

Among the many facts of which great use has been made by the
Homoeopathists, is that found in the precept given for the treatment
of parts which have been frozen, by friction with snow, etc.

"But," says Doctor Holmes, "we deceive ourselves by names, if we suppose
the frozen part to be treated by cold, and not by heat. The snow may
even be actually _warmer_ than the part to which it is applied. But even
if it were at the same temperature when applied, it never did and never
could do the least good to a frozen part, except as a mode of regulating
the application of what? of _heat_. But the heat must be applied
_gradually_, just as food must be given a little at a time to those
perishing with hunger. If the patient were brought into a warm room,
heat would be applied _very rapidly_, were not something interposed to
prevent this, and allow its gradual admission. Snow or iced water is
exactly what is wanted; it is not cold to the part; it is very possibly
warm, on the contrary, for these terms are relative, and if it does not
melt and let the heat in, or is not taken away, the part will remain
frozen up until doomsday. Now the treatment of a frozen limb by heat, in
large or small quantities, is not Homoeopathy."

Another supposed illustration of the Homoeopathic law is the alleged
successful management of burns, by holding them to the fire. "This is a
popular mode of treating those burns which are of too little consequence
to require any more efficacious remedy, and would inevitably get well of
themselves, without any trouble being bestowed upon them. It produces a
most acute pain in the part, which is followed by some loss of
sensibility, as happens with the eye after exposure to strong light, and
the ear after being subjected to very intense sounds. This is all it is
capable of doing, and all further notions of its efficacy must be
attributed merely to the vulgar love of paradox. If this example affords
any comfort to the Homoeopathist, it seems as cruel to deprive him of
it as it would be to convince the mistress of the smoke-jack or the
flatiron that the fire does not literally draw the fire out, which is
her hypothesis.

"But if it were true that frost-bites were cured by cold and burns by
heat, it would be subversive, so far as it went, of the great principle
of Homoeopathy. For you will remember that this principle is that
_Like_ cures _Like_, and not that _Same_ cures _Same_; that there is
_resemblance_ and not _identity_ between the symptoms of the disease and
those produced by the drug which cures it, and none have been readier to
insist upon this distinction than the Homoeopathists themselves. For
if _Same_ cures _Same_, then every poison must be its own
antidote,--which is neither a part of their theory nor their so-called
experience. They have been asked often enough, why it was that arsenic
could not cure the mischief which arsenic had caused, and why the
infectious cause of small-pox did not remedy the disease it had
produced, and then they were ready enough to see the distinction I have
pointed out. "O no! it was not the hair of the same dog, but only of one
very much like him!"

The belief in and employment of the "Infinitesimal doses," Doctor Holmes
handles with the same fairness and acumen; but the absurd idea affirmed
by Hahnemann that Psora is the cause of the great majority of chronic
diseases, he treats as it deserves, with unqualified contempt.

In conclusion, he says, "As one humble member of a profession which for
more than two thousand years has devoted itself to the pursuit of the
best earthly interests of mankind always assailed and insulted from
without by such as are ignorant of its infinite perplexities and labors,
always striving in unequal contest with the hundred armed giants who
walk in the noonday and sleep not in the midnight, yet still toiling not
merely for itself and the present moment, but for the race and the
future, I have lifted up my voice against this lifeless delusion,
rolling its shapeless bulk into the path of a noble science it is too
weak to strike or to injure."

Upon the contagiousness of Puerperal Fever, Doctor Holmes wrote an able
treatise some forty years ago. This was reprinted with some additions,
in 1855, and in an introductory note which accompanies the still later
addition (1883), Doctor Holmes says, "The subject of this Paper has the
same profound interest for me at the present moment as it had when I
was first collecting the terrible evidence out of which, as it seems to
me, the commonest exercise of reason could not help shaping the truth it
involved. It is not merely on account of the bearing of the question--if
there is a question--on all that is most sacred in human life and
happiness that the subject cannot lose its interest. It is because it
seems evident that a fair statement of the facts must produce its
proportion of well-constituted and unprejudiced minds."

The essay, a most valuable one, is republished without the change of a
word or syllable, as the author upon reviewing finds that it anticipates
and eliminates those secondary questions which cannot be for a moment
entertained until the one great point of fact is peremptorily settled.

There are but very few subjects, indeed, in medical science, that Doctor
Holmes has not investigated, and investigated, too, most thoroughly....

In his article on "Reflex Vision," published in Volume IV. of the
Proceedings of the American Academy, will be found a very interesting
account of his experiments in optics. One, indeed, that will both
interest and instruct.

To him, as is well known, we are indebted for numerous improvements in
the stereoscope; and in microscopes also, he has done some original and
important work.

Said an admirer of Doctor Holmes in referring to his career as a medical
professor:

"He always makes people attentive, and I have been told that there is no
professor whom the students so much like to listen to. In one of his
books he says that every one of us is three persons, and I think that if
the statement is true in regard to ordinary men and women, Doctor Holmes
himself is at least half a dozen persons. He lectures so well on anatomy
that his students never suspect him to be a poet, and he writes verses
so well that most people do not suspect him of being an authority among
scientific men. Though he illustrates his medical lectures by quotations
of the most appropriate and interesting sort, from a wonderful variety
of authors, he has never been known to refer to his own writings in that
way."

In celebrating the silver anniversary year of his wedding with the Muse
of the monthlies--meaning his reappearance in the _Atlantic_--he
observed that during the larger part of his absence, his time had been
in a great measure occupied with other duties. "I never forgot the
advice of Coleridge," he said, "that a literary man should have a
regular calling. I may say, in passing, that I have often given the
advice to others, and too often wished that I could supplement it with
the words, "And confine himself to it.'"

CHAPTER XIV.

THE HOLMES BREAKFAST.

As the seventieth birthday of Doctor Holmes drew near, the publishers of
the _Atlantic Monthly_ resolved to give a "Breakfast" in his honor. The
twenty-ninth of August, 1879, was, of course, the true anniversary, but
knowing it would be difficult to bring together at that season of the
year the friends and literary associates of Doctor Holmes, Mr. Houghton
decided to postpone the invitations until the thirteenth of November.
Upon that day a brilliant company assembled at noon in the spacious
parlors of the Hotel Brunswick, in Boston.

Doctor Holmes and his daughter, Mrs. Sargent, received the guests, who
numbered in all about one hundred. Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mrs.
Julia Ward Howe, Ralph Waldo Emerson and John G. Whittier assisted in
this ceremony, and after a couple of hours spent in sparkling converse,
the company adjourned to the dining-room, where a sumptuous "Breakfast"
was served to the "Autocrat" and his friends.

At the six tables were seated writers of eminence in every department of
literature. Grace was said by the Rev. Phillips Brooks, D.D., and after
the cloth was removed, Mr. H.O. Houghton introduced the guest of the day
in a few happily-chosen words.

The company then rose and drank the health of the poet, after which
Doctor Holmes read the following beautiful poem:

THE IRON GATE.

    Where is the patriarch you are kindly greeting?
      Not unfamiliar to my ear his name,
    Not yet unknown to many a joyous meeting
      In days long vanished,--is he still the same,

    Or changed by years forgotten and forgetting,
      Dull-eared, dim-sighted, slow of speech and thought,
    Still o'er the sad, degenerate present fretting,
      Where all goes wrong and nothing as it ought?

    Old age, the gray-beard! Well, indeed, I know him,--
      Shrunk, tottering, bent, of aches and ills the prey;
    In sermon, story, fable, picture, poem,
      Oft have I met him from my earliest day.

    In my old Æsop, toiling with his bundle,--
      His load of sticks,--politely asking Death,
    Who comes when called for,--would he lug or trundle
      His fagot for him?--he was scant of breath.

    And sad "Ecclesiastes, or the Preacher,"
      Has he not stamped the image on my soul,
    In that last chapter, where the worn-out Teacher
      Sighs o'er the loosened cord, the broken bowl?

    Yes, long, indeed, I've known him at a distance,
      And now my lifted door-latch shows him here;
    I take his shrivelled hand without resistance,
      And find him smiling as his step draws near.

    What though of gilded baubles he bereaves us,
      Dear to the heart of youth, to manhood's prime,
    Think of the calm he brings, the wealth he leaves us,
      The hoarded spoils, the legacies of time!

    Altars once flaming, still with incense fragrant,
      Passion's uneasy nurslings rocked asleep,
    Hope's anchor faster, wild desire less vagrant,
      Life's flow less noisy, but the stream how deep!

    Still as the silver cord gets worn and slender,
      Its lightened task-work tugs with lessening strain,
    Hands get more helpful, voices grown more tender,
      Soothe with their softened tones the slumberous brain.

    Youth longs and manhood strives, but age remembers,
      Sits by the raked-up ashes of the past,
    Spreads its thin hands above the whitening embers
      That warm its creeping life-blood till the last.

    Dear to its heart is every loving token
      That comes unbidden ere its pulse grows cold,
    Ere the last lingering ties of life are broken,
      Its labors ended, and its story told.

    Ah, while around us rosy youth rejoices,
      For us the sorrow-laden breezes sigh,
    And through the chorus of its jocund voices
      Throbs the sharp note of misery's hopeless cry.

    As on the gauzy wings of fancy flying
      From some far orb I track our watery sphere,
    Home of the struggling, suffering, doubting, dying,
      The silvered globule seems a glistening tear.

    But Nature lends her mirror of illusion
      To win from saddening scenes our age-dimmed eyes,
    And misty day-dreams blend in sweet confusion
      The wintery landscape and the summer skies.

    So when the iron portal shuts behind us,
      And life forgets us in its noise and whirl,
    Visions that shunned the glaring noonday find us,
      And glimmering starlight shows the gates of pearl.

    I come not here your morning hour to sadden
      A limping pilgrim leaning on his staff,--
    I, who have never deemed it sin to gladden
      This vale of sorrows with a wholesome laugh.

    If word of mine another's gloom has brightened,
      Through my dumb lips the heaven-sent message came;
    If hand of mine another's task has lightened,
      It felt the guidance that it dares not claim.

    But, O my gentle sisters, O my brothers,
      These thick-sown snow-flakes hint of toil's release;
    These feebler pulses bid me leave to others
      The tasks once welcome; evening asks for peace.

    Time claims his tribute; silence now is golden;
      Let me not vex the too long suffering lyre;
    Though to your love untiring still beholden,
      The curfew tells me--cover up the fire.

    And now with grateful smile and accents cheerful,
      And warmer heart than look or word can tell,
    In simplest phrase--these traitorous eyes are tearful--
      Thanks, Brothers, Sisters,--Children, and farewell!

After the reading of the poem, the following reminiscence from Doctor
Holmes' pen, was read by Mr. Houghton:--

"The establishment of the _Atlantic Monthly_ was due to the liberal
enterprise of the then flourishing firm of Phillips & Sampson. Mr.
Phillips, more especially, was most active and sanguine. The publishers
were fortunate enough to secure the services of Mr. Lowell as editor.
Mr. Lowell had a fancy that I could be useful as a contributor, and woke
me from a kind of literary lethargy in which I was half slumbering, to
call me to active service. Remembering some crude contributions of mine
to an old magazine, it occurred to me that their title might serve for
some fresh papers, and so I sat down and wrote off what came into my
head under the title _The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table_. This series
of papers was not the result of an express premeditation, but was, as I
may say, dipped from the running stream of my thoughts. Its very kind
reception encouraged me, and you know the consequences, which have
lasted from that day to this.

"But what I want especially to say here is, that I owe the impulse which
started my second growth, to the urgent hint of my friend Mr. Lowell,
and that you have him to thank, not only for his own noble contributions
to our literature, but for the spur which moved me to action, to which
you owe any pleasure I may have given, and I am indebted for the
crowning happiness of this occasion. His absence I most deeply regret
for your and my own sake, while I congratulate the country to which in
his eminent station he is devoting his services."

As Mr. Whittier had been obliged to leave the company before this, Mr.
James T. Fields read his fine poem entitled "Our Autocrat," from which
we quote the last verses:

    What shapes and fancies, grave or gay,
      Before us at his bidding come!
    The Treadmill tramp, the "One Hoss Shay,"
      The dumb despair of Elsie's doom!

    The tale of Aris and the Maid,
      The plea for lips that cannot speak,
    The holy kiss that Iris laid
      On Little Boston's pallid cheek!

    Long may he live to sing for us
      His sweetest songs at evening time,
    And like his Chambered Nautilus
      To holier heights of beauty climb!

    Though now unnumbered guests surround
      The table that he rules at will,
    Its Autocrat, however crowned,
      Is but our friend and comrade still.

    The world may keep his honored name,
      The wealth of all his varied powers;
    A stronger claim has love than fame
      And he himself is only ours!

Mr W.D. Howells then took the chair and was introduced to the company as
the representative of the "mythical editor."

In his remarks, Mr. Howells paid the following tribute to the Autocrat:

"The fact is known to you all, and I will not insist upon it, but it was
Oliver Wendell Holmes who not only named, but who made the _Atlantic_.
How did he do this? Oh, very simply! He merely invented a new kind of
literature, something so beautiful and rare and fine that while you were
trying to determine its character as monologue or colloquy, prose or
poetry, philosophy or humor, it was gradually penetrating your
consciousness with a sense that the best of all these had been fused in
one--a perfect form, an exquisite wisdom, an unsurpassable grace. This,
and much more than any poor words of mine can say, was the Autocrat,
followed by the Professor, and then by the Poet, at the same
Breakfast-Table. We pledge him by all these names to-day, not only with
the wine in our cups, but with the pride and love in our hearts, where
we have enshrined him immortally young, in spite of the birthdays that
come and go, and where we defy the future that lies in wait for our
precious things, to know his quality better, or value his genius more
highly than we."

Mrs. Julia Ward Howe was then called upon to respond to the toast, "The
girls we have _not_ left behind us," and after a few words in reply, she
read a fine poem in honor of the illustrious guest.

Charles Dudley Warner was then introduced, and after a short speech,
read a poem by H. H., "To Oliver Wendell Holmes, on his seventieth
birthday." In these charming lines almost every poem of Doctor Holmes is
mentioned with rare tact and skill.

At the close of the poem, President Eliot of Harvard, rose and said:

"It seems to me that it is my duty to remind all these poets, essayists
and story-tellers who are gathered here, that the main work of our
friend's life has been of an altogether different nature. I know him as
the professor of anatomy and physiology in the Medical School of Harvard
University for the last thirty-two years, and I know him to-day as one
of the most active and hard-working of our lecturers. Some of you
gentlemen, I observe, are lecturers by profession, at least during the
winter months. Doctor Holmes delivers four lectures every week for eight
months of the year. I am sure the lecturers by profession will
understand that this task requires an extraordinary amount of mental and
physical vigor. And I congratulate our friend on the weekly
demonstration of that vigor which he gives in our medical school. Most
of you have perhaps the impression that Doctor Holmes chiefly enjoys a
pretty couplet, a beautiful verse, an elegant sentence. It has fallen to
me to observe that he has other great enjoyments. I never heard any
other mortal exhibit such enthusiasm over an elegant dissection. And
perhaps you think it is the pen with which Doctor Holmes is chiefly
skilful. I assure you that he is equally skilful with scalpel and with
microscope. And I think that none of us can understand the meaning and
scope of Doctor Holmes' writing, unless we have observed that the daily
work of his life has been to study and teach a natural science, the
noble science of anatomy. It is his to know with absolute exactness the
form of every bone in this wonderful body of ours, the course of every
artery, and vein, and nerve, the form and function of every muscle, and
not only to know it, but to describe it with a fascinating precision and
enthusiasm. When I read his writings I find the traces of this life-work
of his on every page. There are three thousand men scattered through New
England at this moment who will remember Doctor Holmes through their
lives, and transmit to their children the memory of him, as student and
teacher of exact science. And let us honor him to-day, not
forgetting--they can never be forgotten--his poems and essays, as a
noble representative of the profession of the scientific student and
teacher."

Mr. S.L. Clemens (Mark Twain) followed President Eliot.

"I would have travelled," he began, "a much greater distance than I have
come to witness the paying of honors to Doctor Holmes, for my feeling
toward him has always been one of peculiar warmth. When one receives a
letter from a great man for the first time in his life, it is a large
event to him, as all of you know by your own experience. Well, the first
great man who ever wrote me a letter was our guest--Oliver Wendell
Holmes. He was also the first great literary man I ever stole anything
from, and that is how I came to write to him and he to me. When my first
book was new, a friend of mine said, 'The dedication is very neat.'
'Yes,' I said, 'I thought it was.' My friend said, 'I always admired it
even before I saw it in _The Innocents Abroad_.' I naturally said, 'What
do you mean? Where did you ever see it before?' 'Well, I saw it some
years ago, as Doctor Holmes' dedication to his _Songs in Many Keys_.' Of
course my first impulse was to prepare this man's remains for burial,
but upon reflection I said I would reprieve him for a moment or two and
give him a chance to prove his assertion if he could. We stepped into a
bookstore and he did prove it. I had really stolen that dedication
almost word for word. I could not imagine how this curious thing
happened, for I knew one thing for a dead certainty--that a certain
amount of pride always goes along with a teaspoonful of brains, and that
this pride protects a man from deliberately stealing other people's
ideas. That is what a teaspoonful of brains will do for a man, and
admirers had often told me I had nearly a basketful, though they were
rather reserved as to the size of the basket. However, I thought the
thing out and solved the mystery. Two years before I had been laid up a
couple of weeks in the Sandwich Islands, and had read and re-read Doctor
Holmes's poems till my mental reservoir was filled with them to the
brim. The dedication lay on top and handy, so by and by I unconsciously
stole it. Perhaps I unconsciously stole the rest of the volume, too, for
many people have told me that my book was pretty poetical in one way or
another. Well, of course I wrote Doctor Holmes and told him I hadn't
meant to steal, and he wrote back and said in the kindest way that it
was all right and no harm done; and added that he believed we all
unconsciously worked over ideas gathered in reading and hearing,
imagining they were original with ourselves. He stated a truth and did
it in such a pleasant way, and salved over my sore spot so gently and so
healingly that I was rather glad I had committed the crime, for the sake
of the letter. I afterward called on him and told him to make perfectly
free with any ideas of mine that struck him as being good protoplasm
for poetry. He could see by that that there wasn't anything mean about
me; so we got along right from the start.

"I have met Doctor Holmes many times since; and lately he said--however,
I am wandering away from the one thing which I got on my feet to do,
that is, to make my compliments to you, my fellow-teachers of the great
public, and likewise to say I am right glad to see that Doctor Holmes is
still in his prime and full of generous life; and as age is not
determined by years, but by trouble and by infirmities of mind and body,
I hope it may be a very long time yet before any one can truthfully say,
'He is growing old.'"

Mr. Howells then introduced Mr. J.W. Harper of New York, who gave in his
remarks a delightful pen portrait of Doctor Holmes, the lyceum lecturer,
which we have elsewhere quoted. Mr. E.C. Stedman followed Mr. Harper
with a brief speech and graceful poem. Mr. T.B. Aldrich spoke of the
"inexhaustible kindness of Doctor Holmes to his younger brothers in
literature," and Mr. William Winter paid his tribute to the honored
guest by "The Chieftain," a poem which he named for the occasion _Hearts
and Holmes_.

Mr. J.T. Trowbridge then read a poem entitled "Filling an Order," in
which Nature compounds for Miss Columbia "three geniuses A 1.," to grace
her favorite city. She concludes her mixture as follows:

    Says she, "The fault I'm well aware, with genius is the presence
    Of altogether too much clay with quite too little essence,
    And sluggish atoms that obstruct the spiritual solution;
    So now instead of spoiling these by over-much dilution
    With their fine elements I'll make a single rare phenomenon,
    And of three common geniuses concoct a most uncommon one,
    So that the world shall smile to see a soul so universal,
    Such poesy and pleasantry, packed in so small a parcel.

    So said, so done; the three in one she wrapped, and stuck the label
    _Poet, Professor, Autocrat of Wit's own Breakfast-Table._"

C.P. Cranch then read a fine sonnet, and Colonel T.W. Higginson followed
with felicitous remarks, a portion of which referring to the father of
Doctor Holmes we have quoted elsewhere in the book.

Letters of regrets were then read from R. B. Hayes, John Holmes, the
poet's brother, George William Curtis and George Bancroft.

Among others unable to be present, but who sent regrets, were Rebecca
Harding Davis, Carl Schurz, Edwin P. Whipple, Noah Porter, George
Ripley, Henry Watterson, George H. Boker, Frances Hodgson Burnett, L.
Maria Child, Gail Hamilton, Parke Godwin, Donald G. Mitchell, John J.
Piatt, Richard Grant White, D.C. Gilman, J.W. DeForest, Frederick
Douglass, J.G. Holland, George W. Childs, John Hay and W.W. Story.

Mr. James T. Fields was obliged to fulfil a lecture engagement soon
after the speaking began, else he would have read the following fairy
tale:--

Once upon a time a company of good-natured fairies assembled for a
summer moonlight dance on a green lawn in front of a certain picturesque
old house in Cambridge. They had come out for a midnight lark, and as
their twinkling feet flew about among the musical dewdrops they were
suddenly interrupted by the well-known figure of the village doctor,
which, emerging from the old mansion, rapidly made its way homeward.

"Another new mortal has alighted on our happy planet," whispered a fairy
gossip to her near companion.

"Evidently so," replied the tiny creature, smiling good-naturedly on the
doctor's footprints in the grass.

"That is the minister's house," said another small personage, with a
wink of satisfaction.

"Perhaps it is a boy," ejaculated Fairy Number One.

"I _know_ it is a boy!" said Fairy Number Two. I read it in the Doctor's
face when the moon lighted up his countenance as he shut the door so
softly behind him.

"It _is_ a boy!" responded the Fairy Queen, who always knew everything,
and that settled the question.

"If that is the case," cried all the fairies at once, "let us try what
magic still remains to us in this busy, bustling New England. Let us
make that child's life a happy and a famous one if we can."

"Agreed," replied the queen; "and I will lead off with a substantial
gift to the little new-comer. I will crown him with Cheerfulness, a
sunny temperament, brimming over with mirth and happiness."

"And I will second your Majesty's gift to the little man," said a
sweet-voiced creature, "and tender him the ever-abiding gift of Song. He
shall be a perpetual minstrel to gladden the hearts of all his
fellow-mortals."

"And I," said another, "will shower upon him the subtle power of Pathos
and Romance, and he shall take unto himself the spell of a sorcerer
whenever he chooses to scatter abroad his wise and beautiful fancies."

"And I," said a very astute-looking fairy, "will touch his lips with
Persuasion; he shall be a teacher of knowledge, and the divine gift of
eloquence shall be at his command, to uplift and instruct the people."

"And I," said a quaint, energetic little body, "will endow him with a
passionate desire to help forward the less favored sons and daughters of
earth, who are struggling for recognition and success in their various
avocations."

"And I," said a motherly-looking, amiable fairy, "will see that in due
time he finds the best among women for his companionship, a helpmeet
indeed, whose life shall be happily bound up in _his_ life."

"Do give me a chance," cried a beautiful young fairy "and I will answer
for his children, that they may be worthy of their father, and all a
mother's heart may pray that Heaven will vouchsafe to her."

And after seventy years have rolled away into space, the same fairies
assembled on the same lawn at the same season of the year, to compare
notes with reference to their now famous _protégé_. And they declared
that their magic had been thoroughly successful, and that their charms
had all worked without a single flaw.

Then they took hands, and dancing slowly around the time-honored
mansion, sang this roundelay, framed in the words of their own beloved
poet:--

    Strength to his hours of manly toil!
      Peace to his star-lit dreams!
    He loves alike the furrowed soil,
      The music-haunted streams!

    Sweet smiles to keep forever bright
      The sunshine on his lips,
    And faith that sees the ring of light
      Round Nature's last eclipse!

CHAPTER XV.

ORATIONS AND ESSAYS.

In _Pages from an old Volume of Life_, one of the latest books published
by Doctor Holmes, we have a collection of most delightful orations and
essays. Some of them we recognize as old, familiar friends. "Bread and
the Newspaper," for instance, recalls vividly those sad, terribly
earnest days when the civil war was rending not only our land but our
hearts. Something to eat, and the daily papers to read--these we must
have, no matter what else we had to give up!

War taught us, as nothing else could, what we really were. It exalted
our manhood and our womanhood, and showed us our substantial human
qualities for a long time kept out of sight, it may be, by the spirit of
commerce, the love of art, science, or literature. Those who had called
Doctor Holmes "an aristocrat," "a Tory," forgot all their bitter
feelings when he said, "We are finding out that not only 'patriotism is
eloquence,' but that heroism is gentility. All ranks are wonderfully
equalized under the fire of a masked battery. The plain artisan, or the
rough fireman, who faces the lead and iron like a man, is the truest
representative we can show of the heroes of Crécy and Agincourt. And if
one of our fine gentlemen puts off his straw-colored kids and stands by
the other, shoulder to shoulder, or leads him on to the attack, he is as
honorable in our eyes and in theirs as if he were ill-dressed and his
hands were soiled with labor.

In _The Inevitable Trial_, an oration delivered on the 4th of July,
1863, before the City Authorities of Boston, Doctor Holmes who had been
falsely classed among the enemies of the Anti-slavery movement, spoke as
follows:--

"Long before the accents of our famous statesmen resounded in the halls
of the Capitol, long before the _Liberator_ opened its batteries, the
controversy now working itself out by trial of battle was foreseen and
predicted. Washington warned his countrymen of the danger of sectional
divisions, well knowing the line of clearage that ran through the
seemingly solid fabric. Jefferson foreshadowed the judgment to fall upon
the land for its sins against a just God. Andrew Jackson announced a
quarter of a century beforehand that the next pretext of revolution
would be slavery. De Tocqueville recognized with that penetrating
insight which analyzed our institutions and conditions so keenly, that
the Union was to be endangered by slavery not through its interests, but
through the change of character it was bringing about in the people of
the two sections, the same fatal change which George Mason, more than
half a century before, had declared to be the most pernicious effect of
the system, adding the solemn warning, now fearfully justifying itself
in the sight of his descendants, that 'by an inevitable chain of causes
and effects, Providence punishes national sins by national calamities.'

"The Virginian romancer pictured the far-off scenes of the conflict
which he saw approaching as the prophets of Israel painted the coming
woes of Jerusalem, and the strong iconoclast of Boston announced the
very year when the curtain should rise on the yet unopened drama.

"The wise men of the past, and the shrewd men of our own time, who
warned us of the calamities in store for our nation, never doubted what
was the cause which was to produce first alienation and finally rupture.
The descendants of the men, 'daily exercised in tyranny,' the 'petty
tyrants,' as their own leading statesmen called them long ago, came at
length to love the institution which their fathers had condemned while
they tolerated. It is the fearful realization of that vision of the poet
where the lost angels snuff up with eager nostrils the sulphurous
emanations of the bottomless abyss,--so have their natures become
changed by long breathing the atmosphere of the realm of darkness."

In this same grand oration occur also these eloquent words:--

"Whether we know it or not, whether we mean it or not, we cannot help
fighting against the system that has proved the source of all those
miseries which the author of the Declaration of Independence trembled to
anticipate. And this ought to make us willing to do and to suffer
cheerfully. There were Holy Wars of old, in which it was glory enough
to die; wars in which the one aim was to rescue the sepulchre of Christ
from the hands of infidels. The sepulchre of Christ is not in Palestine!
He rose from that burial-place more than eighteen hundred years ago. He
is crucified wherever his brothers are slain without cause; he lies
buried wherever man, made in his Maker's image, is entombed in ignorance
lest he should learn the rights which his Divine Master gave him! This
is our Holy War, and we must bring to it all the power with which he
fought against the Almighty before he was cast from heaven."

In his _Hunt after the Captain_, we realize how near the "dull dead
ghastliness of War" came to the fond father's heart as he sought his
wounded hero through those dreary hospital wards! He knew of what he
spake when appealing so eloquently to his fellow-patriots:--

"Sons and daughters of New England, men and women of the North, brothers
and sisters in the bond of the American Union, you have among you the
scarred and wasted soldiers who have shed their blood for your temporal
salvation. They bore your nation's emblems bravely through the fire and
smoke of the battle-field; nay, their own bodies are starred with
bullet-wounds and striped with sabre-cuts, as if to mark them as
belonging to their country until their dust becomes a portion of the
soil which they defended. In every Northern graveyard slumber the
victims of this destroying struggle. Many whom you remember playing as
children amidst the clover blossoms of our Northern fields, sleep under
nameless mounds with strange Southern wild flowers blooming over them.
By those wounds of living heroes, by those graves of fallen martyrs, by
the hopes of your children, and the claims of your children's children
yet unborn, in the name of outraged honor, in the interest of violated
sovereignty, for the life of an imperilled nation, for the sake of men
everywhere, and of our common humanity, for the glory of God and the
advancement of his kingdom on earth, your country calls upon you to
stand by her through good report and through evil report, in triumph and
in defeat, until she emerges from the great war of Western civilization,
Queen of the broad continent, Arbitress in the councils of earth's
emancipated peoples."

It will be remembered that this heart-stirring oration, _The Inevitable
Trial_, from which the above is quoted, was delivered at one of the most
discouraging periods of the war; when Lee was in Pennsylvania, and just
before the capture of Vicksburg.

Among the other essays and orations in _Pages from an old Volume of
Life_, we find the _Physiology of Walking_, which contains many
interesting facts concerning the human wheel, with its spokes and
felloes.

"Walking," says Doctor Holmes, "is a perpetual falling with a perpetual
self-recovery. It is a most complex, violent, and perilous operation,
which we divest of its extreme danger only by continual practice from a
very early period of life. We find how complex it is when we attempt to
analyze it, and we see that we never understood it thoroughly until the
time of the instantaneous photograph. We learn how violent it is, when
we walk against a post or a door in the dark. We discover how dangerous
it is when we slip or trip and come down, perhaps breaking or
dislocating our limbs, or overlook the last step of a flight of stairs,
and discover with what headlong violence we have been hurling ourselves
forward.

"Two curious facts are easily proved. First, a man is shorter when he is
walking than when at rest. We have found a very simple way of showing
this by having a rod or stick placed horizontally, so as to touch the
top of the head forcibly, as we stand under it. In walking rapidly
beneath it, even if the eyes are shut, the top of the head will not even
graze the rod. The other fact is, that one side of a man always tends to
outwalk the other side, so that no person can walk far in a straight
line, if he is blindfolded. _The Seasons_, and _The Human Body and its
Management_, were originally published in the Atlantic Almanac. _Cinders
from the Ashes_ gives some exceedingly interesting reminiscences.

Richard Henry Dana, the schoolboy, is described by Doctor Holmes as
ruddy, sturdy, quiet and reserved; and of Margaret Fuller he says,
"Sitting on the girls' benches, conspicuous among the schoolgirls of
unlettered origin, by that look which rarely fails to betray hereditary
and congenital culture, was a young person very nearly of my own age.
She came with the reputation of being 'smart,' as we should have called
it; clever, as we say nowadays. Her air to her schoolmates was marked by
a certain stateliness and distance; as if she had other thoughts than
theirs, and was not of them. She was a great student and a great reader
of what she used to call 'náw-véls;' I remember her so well as she
appeared at school and later, that I regret that she had not been
faithfully given to canvas or marble in the day of her best looks. None
know her aspect who have not seen her living. Margaret, as I remember
her at school and afterwards, was tall, fair complexioned, with a
watery, aquamarine lustre in her light eyes, which she used to make
small, as one does who looks at the sunshine.

"A remarkable point about her was that long, flexile neck, arching and
undulating in strange, sinuous movements, which one who loved her would
compare to those of a swan, and one who loved her not, to those of the
ophidian who tempted our common mother. Her talk was affluent,
magisterial, _de haut en bas_, some would say euphuistic, but surpassing
the talk of women in breadth and audacity. Her face kindled and
reddened and dilated in every feature as she spoke, and, as I once saw
her in a fine storm of indignation at the supposed ill treatment of a
relative, showed itself capable of something resembling what Milton
calls the Viraginian aspect."

A composition of Margaret's was one day taken up by the boy Oliver.

"It is a trite remark," she began.

Alas! the embryo-poet did not know the meaning of the word trite.

"How could I ever judge Margaret fairly," he exclaims, "after such a
crushing discovery of her superiority?"

Of his instructors and schoolmates at Andover, Doctor Holmes has given
us numerous pen portraits. The old Academy building had a dreary look to
the homesick boy, but he soon recovered from his "slightly nostalgic"
state, and found not a few congenial spirits in his new surroundings.

One fine, rosy-faced boy with whom he had a school discussion upon Mary,
Queen of Scots, and for whom he has always cherished a lasting
friendship, is now the well-known Phinehas Barnes. Another little
fellow, with black hair and very black eyes, studying with head between
his hands, and eyes fastened to his book as if reading a will that made
him heir to a million, was the future professor, Greek scholar and Bible
Commentator, Horatio Balch Hackett. One of the masters was the late Rev.
Samuel Horatio Stearns, "an excellent and lovable man," says Doctor
Holmes, "who looked kindly on me, and for whom I always cherished a
sincere regard." Professor Moses Stuart he describes as "tall, lean,
with strong, bold features, a keen, scholarly, accipitrine nose, thin,
expressive lips, and great solemnity and impressiveness of voice and
manner. His air was Roman, his neck long and bare, like Cicero's, and
his toga,--that is, his broadcloth cloak,--was carried on his arm,
whatever might have been the weather, with such a statue-like, rigid
grace that he might have been turned into marble as he stood, and looked
noble by the side of the antiques of the Vatican." Then, there was
Doctor Porter, an invalid, with the prophetic handkerchief bundling his
throat; and Doctor Woods, who looked his creed decidedly, and had the
firm fibre of a theological athlete. But none of the preceptors, it may
be presumed, was so closely watched as the one to whom a dream had come
that he should drop dead when praying. "More than one boy kept his eye
on him during his public devotions, possessed by the same feeling the
man had who followed Van Amburgh about, with the expectation, let us not
say hope, of seeing the lion bite his head off sooner or later."

In _Mechanism in Thought and Morals_, we find a deal of psychology as
well as science.

"It is in the moral world," says Doctor Holmes, "that materialism has
worked the strangest confusion. In various forms, under imposing names
and aspects, it has thrust itself into the moral relations, until one
hardly knows where to look for any first principles without upsetting
everything in searching for them.

"The moral universe includes nothing but the exercise of choice: all
else is machinery. What we can help and what we cannot help are on two
sides of a line which separates the sphere of human responsibility from
that of the Being who has arranged and controls the order of things.

"The question of the freedom of the will has been an open one, from the
days of Milton's demons in conclave to the noteworthy essay of Mr.
Hazard, our Rhode Island neighbor. It still hangs suspended between the
seemingly exhaustive strongest motive argument and certain residual
convictions. The sense that we are, to a limited extent,
self-determining; the sense of effort in willing; the sense of
responsibility in view of the future, and the verdict of conscience in
review of the past,--all of these are open to the accusation of fallacy;
but they all leave a certain undischarged balance in most minds. We can
invoke the strong arm of the _Deus in machina_, as Mr. Hazard, and Kant
and others, before him have done. Our will may be a primary initiating
cause or force, as unexplainable, as unreducible, as indecomposable, as
impossible if you choose, but as real to our belief as the _oeternitas
a parte ante_. The divine foreknowledge is no more in the way of
delegated choice than the divine omnipotence is in the way of delegated
power. The Infinite can surely slip the cable of the finite if it choose
so to do."

With outspoken braveness Doctor Holmes rejects "the mechanical doctrine
which makes me," he says, "the slave of outside influences, whether it
work with the logic of Edwards, or the averages of Buckle; whether it
come in the shape of the Greek's destiny, or the Mahometan's fatalism."

But he claims, too, the right to eliminate all mechanical ideas which
have crowded into the sphere of intelligent choice between right and
wrong. "The pound of flesh," he declares, "I will grant to Nemesis; but
in the name of human nature, not one drop of blood,--not one drop."

And this leads us to speak of Doctor Holmes' religious views. He
attended King's Chapel, and is classed among the most liberal-minded of
the Unitarian creed.

When chairman of the Boston Unitarian Festival, in 1877, he gave the
following list of certain theological beliefs that he has always
delighted to combat.

"May I," he begins, "without committing any one but myself, enumerate a
few of the stumbling blocks which still stand in the way of some who
have many sympathies with what is called the liberal school of thinkers?

"The notion of sin as a transferable object. As philanthropy has ridded
us of chattel slavery, so philosophy must rid us of chattel sin and all
its logical consequences.

"The notion that what we call sin is anything else than inevitable,
unless the Deity had seen fit to give every human being a perfect
nature, and develop it by a perfect education.

"The oversight of the fact that all moral relations between man and his
Maker are reciprocal, and must meet the approval of man's enlightened
conscience before he can render true and heartfelt homage to the power
that called him into being, and is not the greatest obligation to all
eternity on the side of the greatest wisdom and the greatest power?

"The notion that the Father of mankind is subject to the absolute
control of a certain malignant entity known under the false name of
justice, or subject to any law such as would have made the father of the
prodigal son meet him with an account-book and pack him off to jail,
instead of welcoming him back and treating him to the fatted calf.

"The notion that useless suffering is in any sense a satisfaction for
sin, and not simply an evil added to a previous one."

In reviewing the life and the writings of Jonathan Edwards, Doctor
Holmes with his usual fairness and kindly spirit toward all mankind,
declares that the spiritual nature seems to be a natural endowment, like
a musical ear.

"Those who have no ear for music must be very careful how they speak
about that mysterious world of thrilling vibrations which are idle
noises to them. And so the true saint can be appreciated only by saintly
natures. Yet the least spiritual man can hardly read the remarkable
'Resolutions' of Edwards without a reverence akin to awe for his purity
and elevation. His beliefs and his conduct we need not hesitate to
handle freely. The spiritual nature is no safeguard against error of
doctrine or practice; indeed it may be doubted whether a majority of all
the spiritual natures in the world would be found in Christian
countries. Edwards' system seems, in the light of to-day, to the last
degree barbaric, mechanical, materialistic, pessimistic. If he had lived
a hundred years later, and breathed the air of freedom, he could not
have written with such old-world barbarism as we find in his volcanic
sermons....

"There is no sufficient reason for attacking the motives of a man so
saintly in life, so holy in aspirations, so patient, so meek, so
laborious, so thoroughly in earnest in the work to which his life was
given. But after long smothering in the sulphurous atmosphere of his
thought, one cannot help asking, is this,--or anything like this,--the
accepted belief of any considerable part of Protestantism? If so, we
must say with Bacon, 'It were better to have no opinion of God than such
an opinion as is unworthy of him.'"

In speaking of the old reproach against physicians, that where there
were three of them together there were two atheists, Doctor Holmes
pertinently remarks: "There is, undoubtedly, a strong tendency in the
pursuits of the medical profession to produce disbelief in that figment
of tradition and diseased human imagination which has been installed in
the seat of divinity by the priesthood of cruel and ignorant ages. It is
impossible, or, at least, very difficult, for a physician who has seen
the perpetual efforts of Nature--whose diary is the book he reads
oftenest--to heal wounds, to expel poisons, to do the best that can be
done under the given conditions,--it is very difficult for him to
believe in a world where wounds cannot heal, where opiates cannot give a
respite from pain, where sleep never comes with its sweet oblivion of
suffering, where the art of torture is the only faculty which remains to
the children of that same Father who cares for the falling sparrow. The
Deity has often been pictured as Moloch, and the physician has, no
doubt, frequently repudiated him as a monstrosity.

"On the other hand, the physician has often been renounced for piety as
well as for his peculiarly professional virtue of charity, led upward by
what he sees the source of all the daily marvels wrought before his own
eyes. So it was that Galen gave utterance to that song of praise which
the sweet singer of Israel need not have been ashamed of; and if this
heathen could be lifted into such a strain of devotion, we need not be
surprised to find so many devout Christian worshippers among the crowd
of medical 'atheists.'"

In coming back again as a regular contributor to the magazine which
Doctor Holmes was so prominently identified with a quarter of a century
ago, he indulges in a few entertaining reflections. "When I sat down to
write the first paper I sent to the _Atlantic Monthly_," he says, "I
felt somewhat as a maiden of more than mature effloresence may be
supposed to feel as she passes down the broad aisle in her bridal veil
and wealth of orange blossoms. I had written little of late years. I was
at that time older than Goldsmith was when he died, and Goldsmith, as
Doctor Johnson says, was a plant that flowered late. A new generation
had grown up since I had written the verses by which, if remembered at
all, I was best known. I honestly feared that I might prove the
superfluous veteran who has no business behind the footlights. I can as
honestly say that it turned out otherwise. I was most kindly welcomed,
and now I am looking back on that far-off time as the period--I will not
say of youth--for I was close upon the five-barred gate of the
_cinquantaine_, though I had not yet taken the leap--but of marrowy and
vigorous manhood. Those were the days of unaided vision, of acute
hearing, of alert movements, of feelings almost boyish in their
vivacity. It is a long cry from the end of a second quarter of a century
in a man's life to the end of the third quarter. His companions have
fallen all around him, and he finds himself in a newly peopled world.
His mental furnishing looks old-fashioned and faded to the generation
which is crowding about him with its new patterns and fresh colors.
Shall he throw open his apartments to visitors, or is it not wiser to
live on his memories in a decorous privacy, and not risk himself before
the keen young eyes and relentless judgment of the new-comers, who have
grown up in strength and self-reliance while he has been losing force
and confidence. If that feeling came over me a quarter of a century ago,
it is not strange that it comes back upon me now. Having laid down the
burden, which for more than thirty-five years I have carried cheerfully,
I might naturally seek the quiet of my chimney corner, and purr away the
twilight of my life, unheard beyond the circle of my own fireplace. But
when I see what my living contemporaries are doing, I am shamed out of
absolute inertness and silence. The men of my birth year are so
painfully industrious at this very time that one of the same date hardly
dares to be idle. I look across the Atlantic and see Mr. Gladstone,
only four months younger than myself, and standing erect with patriots'
grievances on one shoulder, and Pharaoh's pyramids on the other--an
Atlas whose intervals of repose are paroxysms of learned labor; I listen
to Tennyson, another birth of the same year, filling the air with melody
long after the singing months of life are over; I come nearer home, and
here is my very dear friend and college classmate, so certain to be in
every good movement with voice or pen, or both, that, where two or three
are gathered together for useful ends, if James Freeman Clarke is not
with them, it is because he is busy with a book or a discourse meant for
a larger audience; I glance at the placards on the blank walls that I am
passing, and there I see the colossal head of Barnum, the untiring,
inexhaustible, insuperable, ever-triumphant and jubilant Barnum, who
came to his atmospheric life less than a year before I began to breathe
the fatal mixture, and still wages his Titanic battle with his own past
superlatives. How can one dare to sit down inactive with such examples
before him? One must do something, were it nothing more profitable than
the work of that dear old Penelope, of almost ninety years, whom I so
well remember hemming over and over again the same piece of linen, her
attendant scissors removing each day's work at evening; herself meantime
being kindly nursed in the illusion that she was still the useful martyr
of the household."

An author, in Doctor Holmes' opinion, should know that the very
characteristics which make him the object of admiration to many, and
endear him to some among them, will render him an object of dislike to a
certain number of individuals of equal, it may be of superior,
intelligence. The converse of all this is very true.

"There will be individuals--they may be few, they may be many--who will
so instantly recognize, so eagerly accept, so warmly adopt, even so
devoutly idolize, the writer in question, that self-love itself, dulled
as its palate is by the hot spices of praise, draws back overcome by the
burning stimulants of adoration. I was told, not long since, by one of
our most justly admired authoresses, that a correspondent wrote to her
that she had read one of her stories fourteen times in succession."

There is a deep meaning in these elective affinities. Each personality
is more or less completely the complement of some other. Doctor Holmes
thinks it should never be forgotten by the critic that "every grade of
mental development demands a literature of its own; a little above its
level, that it may be lifted to a higher grade, but not too much above
it, so that it requires too long a stride--a stairway, not a steep wall
to climb. The true critic is not the sharp _captator verborum_; not the
brisk epigrammatist, showing off his own cleverness, always trying to
outflank the author against whom he has arrayed his wits and his
learning. He is a man who knows the real wants of the reading world, and
can prize at their just value the writings which meet those wants."

There is also another side of the picture. Doctor Holmes does not forget
the trials of authorship. The writer who attains a certain measure of
popularity "will be startled to find himself the object of an
embarrassing devotion, and almost appropriation, by some of his parish
of readers. He will blush at his lonely desk, as he reads the
extravagances of expression which pour over him like the oil which ran
down upon the beard of Aaron, and even down to the skirts of his
garments--an extreme unction which seems hardly desirable. We ought to
have his photograph as he reads one of those frequent missives, oftenest
traced, we may guess, in the delicate, slanting hand which betrays the
slender fingers of the sympathetic sisterhood.

"A slight sense of the ridiculous at being made so much of qualifies the
placid tolerance with which the rhymester or the essayist sees himself
preferred to the great masters in prose and verse, and reads his name
glowing in a halo of epithets which might belong to Bacon or Milton. We
need not grudge him such pleasure as he may derive from the illusion of
a momentary revery, in which he dreams of himself as clad in royal robes
and exalted among the immortals. The next post will probably bring him
some slip from a newspaper or critical journal, which will strip him of
his regalia, as Thackeray, in one of his illustrations, has disrobed and
denuded the grand monarque. He saw himself but a moment ago a colossal
figure in a drapery of rhetorical purple, ample enough for an Emperor,
as Bernini would clothe him. The image breaker has passed by, belittling
him by comparison, jostling him off his pedestal, levelling his most
prominent feature, or even breaking a whole ink bottle against him as
the indignant moralist did on the figure in the vestibule of the opera
house--the shortest and most effective satire that ever came from that
fountain of approval and commendation. Such are some of the varied
experiences of authorship."

Out of his literary career as a successful writer, Doctor Holmes was
able to formulate many rules for the self-protection of authors, which
were adopted unanimously at an authors' association which was held in
Washington last September, and the remainder of his "talk" is devoted to
extracts from their proceedings. Appended are a few of them:

Of visits of strangers to authors. These are not always distinguishable
from each other, and may justly be considered together. The stranger
should send up his card if he has one; if he has none, he should, if
admitted, at once announce himself and his object, without
circumlocution, as thus; "My name is M. or N., from X. or Y. I wish to
see and take the hand of a writer whom I have long admired for his,"
etc., etc. Here the author should extend his hand, and reply in
substance as follows: "I am pleased to see you, my dear sir, and very
glad that anything I have written has been a source of pleasure or
profit to you." The visitor has now had what he says he came for, and,
after making a brief polite acknowledgment, should retire, unless, for
special reasons, he is urged to stay longer.

Of autograph-seekers. The increase in the number of applicants for
autographs is so great that it has become necessary to adopt positive
regulations to protect the author from the exorbitant claims of this
class of virtuosos. The following propositions were adopted without
discussion:

No author is under any obligation to answer any letter from an unknown
person applying for his autograph. If he sees fit to do so, it is a
gratuitous concession on his part.

No stranger should ask for more than one autograph.

No stranger should request an author to copy a poem, or even a verse. He
should remember that he is one of many thousands; that one thousand
fleas are worse than one hornet, and that a mob of mosquitoes will draw
more blood than a single horse leech.

Every correspondent applying for an autograph should send a card or
blank paper, in a stamped envelope, directed to himself (or herself). If
he will not take the trouble to attend to all this, which he can just as
well as to make the author do it, he must not expect the author to make
good his deficiencies. [Accepted by acclamation].

Sending a stamp does not constitute a claim on an author for answer.
[Received with loud applause]. The stamp may be retained by the author,
or, what is better, devoted to the use of some appropriate charity, as
for instance, the asylum for idiots and feeble-minded persons.

Albums. An album of decent external aspect may, without impropriety, be
offered to an author, with the request that he will write his name
therein. It is not proper, as a general rule, to ask for anything more
than the name. The author may, of course, add a quotation from his
writings, or a sentiment, if so disposed; but this must be considered as
a work of supererogation, and an exceptional manifestation of courtesy.

Bed-quilt autographs. It should be a source of gratification to an
author to contribute to the soundness of his reader's slumbers, if he
cannot keep him awake by his writings. He should therefore cheerfully
inscribe his name on the scrap of satin or other stuff (provided always
that it be sent him in a stamped and directed envelope), that it may
take its place in the patchwork mosaic for which it is intended.

Letters of admiration. These may be accepted as genuine, unless they
contain specimens of the writer's own composition, upon which a critical
opinion is requested, in which case they are to be regarded in the same
light as medicated sweetmeats, namely, as meaning more than their looks
imply. Genuine letters of admiration, being usually considered by the
recipient as proofs of good taste and sound judgment on the part of his
unknown correspondent, may be safely left to his decision as to whether
they shall be answered or not.

The author of _Elsie Venner_ thus excuses himself for opening the budget
of the grievances of authors. "In obtaining and giving to the public
this abstract of the proceedings of the association, I have been
impelled by the same feelings of humanity which led me to join the
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, believing that the
sufferings of authors are as much entitled to sympathy and relief as
those of the brute creation."

The birthday of the Emperor of Japan is the principal holiday of the
year among his subjects, and as Saturday, November 3d, 1883, was the
thirty-third anniversary of the birthday of Mutsuhito Tenno, the
reigning Emperor, it was appropriately celebrated by the Japanese
gentlemen in Boston. The Japanese department at the Foreign Exhibition
was closed, and in the evening a banquet was given at the Parker House,
about sixty gentlemen assembling in response to the invitation of Mr.
S.R. Takahashi, chief of the imperial Japanese commission to the Boston
Foreign Exhibition. The entrance to the banquet rooms was decorated with
the Japanese and American colors, and at the head of the hall were
portraits of the Emperor and Empress of Japan, with the colors of that
country between them. The occasion was a very enjoyable one, and was
especially interesting as it was a departure from the custom at ordinary
dinners here, several gentlemen dividing with the presiding officer the
duty of proposing the toasts. One of the most delightful orations of the
evening given by Oliver Wendell Holmes, was as follows:

"I have heard of 'English' as she is spoke," being taught in ten
lessons, but I never heard that a nation's literature could have justice
done to it in ten minutes. An ancestress of mine--one of my thirty-two
great-great-great-great-grandmothers--a noted poetess in her day, thus
addressed her little brood of children:

    Alas! my birds, you wisdom want
    Of perils you are ignorant;
    Ofttimes in grass, on trees, in flight,
    Sore accidents on you may light;
    Oh, to your safety have an eye,
    So happy may you live and die.

"In accepting your kind invitation, I confess that I was ignorant of my
perils. I did not follow the counsel of my grandmamma with the four g's
in having an eye to my own safety. For I fear that if I had dreamed of
being called on to answer for American literature, one of those
'previous engagements,' which crop out so opportunely, would have stood
between me and my present trying position. I had meant, if called upon,
to say a few words about a Japanese youth who studied law in Boston, a
very cultivated and singularly charming young person, who died not very
long after his return to his native country. Some of you may remember
young Enouie--I am not sure that I spell it rightly, and I know that I
cannot pronounce it properly; for from his own lips it was as soft as an
angel's whisper. His intelligence, his delicate breeding, the loveliness
of his character, captivated all who knew him. We loved him, and we
mourned for him as if he had been a child of our own soil. But of him I
must say no more.

"In speaking of American literature we naturally think first of our
historical efforts. We see that books hold but a small part of American
history. The axe and the ploughshare are the two pens with which our New
World annals have been principally written, with schoolhouses as notes
of interrogation, and steeples as exclamation points of pious adoration
and gratitude. Within half a century the railroad has ruled our broad
page all over, and rewritten the story, with States for new chapters and
cities for paragraphs. This is the kind of history which he who runs may
read, and he must run fast and far if he means to read any considerable
part of it.

"But we must not forget our political history, perishable in great
measure as to its form, long enduring in its results. This literature is
the index of our progress--in both directions--forward and the contrary.
From the days of Washington and Franklin to the times still fresh in our
memory, from the Declaration of Independence to the proclamation which
enfranchised the colored race, our political literature, with all its
terrible blunders and short-comings, has been, after all, the fairest
expression the world has yet seen of what a free people and a free press
have to say and to show for themselves.

"But besides 'Congressional Documents' and the like, the terror of
librarians and the delight of paper-makers, we do a good deal of other
printing. We make some books, a good many books, a great many books, so
many that the hyperbole at the end of St. John's gospel would hardly be
an extravagance in speaking of them. And among these are a number of
histories which hold an honorable place on the shelves of all the great
libraries of Christendom. Why should I enumerate them? For history is a
Boston specialty. From the days of Prescott and Ticknor to those of
Motley and Parkman, we have always had an historian or two on hand, as
they used always to have a lion or two in the Tower of London.

"Next to the historians naturally come the story-tellers and romancers.
The essential difference is--I would not apply the rough side of the
remark to historians like the best of our own, but it is very often the
fact--that history tells lies about real persons and fiction tells truth
through the mouths of unreal ones. England threw open the side doors of
its library to Irving. The continent flung wide its folding doors to
Cooper. Laplace was once asked who was the greatest mathematician of
Germany. 'Pfaff is the greatest,' he answered. 'I thought Gauss was,'
the questioner said. 'You asked me,' rejoined Laplace, 'who was the
greatest mathematician of Germany. Gauss was the greatest mathematician
of Europe.' So, I suppose we might say _The Pilot_ is or was the most
popular book ever written in America, but _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ is the
most popular story ever published in the world. And if _The Heart of Mid
Lothian_ added a new glory of romance to the traditions of Auld Reekie,
_The Scarlet Letter_ did as much for the memories of our own New
England. I need not speak of the living writers, some of whom are among
us, who have changed the old scornful question into 'Who _does not_ read
an American book?'

"As to poetical literature, I must confess that, except a line or two of
Philip Freneau's, I know little worthy of special remembrance before the
beginning of this century, always excepting, as in duty bound, the
verses of my manifold grandmother. The conditions of the country were
unfavorable to the poetical habit of mind. The voice that broke the
silence was that of Bryant, a clear and smooth baritone, if I may borrow
a musical term, with a gamut of a few notes of a grave and manly
quality. Then came Longfellow, the poet of the fireside, of the library,
of all gentle souls and cultivated tastes, whose Muse breathed a soft
contralto that was melody itself, and Emerson, with notes that reached
an octave higher than any American poet--a singer whose

    Voice fell like a falling star.

Like that of the bird addressed by Wordsworth--

    At once far off and near,

it was a

                              Cry
    Which made [us] look a thousand ways,
      In bush and tree and sky;

for whether it soared from the earth or dropped from heaven, it was next
to impossible to divine.

"I will not speak of the living poets of the old or the new generation.
It belongs to the young to give the heartiest welcome to the new brood
of singers. Samuel Rogers said that when he heard a new book praised, he
read an old one. Mr. Emerson, in one of his later essays, advises us
never to read a book that is not a year old. This I will say, that every
month shows us in the magazines, and even in the newspapers, verse that
would have made a reputation in the early days of the _North American
Review_, but which attracts little more notice than a breaking bubble.

"A great improvement is noticeable in the character of criticism, which
is leaving the hands of the 'general utility' writers and passing into
the hands of experts. The true critic is the last product of literary
civilization. It costs as great an effort to humanize the being known by
that name as it does to make a good church-member of a scalping savage.
Criticism is a noble function, but only so in noble hands. We have just
welcomed Mr. Arnold as its worthy English representative; we could not
secure our creditors more handsomely than we have done by leaving Mr.
Lowell in pledge for our visitor's safe return.

"One more hopeful mark of literary progress is seen in our cyclopædias,
our periodicals, our newspapers, and I may add our indexes. I would
commend to the attention of our enlightened friends such works as Mr.
Pool's great _Index to Periodical Literature_, Mr. Alibone's _Dictionary
of Authors_, and the _Index Medicus_, now publishing at Washington--a
wonderful achievement of organized industry, still carried on under the
superintendence of Doctor Billings, and well deserving examination by
all scholars, whatever their calling.

"We have learned so much from our Japanese friends, that we should be
thankful to pay them back something in return. With art such as they
have, they must also have a literature showing the same originality,
grace, facility and simple effectiveness. Let us hope they will carry
away something of our intellectual products, as well as those good
wishes which follow them wherever they show their beautiful works of art
and their pleasant and always welcome faces."

CHAPTER XVI.

THE HOME CIRCLE.

Doctor Holmes has two sons and one daughter. Oliver Wendell Holmes
Junior, his eldest child, was born in 1841. When a young lad, he
attended the school of Mr. E.S. Dixwell, in Boston, and it was here that
he met his future wife, Miss Fannie Dixwell. In his graduating year at
Harvard College (1861), he joined the Fourth Battalion of Infantry,
commanded by Major Thomas G. Stevenson. The company was at that time
stationed at Fort Independence, Boston Harbor, and it was there that
young Holmes wrote his poem for Class Day. He served three years in the
war, and was wounded first in the breast at Ball's Bluff, and then in
the neck at the Battle of Antietam.

In Doctor Holmes' _Hunt after the Captain_, we have not only a vivid
picture of war times, but a most touching revelation of fatherly love
and solicitude. The young captain was wounded yet again at Sharpsburgh,
and was afterwards brevetted as Lieutenant-Colonel. During General
Grant's campaign of 1864 he served as aide-de-camp to Brigadier-General
H.G. Wright. After the war he entered the Harvard Law School, and in
1866 received the degree of LL. B. Since then he has practised law in
Boston, and has written many valuable articles upon legal subjects.

His edition of Kent's _Commentaries on American Law_, to which he
devoted three years of careful labor, has received the highest
encomiums, and his volume on _The Common Law_ forms an indispensable
part of every law student's library.

In 1882, he was appointed Professor in the Harvard Law School, and a few
weeks later was elected Justice in the Supreme Court of Massachusetts.

At the Lawyers' Banquet, given January 30th, 1883, at the Hotel Vendome,
Honorable William G. Russell thus introduced the father of the
newly-appointed judge:

"We come now to a many-sided subject, and I know not on which side to
attack him with any hope of capturing him. I might hail him as our poet,
for he was born a poet; they are all born so. If he didn't lisp in
numbers, it was because he spoke plainly at a very early age. I might
hail him as physician, and a long and well-spent life in that profession
would justify it; but I don't believe it will ever be known whether he
has cured more cases of dyspepsia and blues by his poems or his powders
and his pills. I might hail him as professor, and as professor
_emeritus_ he has added a new wreath to his brow. I might hail him as
Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, for there he had a long reign. He will
defend himself with courage, for he never showed the white feather but
once, and that is, that he does not dare to be as funny as he can. A
tough subject, surely, and I must try him on the tender side, the
paternal. I give you the father who went in search of a captain, and,
finding him, presents to us now his son, the judge."

On rising, Doctor Holmes held up a sheet of paper, and said, "You see
before you" (referring to the paper) "all that you have to fear or
hope. For thirty-five years I have taught anatomy. I have often heard of
the roots of the tongue, but I never found them. The danger of a tongue
let loose you have had opportunity to know before, but the danger of a
scrap of paper like this is so trivial that I hardly need to apologize
for it."

    His Honor's father yet remains,
      His proud paternal posture firm in;
    But, while his right he still maintains
    To wield the household rod and reins,
      He bows before the filial ermine.

    What curious tales has life in store,
      With all its must-bes and its may-bes!
    The sage of eighty years and more
    Once crept a nursling on the floor,--
      Kings, conquerors, judges, all were babies.

    The fearless soldier, who has faced
      The serried bayonets' gleam appalling,
    For nothing save a pin misplaced
    The peaceful nursery has disgraced
      With hours of unheroic bawling.

    The mighty monarch, whose renown
      Fills up the stately page historic,
    Has howled to waken half the town,
    And finished off by gulping down
      His castor oil or paregoric.

    The justice, who, in gown and cap,
      Condemns a wretch to strangulation,
    Has scratched his nurse and spilled his pap,
    And sprawled across his mother's lap
      For wholesome law's administration.

    Ah, life has many a reef to shun
      Before in port we drop our anchor,
    But when its course is nobly run
    Look aft! for there the work was done.
      Life owes its headway to the spanker!

    Yon seat of justice well might awe
      The fairest manhood's half-blown summer;
    There Parsons scourged the laggard law,
    There reigned and ruled majestic Shaw,--
      What ghosts to hail the last new-comer!

    One cause of fear I faintly name,--
      The dread lest duty's dereliction
    Shall give so rarely cause for blame
    Our guileless voters will exclaim,
      "No need of human jurisdiction!"

    What keeps the doctor's trade alive?
      Bad air, bad water; more's the pity!
    But lawyers walk where doctors drive,
    And starve in streets where surgeons thrive,
      Our Boston is so pure a city.

    What call for judge or court, indeed,
      When righteousness prevails so through it
    Our virtuous car-conductors need
    Only a card whereon they read
      "Do right; it's naughty not to do it!"

    The whirligig of time goes round,
      And changes all things but affection;
    One blessed comfort may be found
    In heaven's broad statute which has bound
      Each household to its head's protection.

    If e'er aggrieved, attacked, accused,
      A sire may claim a son's devotion
    To shield his innocence abused,
    As old Anchises freely used
      His offspring's legs for locomotion.

    You smile. You did not come to weep,
      Nor I my weakness to be showing;
    And these gay stanzas, slight and cheap,
    Have served their simple use,--to keep
      A father's eyes from overflowing.

Doctor Holmes' daughter, who bore her mother's name, Amelia Jackson,
married the late John Turner Sargent. In her _Sketches and Reminiscences
of the Radical Club_, we have some pithy remarks of Doctor Holmes'. To
speak without premeditation, he says, on a carefully written essay, made
him feel as he should if, at a chemical lecture, somebody should pass
around a precipitate, and when the mixture had become turbid should
request him to give his opinion concerning it. The fallacies continually
rising in such a discussion from the want of a proper understanding of
terms, always made him feel as if quicksilver had been substituted for
the ordinary silver of speech. The only true way to criticize such an
essay was to take it home, slowly assimilate it, and not talk about it
until it had become a part of one's self.

Edward, the youngest son of Doctor Holmes, had chosen the same
profession as his brother.

It was at Mrs. Sargent's home, at Beverly Farms, that Doctor Holmes
passed most of his summers. The pretty, cream-colored house, with its
broad veranda in front, can be easily seen from the station; but to
appreciate the charms of this pleasant country home, one should catch a
glimpse of the cosey interior.

Robert Rantoul, John T. Morse and Henry Lee were neighbors of Doctor
Holmes at Beverly Farms, and Lucy Larcom's home was not far distant.

After eighteen years' residence at No. 8 Montgomery Place, Doctor Holmes
moved to 164 Charles street, where he lived about twelve years. His home
in Boston was at No. 296 Beacon street.

"We die out of houses," says the poet, "just as we die out of our
bodies.... The body has been called the house we live in; the house is
quite as much the body we live in.... The soul of a man has a series of
concentric envelopes around it, like the core of an onion, or the
innermost of a nest of boxes. First, he has his natural garment of flesh
and blood. Then his artificial integuments, with their true skin of
solid stuffs, their cuticle of lighter tissues, and their
variously-tinted pigments. Thirdly, his domicile, be it a single chamber
or a stately mansion. And then the whole visible world, in which Time
buttons him up as in a loose, outside wrapper.... Our houses shape
themselves palpably on our inner and outer nature. See a householder
breaking up and you will be sure of it. There is a shell fish which
builds all manner of smaller shells into the walls of its own. A house
is never a home until we have crusted it with the spoils of a hundred
lives besides those of our own past. See what these are and you can tell
what the occupant is."

The poet's home on Beacon street well illustrates the above extract. I
shall not soon forget the charming picture that greeted me, one gray
winter day, as I was ushered into the poet's cheerful study. A blazing
wood fire was crackling on the hearth, and the ruddy glow was reflected
now on the stately features of "Dorothy Q.," now on the Copley portrait
of old Doctor Cooper, and now with a peculiar Rembrandt effect upon the
low rows of books, the orderly desk, and the kind, cordial face of the
poet himself. An "Emerson Calendar" was hanging over the mantel, and
after calling my attention to the excellent picture upon it of the old
home at Concord, Doctor Holmes began to talk of his brother poet in
terms of warmest affection.

[Illustration: Hand written Poem signed by Oliver Wendell Holmes]

As he afterwards remarked at the Nineteenth Century Club, the difference
between Emerson's poetry and that of others with whom he might naturally
be compared, was that of algebra and arithmetic. The fascination of his
poems was in their spiritual depth and sincerity and their all pervading
symbolism. Emerson's writings in prose and verse were worthy of all
honor and admiration, but his manhood was the noblest of all his high
endowments. A bigot here and there might have avoided meeting him, but
if He who knew what was in men had wandered from door to door in New
England, as of old in Palestine, one of the thresholds which "those
blessed feet" would have crossed would have been that of the lovely and
quiet home of Emerson.

The view from the broad bay window in Doctor Holmes' study, recalled his
own description:

    Through my north window, in the wintry weather,
      My airy oriel on the river shore,
    I watch the sea-fowl as they flock together,
      Where late the boatman flashed his dripping oar.

    The gull, high floating, like a sloop unladen,
      Lets the loose water waft him as it will;
    The duck, round-breasted as a rustic maiden,
      Paddles and plunges, busy, busy still.

A microscopical apparatus placed under another window in the study,
reminds the visitor of the "man of science," while the books--

    A mingled race, the wreck of chance and time
    That talk all tongues and breathe of every clime--

speak in eloquent numbers of the "man of letters."

There is the Plato on the lower shelf, with the inscription, Ezra
Stiles, 1766, to which Doctor Holmes alludes in his tribute to the New
England clergy. Here is the hand-lens imported by the Reverend John
Prince, of Salem, and just before us, in the "unpretending row of local
historians," is Jeremy Belknap's _History of New Hampshire_, "in the
pages of which," says Doctor Holmes, "may be found a chapter contributed
in part by the most remarkable man in many respects, among all the older
clergymen,--preacher, lawyer, physician, astronomer, botanist,
entomologist, explorer, colonist, legislator in State and national
governments, and only not seated on the bench of the Supreme Court of a
Territory because he declined the office when Washington offered it to
him. This manifold individual," adds Doctor Holmes, "was the minister of
Hamilton, a pleasant little town in Essex County, Massachusetts, the
Reverend Manasseh Cutler."

[Illustration: DR. HOLMES' LIBRARY, BEACON ST.]

Here is the _Aëtius_ found one never-to-be-forgotten rainy day, in that
dingy bookshop in Lyons, and here the vellum-bound _Tulpius_, "my only
reading," says Doctor Holmes, "when imprisoned in quarantine at
Marseilles, so that the two hundred and twenty-eight cases he has
recorded are, many of them, to this day still fresh in my memory."
Here, too, is the _Schenckius_,--"the folio filled with _casus
rariores_, which had strayed in among the rubbish of the bookstall on
the boulevard--and here the noble old _Vesalius_, with its grand
frontispiece not unworthy of Titian, and the fine old _Ambroise Parié_,
long waited for even in Paris and long ago, and the colossal Spigelius,
with his eviscerated beauties, and Dutch Bidloo with its miracles of
fine engraving and bad dissection, and Italian Mascagni, the despair of
all would-be imitators, and pre-Adamite John de Ketam, and antediluvian
_Berengarius Carpensis_," and many other rare volumes, dear to the heart
of every bibliophile.

Glancing again from the window, I catch a glimpse of the West Boston
Bridge, and recall the poet's description of the "crunching of ice at
the edges of the river as the tide rises and falls, the little cluster
of tent-like screens on the frozen desert, the excitement of watching
the springy hoops, the mystery of drawing up life from silent, unseen
depths." With his opera glass he watches the boys and men, black and
white, fishing over the rails of the bridge "as hopefully as if the
river were full of salmon." At certain seasons, he observes, there will
now and then be captured a youthful and inexperienced codfish, always,
however, of quite trivial dimensions. The fame of the exploit has no
sooner gone abroad than the enthusiasts of the art come flocking down to
the river and cast their lines in side by side, until they look like a
row of harp-strings for number. "That a codfish is once in a while
caught," says Doctor Holmes, "I have asserted to be a fact; but I have
often watched the anglers, and do not remember ever seeing one drawn
from the water, or even any unequivocal symptom of a bite. The spring
sculpin and the flabby, muddy flounder are the common rewards of the
angler's toil.

The silhouette figures on the white background enliven the winter
landscape, but now the blazing log on the hearthstone rolls over and the
whole study is aglow with light! Truly "winter _is_ a cheerful season to
people who have open fireplaces;" and who will not agree with our
poet-philosopher when he says, "A house without these is like a face
without eyes, and that never smiles. I have seen respectability and
amiability grouped over the air-tight stove; I have seen virtue and
intelligence hovering over the register; but I have never seen true
happiness in a family circle where the faces were not illuminated by the
blaze of an open fireplace."

A well-known journalist writes as follows of Doctor Holmes "at home."

"All who pay their respects to the distinguished Autocrat will find the
genial, merry gentleman whose form and kindly greeting all admirers have
anticipated while reading his sparkling poems. He is the perfect essence
of wit and hospitality--courteous, amiable and entertaining to a degree
which is more easily remembered than imparted or described. If the
caller expects to find blue-blood snobbishness at 296 Beacon street, he
will be disappointed. It is one of the most elegant and charming
residences on that broad and fashionable thoroughfare, but far less
pretentious, both inwardly and outwardly, than many of the others. For
an uninterrupted period of forty-seven years, Doctor Holmes has lived in
Boston, and for the last dozen years he has occupied his present
residence on Beacon street.

"The chief point of attraction in the present residence--for the
visitor as well as the host--is the magnificent and spacious library,
which may be more aptly termed the Autocrat's workshop. It is up one
flight, and seemingly occupies the entire rear half of the whole
building on this floor. It is a very inviting room in every respect, and
from the spacious windows overlooking the broad expanse of the Charles
River, there can be had an extensive view of the surrounding suburbs in
the northerly, eastern and western directions. On a clear day there can
be more or less distinctly described the cities and towns of Cambridge,
Arlington, Medford, Somerville, Malden, Revere, Everett, Chelsea,
Charlestown and East Boston. Even in the picture can be recognized the
lofty tower of the Harvard Memorial Hall, which is but a few steps from
the doctor's birthplace and first home. Arthur Gilman, in his admirable
pen and pencil sketches of the homes of the American poets, makes a
happy and appropriate allusion to the Autocrat's library. 'The ancient
Hebrew,' he says, 'always had a window open toward Jerusalem, the city
about which his most cherished hopes and memories clustered, and this
window gives its owner the pleasure of looking straight to the place of
his birth, and thus of freshening all the happy memories of a successful
life.'

"In renewing his old-time acquaintance with the _Atlantic_ family
circle, the Autocrat recognized the modern invention of the journalistic
interviewer, and submitted some plans for his regulation, to be
considered by the various local governments. His idea is that the
interviewer is a product of our civilization, one who does for the
living what the undertaker does for the dead, taking such liberties as
he chooses with the subject of his mental and conversational
manipulations, whom he is to arrange for public inspection. 'The
interview system has its legitimate use,' says Doctor Holmes, 'and is
often a convenience to politicians, and may even gratify the vanity and
serve the interests of an author.' He very properly believes, however,
that in its abuse it is an infringement of the liberty of the private
citizen to be ranked with the edicts of the council of ten, the decrees
of the star chamber, the _lettres de cachet_, and the visits of the
Inquisition. The interviewer, if excluded, becomes an enemy, and has the
columns of a newspaper at his service in which to revenge himself. If
admitted, the interviewed is at the mercy of the interviewer's memory,
if he is the best meaning of men; of his accuracy, if he is careless; of
his malevolence, if he is ill-disposed; of his prejudices, if he has
any, and of his sense of propriety, at any rate.

"Doctor Holmes humorously suggests the following restrictions: 'A
licensed corps of interviewers, to be appointed by the municipal
authorities, each interviewer to wear, in a conspicuous position, a
number and a badge, for which the following emblems and inscriptions are
suggested: Zephyrus, with his lips at the ear of Boreas, who holds a
speaking trumpet, signifying that what is said by the interviewed in a
whisper will be shouted to the world by the interviewer through that
brazen instrument. For mottoes, either of the following: _Fænum halct in
cornu_; _Hunc tu Romane caveto_. No person to be admitted to the corps
of interviewers without a strict preliminary examination. The candidate
to be proved free from color blindness and amblyopia, ocular and mental
strabismus, double refraction of memory, kleptomania, mendacity of more
than average dimensions, and tendency to alcholic endosmosis. His moral
and religious character to be vouched for by three orthodox clergymen of
the same belief, and as many deacons who agree with them and each other.
All reports to be submitted to the interviewed, and the proofs thereof
to be corrected and sanctioned by him before being given to the public.
Until the above provisions are carried out no record of an alleged
interview to be considered as anything more than the untrustworthy
gossip of an irresponsible impersonality.'"

"What business have young scribblers to send me their verses and ask my
opinion of the stuff?" said Doctor Holmes one day, annoyed by the
officiousness of certain would-be aspirants to literary fame. "They have
no more right to ask than they have to stop me on the street, run out
their tongues, and ask what the matter is with their stomachs, and what
they shall take as a remedy." At another time he made the remark:
"Everybody that writes a book must needs send me a copy. It's very good
of them, of course, but they're not all successful attempts at
bookmaking, and most of them are relegated to my hospital for sick books
up-stairs."

But once a young writer sent from California a sample of his poetry, and
asked Holmes if it was worth while for him to keep on writing. It was
evident that the doctor was impressed by something decidedly original in
the style of the writer, for he wrote back that he should keep on, by
all means.

Some time afterward a gentleman called at the home of Professor Holmes
in Boston and asked him if he remembered the incident. "I do, indeed,"
replied Holmes. "Well," said his visitor, who was none other than Bret
Harte, "I am the man."

CHAPTER XVII.

LOVE OF NATURE.

It is city-life, Boston-life, in fact, that forms the fitting frame of
any pen-picture one might draw of Oliver Wendell Holmes, and yet even
his prose writings are full of all a poet's love for country sights and
sounds. Listen, for instance, to this rich word-picture of the opening
spring: "A flock of wild geese wedging their way northward, with
strange, far-off clamor, are the heralds of April; the flowers are
opening fast; the leaves are springing bright green upon the currant
bushes; dark, almost livid, upon the lilacs; the grass is growing apace,
the plants are coming up in the garden beds, and the children are
thinking of May-day....

"The birds come pouring in with May. Wrens, brown thrushes, the various
kinds of swallows, orioles, cat-birds, golden robins, bobo'links,
whippoorwills, cuckoos, yellow-birds, hummingbirds, are busy in
establishing their new households. The bumble-bee comes in with his
'mellow, breezy bass,' to swell the song of the busy minstrels.

"And now June comes in with roses in her hand ... the azalea--wild
honeysuckle--is sweetening the road-sides; the laurels are beginning to
blow, the white lilies are getting ready to open, the fireflies are seen
now and then flitting across the darkness; the katydids, the
grasshoppers, the crickets, make themselves heard; the bull-frogs utter
their tremendous voices, and the full chorus of birds makes the air
vocal with melody."

How like Thoreau the following passage reads:

"O, for a huckleberry pasture to wander in, with labyrinths of taller
bushes, with bayberry leaves at hand to pluck and press and smell of,
and sweet fern, its fragrant rival, growing near!... I wonder if others
have noticed what an imitative fruit the blackberry is. I have tasted
the strawberry, the pine-apple, and I do not know how many other flavors
in it--if you think a little, and have read Darwin, and Huxley, perhaps
you will believe that it, and all the fruits it tastes of, may have
come from a common progenitor."

And there is the poet's beautiful picture of Indian summer.

"It is the time to be in the woods or on the seashore,--a sweet season
that should be given to lonely walks, to stumbling about in old
churchyards, plucking on the way the aromatic silvery herb everlasting,
and smelling at its dry flower until it etherizes the soul into aimless
reveries outside of space and time. There is little need of painting the
still, warm, misty, dreamy Indian summer in words; there are many states
that have no articulate vocabulary, and are only to be reproduced by
music, and the mood this season produces is of that nature. By and by,
when the white man is thoroughly Indianized (if he can bear the
process), some native Hayden will perhaps turn the Indian summer into
the loveliest _andante_ of the new 'Creation.'"

And again: "To those who know the Indian summer of our Northern States,
it is needless to describe the influence it exerts on the senses and the
soul. The stillness of the landscape in that beautiful time is as if the
planet were _sleeping_ like a top, before it begins to rock with the
storms of autumn. All natures seem to find themselves more truly in its
light; love grows more tender, religion more spiritual, memory sees
farther back into the past, grief revisits its mossy marbles, the poet
harvests the ripe thoughts which he will tie in sheaves of verse by his
winter fireside."

At another time, when revisiting the scenes of his old schooldays at
Andover, he gives us the following vivid description of mountain
scenery:

"Far to the north and west the mountains of New Hampshire lifted their
summits in a long encircling ridge of pale-blue waves. The day was
clear, and every mound and peak traced its outline with perfect
definition against the sky.

I have been by the seaside now and then, but the sea is constantly
busy with its own affairs, running here and there, listening to
what the winds have to say, and getting angry with them, always
indifferent, often insolent, and ready to do a mischief to those
who seek its companionship. But these still, serene, unchanging
mountains,--Monadnock, Kearsarge,--what memories that name recalls! and
the others, the dateless Pyramids of New England, the eternal monuments
of her ancient race, around which cluster the homes of so many of her
bravest and hardiest children, I can never look at them without feeling
that, vast and remote and awful as they are, there is a kind of inward
heat and muffled throb in their stony cores, that brings them into a
vague sort of sympathy with human hearts. How delightful all those
reminiscences, as he wanders, "the ghost of a boy" by his side, now by
the old elm that held, buried in it by growth, iron rings to keep the
Indians from destroying it with their tomahawks; and now through the old
playground sown with memories of the time when he was young.

"A kind of romance gilds for me," he says, "the sober tableland of that
cold New England hill where I came a slight, immature boy, in contact
with a world so strange to me, and destined to leave such mingled and
lasting impressions. I looked across the valley to the hillside where
Methuen hung suspended, and dreamed of its wooded seclusion as a village
paradise. I tripped lightly down the long northern slope with _facilis
descensus_ on my lips, and toiled up again, repeating _sed revocare
gradum_. I wandered in the autumnal woods that crown the 'Indian Ridge,'
much wondering at that vast embankment, which we young philosophers
believed with the vulgar to be of aboriginal workmanship, not less
curious, perhaps, since we call it an escar, and refer it to alluvial
agencies. The little Shawsheen was our swimming-school, and the great
Merrimac, the right arm of four toiling cities, was within reach of a
morning stroll."

Nor does he forget to recall a visit to Haverhill with his room-mate,
when he saw the mighty bridge over the Merrimac that defied the
ice-rafts of the river, and the old meeting-house door with the
bullet-hole in it, through which the minister, Benjamin Rolfe, was shot
by the Indians. "What a vision it was," he exclaims, "when I awoke in
the morning to see the fog on the river seeming as if it wrapped the
towers and spires of a great city! for such was my fancy, and whether it
was a mirage of youth, or a fantastic natural effect, I hate to inquire
too nicely."

Like all poets, Doctor Holmes had a passionate love for flowers, and
with a delight that is most heartily shared by the sympathetic reader,
he thus recalls the old garden belonging to the gambrel-roofed house in
Cambridge.

"There were old lilac bushes, at the right of the entrance, and in the
corner at the left that remarkable moral pear-tree, which gave me one of
my first lessons in life. Its fruit never ripened but always rotted at
the core just before it began to grow mellow. It was a vulgar plebeian
specimen, at best, and was set there, no doubt, only to preach its
annual sermon, a sort of 'Dudleian Lecture' by a country preacher of
small parts. But in the northern border was a high-bred Saint Michael
pear-tree, which taught a lesson that all of gentle blood might take to
heart; for its fruit used to get hard and dark, and break into unseemly
cracks, so that when the lord of the harvest came for it, it was like
those rich men's sons we see too often, who have never ripened, but only
rusted, hardened and shrunken. We had peaches, lovely nectarines, and
sweet, white grapes, growing and coming to kindly maturity in those
days; we should hardly expect them now, and yet there is no obvious
change of climate. As for the garden-beds, they were cared for by the
Jonathan or Ephraim of the household, sometimes assisted by one Rule, a
little old Scotch gardener, with a stippled face and a lively temper.
Nothing but old-fashioned flowers in them--hyacinths, pushing their
green beaks through as soon as the snow was gone, or earlier tulips,
coming up in the shape of sugar 'cockles,' or cornucopiæ, one was almost
tempted to look to see whether nature had not packed one of those
two-line 'sentiments,' we remember so well in each of them; peonies,
butting their way bluntly through the loosened earth; flower-de-luces
(so I will call them, not otherwise); lilies; roses, damask, white,
blush, cinnamon (these names served us then); larkspurs, lupins, and
gorgeous holyhocks.

"With these upper-class plants were blended, in republican fellowship,
the useful vegetables of the working sort;--beets, handsome with
dark-red leaves; carrots, with their elegant filigree foliage, parsnips
that cling to the earth like mandrakes; radishes, illustrations of total
depravity, a prey to every evil underground emissary of the powers of
darkness; onions, never easy until they are out of bed, so to speak, a
communicative and companionable vegetable, with a real genius for soups;
squash vines with their generous fruits, the winter ones that will hang
up 'ag'in the chimbly' by and by--the summer ones, vase like, as
Hawthorne described them, with skins so white and delicate, when they
are yet new-born, that one thinks of little sucking pigs turned
vegetables, like Daphne into a laurel, and then of tender human infancy,
which Charles Lamb's favorite so calls to mind;--these, with melons,
promising as 'first scholars,' but apt to put off ripening until the
frost came and blasted their vines and leaves, as if it had been a
shower of boiling water, were among the customary growths of the
Garden."

Then follows, in these charming reminiscences, an account of the
reconstruction of the dear old Garden.

"Consuls Madisonius and Monrovious left the seat of office, and Consuls
Johannes Quincius, and Andreas, and Martinus, and the rest, followed in
their turn, until the good Abraham sat in the curule chair. In the
meantime changes had been going on under our old gambrel roof, and the
Garden had been suffered to relapse slowly into a state of wild nature.
The haughty flower-de-luces, the curled hyacinths, the perfumed roses,
had yielded their place to suckers from locust-trees, to milkweed,
burdock, plantain, sorrel, purslane; the gravel walks, which were to
nature as rents in her green garment, had been gradually darned over
with the million threaded needles of her grasses until nothing was left
to show that a garden had been there.

"But the Garden still existed in my memory; the walks were all mapped
out there, and the place of every herb and flower was laid down as if on
a chart.

"By that pattern I reconstructed the Garden, lost for a whole generation
as much as Pompeii was lost, and in the consulate of our good Abraham it
was once more as it had been in the days of my childhood. It was not
much to look upon for a stranger; but when the flowers came up in their
old places, the effect on me was something like what the widow of Nain
may have felt when her dead son rose on his bier and smiled upon her.

"Nature behaved admirably, and sent me back all the little tokens of her
affection she had kept so long. The same delegates from the underground
fauna ate up my early radishes; I think I should have been disappointed
if they had not. The same buff-colored bugs devoured my roses that I
remembered of old. The aphids and the caterpillar and the squash-bug
were cordial as ever; just as if nothing had happened to produce a
coolness or entire forgetfulness between us. But the butterflies came
back too, and the bees and the birds."

Says a well-known writer:

"Though born and reared beneath the shadow of the great city, yet Doctor
Holmes has ever found great delight in spending a portion of each year
in the country. The last few summers he has made his home at Beverly
Farms, but from 1849 to 1856, inclusive, his summer home was in
Pittsfield, in Berkshire County. His recollections of the scenes and
people in that charming town are pleasant and abundant. The villa which
he built was upon a round knoll, commanding a fine view of the whole
circle of Berkshire mountains, and of the Housatonic, winding in its
serpentine way through the fertile meadows and valleys to the sound of
Long Island. Yielding to his own good nature and the soft persuasion of
a committee of Pittsfield ladies, Doctor Holmes once contributed a
couple of poems to a fancy fair which was being held in the town during
his residence there. They do not appear in any of the published
collections, which is the one reason, above all others, why we print
them now. Each of the poems was inclosed in an envelope bearing a motto;
and the right to a second choice, guided by these, was disposed of in a
raffle, to the no small emolument of the objects of the fair. The two
pieces are even to this day represented by at least a square yard of the
quaint ecclesiastical heraldry which illuminates the gorgeous chancel
window of the St. Stephen's church in Pittsfield. The motto of the first
envelope ran thus:

    Faith is the conquering angels' crown;
      Who hopes for grace must ask it;
    Look shrewdly ere you lay me down;
      I'm Portia's leaden casket.

The following verses were found within:

    Fair lady, whosoe'er thou art,
      Turn this poor leaf with tenderest care,
    And--hush, oh, hush thy beating heart;
      The one thou lovest will be there.

    Alas, not loved by thee alone,
      Thine idol ever prone to range;
    To-day all thine, to-morrow flown,
      Frail thing, that every hour may change.

    Yet, when that truant course is done,
      If thy lost wanderer reappear,
    Press to thy heart the only one
      That nought can make more truly dear.

Within this paper was a smaller envelope containing a one dollar bill,
and this explanation of the poet's riddle:

    Fair lady, lift thine eyes and tell
      If this is not a truthful letter;
    This is the (1) thou lovest well,
      And nought (0) can make thee love it better (10)

    Though fickle, do not think it strange
      That such a friend is worth possessing;
    For one that gold can never change
      Is Heaven's own dearest earthly blessing.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL.

Upon the seventeenth of October, 1883, the centennial anniversary of the
Harvard Medical School, the new building upon the Back Bay was
dedicated. The fine, commodious structure is situated upon the corner of
Boylston and Exeter streets, and is at nearly equal distances from the
Massachusetts General Hospital, the City Hospital, the Boston Dispensary
and the Children's Hospital with their stores of clinical material,
available for the purposes of teaching. Close by, also, are the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the museums of the Society of
Natural History and of Fine Arts, and the Medical Library Association.
The building has a frontage of one hundred and twenty-two feet toward
the north on Boylston street, and of ninety feet toward the west on
Exeter street, and its corner position, together with the reservation
of a large open area on the east, will always insure good light and good
air.

The dedication exercises were divided into two parts, the opening
addresses being given in Huntington Hall, at the Institute of
Technology, and the remainder of the programme in the new building. Upon
the platform, in Huntington Hall, were seated President Eliot, of
Harvard University, the faculty of the Medical School, and numerous
invited guests. Upon the walls just back of the platform, against a
background of maroon-colored drapery, and directly over the head of the
original, hung a portrait of Professor Oliver Wendell Holmes. Beneath
this portrait was a fine marble bust of Professor Henry J. Bigelow, who
was seated beside Doctor Holmes.

President Eliot opened the exercises with the interesting address which
follows:

"We are met to celebrate the beginning of the second century of the
Medical School's existence, and the simultaneous completion of its new
building. It is a hundred years since John Warren, Benjamin Waterhouse
and Aaron Dexter were installed as professors of anatomy and surgery,
theory and practice, and _materia medica_ respectively, and without the
aid of collections or hospitals began to lecture in some small, rough
rooms in the basement of Harvard Hall, and in a part of little Holden
Chapel, at Cambridge. From that modest beginning the school has
gradually grown until it counts a staff of forty-seven teachers, ten
professors, six assistant professors, nine instructors, thirteen
clinical instructors, and nine assistants--working in the spacious and
well-equipped building, which we are shortly to inspect, and commanding
every means of instruction and research which laboratories, dispensaries
and hospitals can supply. Out of our present strength and abundance we
look back to the founding of the school and to its slow and painful
development. We bear in our hearts the three generations of teachers who
have served this school with disinterested diligence and zeal. We recall
their unrequited labors, their frequent anxieties and conflicts and
their unfulfilled hopes; we bring to mind the careful plantings and the
tardy harvests, reaped at last, but not by them that sowed. We meet,
indeed, to rejoice in present prosperity and fair prospects, but we
would first salute our predecessors and think with reverence and
gratitude of their toils and sacrifices, the best fruits of which our
generation has inherited.

"The medical faculty of to-day have strong grounds for satisfaction in
the present state of the school; for they have made great changes in its
general plan and policy, run serious risks, received hearty support from
the profession and the community, and now see their efforts crowned with
substantial success. By doubling the required period of study in each