Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes Part 4

At the Berkshire festivals, the poet was often called upon to furnish a song, and brimful of wit and wisdom they always were, though often composed upon the spur of the moment. Here is a part of one of them:

Come back to your mother, ye children, for shame, Who have wandered like truants, for riches or fame!

With a smile on her face, and a sprig in her cap, She calls you to feast from her bountiful lap.

Come out from your alleys, your courts, and your lanes, And breathe, like young eagles, the air of our plains, Take a whiff from our fields, and your excellent wives Will declare it's all nonsense insuring your lives.

Come you of the law, who can talk, if you please, Till the Man in the Moon will declare it's a cheese, And leave 'the old lady that never tell lies,'

To sleep with her handkerchief over her eyes.

Ye healers of men, for a moment decline Your feats in the rhubarb and ipecac line; While you shut up your turnpike, your neighbors can go The old roundabout road, to the regions below.

You clerk, on whose ears are a couple of pens, And whose head is an anthill of units and tens, Though Plato denies you, we welcome you still As a featherless biped, in spite of your quill.

Poor drudge of the city! how happy he feels With the burrs on his legs and the gra.s.s at his heels!

No _dodger_ behind, his bandannas to share, No constable grumbling "You mustn't walk there!"

In yonder green meadow, to memory dear, He slaps a mosquito and brushes a tear; The dewdrops hang round him on blossoms and shoots, He breathes but one sigh for his youth and his boots.

There stands the old schoolhouse, hard by the old church That tree at its side had the flavor of birch; O sweet were the days of his juvenile tricks, Though the prairie of youth had so many "big licks."

By the side of yon river he weeps and he slumps, The boots fill with water as if they were pumps; Till, sated with rapture, he steals to his bed, With a glow in his heart, and a cold in his head.

At the annual dinner of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, in 1843, Doctor Holmes read the fine poem ent.i.tled _Terpsich.o.r.e_.

Three years later he delivered _Urania, A Rhyme Lesson_ before the Boston Mercantile Library a.s.sociation. "To save a question that is sometimes put," remarks the poet, "it is proper to say that in naming these two poems after two of the Muses, nothing more was intended than a suggestion of their general character and aim."

FOOTNOTES:

[7] From notes furnished by Dr. Holmes.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE LECTURER.

When Doctor Warren gave up the Parkman professorship at Harvard, in 1847, Doctor Holmes was appointed to take his place as Professor of Anatomy and Physiology. For eight months of the year, four lectures are delivered each week in this department of the college, and yet Doctor Holmes still found time "between whiles," to attend to his Boston practice, and to write many charming poems and essays. He also entered the lyceum arena, "an original American contrivance," as Theodore Parker describes it in 1857, "for educating the people. The world has nothing like it. In it are combined the best things of the Church: i.e., the preaching; and of the College: i.e., the informing thought, with some of the fun of the theatre. Besides, it gives the rural districts a chance to see the men they read about--to see the lions--for the lecturer is also a show to the eyes. For ten years past six or eight of the most progressive minds in America have been lecturing fifty or a hundred times a year."

Among the many subjects that Doctor Holmes touched upon in these lyceum lectures was a fine, witty, and remarkably just criticism on the _English Poets of the Nineteenth Century_. What a pity that Oscar Wilde and his brother poets of this later day could not have the benefit of just such a clear, microscopic a.n.a.lysis! What the Autocrat himself thought of these lecturing tours through the country we have in his own words:

"I have played the part of 'Poor Gentleman' before many audiences," he says; "more, I trust, than I shall ever face again. I did not wear a stage costume, nor a wig, nor mustaches of burnt cork; but I was placarded and announced as a public performer, and at the proper hour I came forward with the ballet-dancer's smile upon my countenance, and made my bow and acted my part. I have seen my name stuck up in letters so big that I was ashamed to show myself in the place by daylight. I have gone to a town with a sober literary essay in my pocket, and seen myself everywhere announced as the most desperate of _buffos_. I have been through as many hardships as Ulysses in the exercise of my histrionic vocation. I have sometimes felt as if I were a wandering spirit, and this great, unchanging multivertebrate which I faced night after night was one ever-listening animal, which writhed along after me wherever I fled, and coiled at my feet every evening turning up to me the same sleepless eyes which I thought I had closed with my last drowsy incantation."

Of his audiences he writes again as follows:

"Two lyceum a.s.semblies, of five hundred each, are so nearly alike, that they are absolutely undistinguishable in many cases by any definite mark, and there is nothing but the place and time by which one can tell the 'remarkably intelligent audience' of a town in New York or Ohio from one in any New England town of similar size. Of course, if any principle of selection has come in, as in those special a.s.sociations of young men which are common in cities, it deranges the uniformity of the a.s.semblage. But let there be no such interfering circ.u.mstances, and one knows pretty well even the look the audience will have, before he goes in. Front seats, a few old folks--shiny-headed--slant up best ear toward the speaker--drop off asleep after a while, when the air begins to get a little narcotic with carbonic acid. Bright women's faces, young and middle-aged, a little behind these, but toward the front--(pick out the best, and lecture mainly to that). Here and there a countenance, sharp and scholarlike, and a dozen pretty female ones sprinkled about. An indefinite number of pairs of young people--happy, but not always very attentive. Boys in the background more or less quiet. Dull faces here, there--in how many places! I don't say dull _people_, but faces without a ray of sympathy or a movement of expression. They are what kill the lecturer. These negative faces with their vacuous eyes and stony lineaments pump and suck the warm soul out of him;--that is the chief reason why lecturers grow so pale before the season is over.

"Out of all these inevitable elements the audience is generated--a great compound vertebrate, as much like fifty others you have seen as any two mammals of the same species are like each other."

"Pretty nigh killed himself," says the good landlady, "goin' about lecterin' two or three winters, talking in cold country lyceums--as he used to say--goin' home to cold parlors and bein' treated to cold apples and cold water, and then goin' up into a cold bed in a cold chamber, and comin' home next mornin' with a cold in his head as bad as the horse distemper. Then he'd look kind of sorry for havin' said it, and tell how kind some of the good women was to him; how one spread an eiderdown comforter for him, and another fixed up somethin' hot for him after the lectur, and another one said, 'There now, you smoke that cigar of yours after the lectur, jest as if you was at home,' and if they'd all been like that, he'd have gone on lecturing forever, but, as it was, he had got pooty nigh enough of it, and preferred a nateral death to puttin'

himself out of the world by such violent means as lecturin'."

To these graphic pictures of the "lyceum lecturer" we would add one more which was given by Mr. J.W. Harper, at the Holmes Breakfast.

"I well remember," he said, "the first time I saw Doctor Holmes. It was long ago; not as our Autocrat expresses it, 'in the year eighteen hundred and ever so few;' nor, as Thackeray has it, 'when the present century was in its teens.' It was just after the close of the last half century, and on a cold winter's afternoon, when the sun was fast setting behind the then ungilded dome of the State House, and it was in old Bromfield street. It was not in the Bromfield Street Methodist Church, nor in the contiguous Methodist inn, known as the Bromfield House, which, for many years, might have been the convenient resort of good Methodist elders, and of the peripatetic presiding elders, who were called by the genial Bishop Wainwright, the 'bob-tailed bishops' of their flocks and districts.... I was in the large stable adjoining the Bromfield House, endeavoring to secure a sleigh, when there entered a gentleman apparently of my own age. He came in quickly, and with impatience demanded the immediate production of a team and sleigh, which, though ordered for him, had somehow been forgotten. The new-comer, it was evident, was not to be trifled with. There was no nonsense about him, and I was not surprised, when, a few years later, I learned that he had become an Autocrat.

"On that particular night he had a long drive before him, for he was to lecture at Newburyport, or Nantasket, or Nantucket, or some other then unannexed suburb of Boston. I doubt if the horse survived the drive, and I am quite sure he is not now living. But the driver lives, and the young New Yorker who then admired him, and would fain have driven with him on that cold winter night, has since, in common with thousands of other New Yorkers, been filled with grateful admiration for what that driver has done for literature, and for the happiness and improvement of the world."

In 1838 Doctor Holmes wrote the _Boylston Prize Dissertation_, and in 1842, _h.o.m.oeopothy and its kindred Delusions_. The Boylston prizes were established in 1803, by Ward Nicholas Boylston. Doctor Holmes gained three of these prizes, and the _Dissertations_, one of which was upon Intermittent Fever, were published together in book form in 1838.

When, in February of the same year (1842), the young men of Boston gave a dinner to Charles d.i.c.kens, Doctor Holmes welcomed the distinguished visitor in the following beautiful song:

The stars their early vigils keep, The silent hours are near, When drooping eyes forget to weep-- Yet still we linger here; And what--the pa.s.sing churl may ask-- Can claim such wondrous power, That Toil forgets his wonted task, And Love his promised hour?

The Irish harp no longer thrills, Or breathes a fainter tone; The clarion blast from Scotland's hills Alas! no more is blown.

And Pa.s.sion's burning lip bewails Her Harold's wasted fire, Still lingering o'er the dust that veils The Lord of England's lyre.

But grieve not o'er its broken strings, Nor think its soul hath died, While yet the lark at heaven's gate sings, As once o'er Avon's side;-- While gentle summer sheds her bloom, And dewy blossoms wave, Alike o'er Juliet's storied tomb And Nelly's nameless grave.

Thou glorious island of the sea!

Though wide the wasting flood That parts our distant land from thee, We claim thy generous blood.

Nor o'er thy far horizon springs One hallowed star of fame.

But kindles, like an angel's wings, Our western skies in flame!

CHAPTER IX.

NAMING THE NEW MAGAZINE.

In the year 1857, Mr. Phillips, of the firm of Phillips & Sampson, undertook the publication in Boston, of a new literary magazine. They were fortunate in securing James Russell Lowell as editor, and one condition he made upon accepting the office was, that his friend, Doctor Holmes, should be one of the chief contributors.

It was the latter, also, who was called upon to name the new magazine.

Thus was the _Atlantic Monthly_ launched upon the great sea of literature--a periodical that has never lost its first high prestige.

When Doctor Holmes sat down to write his first article for the new magazine, he remembered that some twenty-five years before, he had begun a series of papers for a certain _New England Magazine_, published in Boston, by J. T. & E. Buckingham, with the t.i.tle of _Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table_. Curious, as he says, to try the experiment of shaking the same bough again and finding out if the ripe fruit were better or worse than the early wind-falls, he took the same t.i.tle for his new articles.

"The man is father to the boy that was," he adds, "and I am my own son, as it seems to me, in those papers of the _New England Magazine_."

To show the reader some family traits of this "young autocrat," we quote from these earlier articles the following fine extracts:

"When I feel inclined to read poetry, I take down my dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. The author may arrange the gems effectively, but their shape and l.u.s.tre have been given by the attrition of ages. Bring me the finest simile from the whole range of imaginative writing, and I will show you a single word which conveys a more profound, a more accurate, and a more eloquent a.n.a.logy.

"Once on a time, a notion was started that if all the people in the world would shout at once, it might be heard in the moon. So the projectors agreed it should be done in just ten years. Some thousand shiploads of chronometers were distributed to the selectmen and other great folks of all the different nations. For a year beforehand, nothing else was talked about but the awful noise that was to be made on the great occasion. When the time came everybody had their ears so wide open to hear the universal e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n of boo--the word agreed upon--that n.o.body spoke except a deaf man in one of the Fejee Islands, and a woman in Pekin, so that the world was never so still since the creation."