Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes Part 14

"Doctor Holmes humorously suggests the following restrictions: 'A licensed corps of interviewers, to be appointed by the munic.i.p.al authorities, each interviewer to wear, in a conspicuous position, a number and a badge, for which the following emblems and inscriptions are suggested: Zephyrus, with his lips at the ear of Boreas, who holds a speaking trumpet, signifying that what is said by the interviewed in a whisper will be shouted to the world by the interviewer through that brazen instrument. For mottoes, either of the following: _Faenum halct in cornu_; _Hunc tu Romane caveto_. No person to be admitted to the corps of interviewers without a strict preliminary examination. The candidate to be proved free from color blindness and amblyopia, ocular and mental strabismus, double refraction of memory, kleptomania, mendacity of more than average dimensions, and tendency to alcholic endosmosis. His moral and religious character to be vouched for by three orthodox clergymen of the same belief, and as many deacons who agree with them and each other.

All reports to be submitted to the interviewed, and the proofs thereof to be corrected and sanctioned by him before being given to the public.

Until the above provisions are carried out no record of an alleged interview to be considered as anything more than the untrustworthy gossip of an irresponsible impersonality.'"

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

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

Some time afterward a gentleman called at the home of Professor Holmes in Boston and asked him if he remembered the incident. "I do, indeed,"

replied Holmes. "Well," said his visitor, who was none other than Bret Harte, "I am the man."

CHAPTER XVII.

LOVE OF NATURE.

It is city-life, Boston-life, in fact, that forms the fitting frame of any pen-picture one might draw of Oliver Wendell Holmes, and yet even his prose writings are full of all a poet's love for country sights and sounds. Listen, for instance, to this rich word-picture of the opening spring: "A flock of wild geese wedging their way northward, with strange, far-off clamor, are the heralds of April; the flowers are opening fast; the leaves are springing bright green upon the currant bushes; dark, almost livid, upon the lilacs; the gra.s.s 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 b.u.mble-bee comes in with his 'mellow, breezy ba.s.s,' 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 gra.s.shoppers, 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 Th.o.r.eau the following pa.s.sage 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 seash.o.r.e,--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 s.p.a.ce 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 cl.u.s.ter 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 m.u.f.fled 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 pa.s.sionate 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 a.s.sisted 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 'c.o.c.kles,' or cornucopiae, one was almost tempted to look to see whether nature had not packed one of those two-line 'sentiments,' we remember so well in each of them; peonies, b.u.t.ting 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-cla.s.s 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, ill.u.s.trations 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 gra.s.ses 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 b.u.t.terflies 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 p.r.o.ne 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 Ma.s.sachusetts 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 Ma.s.sachusetts Inst.i.tute of Technology, the museums of the Society of Natural History and of Fine Arts, and the Medical Library a.s.sociation.

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 Inst.i.tute 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: