Pages From an Old Volume of Life

O >> Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. >> Pages From an Old Volume of Life


After leaving the school of Dame Prentiss, best remembered by infantine
loves, those pretty preludes of more serious passions; by the great
forfeit-basket, filled with its miscellaneous waifs and deodauds, and by
the long willow stick by the aid of which the good old body, now stricken
in years and unwieldy in person could stimulate the sluggish faculties or
check the mischievous sallies of the child most distant from his ample
chair,--a school where I think my most noted schoolmate was the present
Bishop of Delaware, became the pupil of Master William Biglow. This
generation is not familiar with his title to renown, although he fills
three columns and a half in Mr. Duyckinck's "Cyclopaedia of American
Literature." He was a humorist hardly robust enough for more than a
brief local immortality. I am afraid we were an undistinguished set, for
I do not remember anybody near a bishop in dignity graduating from our
benches.

At about ten years of age I began going to what we always called the
"Port School," because it was kept at Cambridgeport, a mile from the
College. This suburb was at that time thinly inhabited, and, being much
of it marshy and imperfectly reclaimed, had a dreary look as compared
with the thriving College settlement. The tenants of the many beautiful
mansions that have sprung up along Main Street, Harvard Street, and
Broadway can hardly recall the time when, except the "Dana House" and the
"Opposition House" and the "Clark House," these roads were almost all the
way bordered by pastures until we reached the "stores" of Main Street, or
were abreast of that forlorn "First Row" of Harvard Street. We called
the boys of that locality "Port-chucks." They called us
"Cambridge-chucks," but we got along very well together in the main.

Among my schoolmates at the Port School was a young girl of singular
loveliness. I once before referred to her as "the golden blonde," but did
not trust myself to describe her charms. The day of her appearance in
the school was almost as much a revelation to us boys as the appearance
of Miranda was to Caliban. Her abounding natural curls were so full of
sunshine, her skin was so delicately white, her smile and her voice were
so all-subduing, that half our heads were turned. Her fascinations were
everywhere confessed a few years afterwards; and when I last met her,
though she said she was a grandmother, I questioned her statement, for
her winning looks and ways would still have made her admired in any
company.

Not far from the golden blonde were two small boys, one of them very
small, perhaps the youngest boy in school, both ruddy, sturdy, quiet,
reserved, sticking loyally by each other, the oldest, however, beginning
to enter into social relations with us of somewhat maturer years. One of
these two boys was destined to be widely known, first in literature, as
author of one of the most popular books of its time and which is
freighted for a long voyage; then as an eminent lawyer; a man who, if his
countrymen are wise, will yet be prominent in the national councils.
Richard Henry Dana, Junior, is the name he bore and bears; he found it
famous, and will bequeath it a fresh renown.

Sitting on the girls' benches, conspicuous among the school-girls 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. This was Margaret Fuller, the only one
among us who, like "Jean Paul," like "The Duke," like "Bettina," has
slipped the cable of the more distinctive name to which she was anchored,
and floats on the waves of speech as "Margaret." Her air to her
schoolmates was marked by a certain stateliness and distance, as if she
had other thoughts than theirs and was not of them. She was a great
student and a great reader of what she used to call "naw-vels." I
remember her so well as she appeared at school and later, that I regret
that she had not been faithfully given to canvas or marble in the day of
her best looks. None know her aspect who have not seen her living.
Margaret, as I remember her at school and afterwards, was tall, fair
complexioned, with a watery, aqua-marine lustre in her light eyes, which
she used to make small, as one does who looks at the sunshine. A
remarkable point about her was that long, flexile neck, arching and
undulating in strange sinuous movements, which one who loved her would
compare to those of a swan, and one who loved her not to those of the
ophidian who tempted our common mother. Her talk was affluent,
magisterial, de haut en bas, some would say euphuistic, but surpassing
the talk of women in breadth and audacity. Her face 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.

Little incidents bear telling when they recall anything of such a
celebrity as Margaret. I remember being greatly awed once, in our
school-days, with the maturity of one of her expressions. Some themes
were brought home from the school for examination by my father, among
them one of hers. I took it up with a certain emulous interest (for I
fancied at that day that I too had drawn a prize, say a five-dollar one,
at least, in the great intellectual life-lottery) and read the first
words.

"It is a trite remark," she began.

I stopped. Alas! I did not know what trite meant. How could I ever
judge Margaret fairly after such a crushing discovery of her superiority?
I doubt if I ever did; yet oh, how pleasant it would have been, at about
the age, say, of threescore and ten, to rake over these ashes for cinders
with her,--she in a snowy cap, and I in a decent peruke!

After being five years at the Port School, the time drew near when I was
to enter college. It seemed advisable to give me a year of higher
training, and for that end some public school was thought to offer
advantages. Phillips Academy at Andover was well known to us. We had
been up there, my father and myself, at anniversaries. Some Boston boys
of well-known and distinguished parentage had been scholars there very
lately, Master Edmund Quincy, Master Samuel Hurd Walley, Master Nathaniel
Parker Willis,--all promising youth, who fulfilled their promise.

I do not believe there was any thought of getting a little respite of
quiet by my temporary absence, but I have wondered that there was not.
Exceptional boys of fourteen or fifteen make home a heaven, it is true;
but I have suspected, late in life, that I was not one of the exceptional
kind. I had tendencies in the direction of flageolets and octave flutes.
I had a pistol and a gun, and popped at everything that stirred, pretty
nearly, except the house-cat. Worse than this, I would buy a cigar and
smoke it by instalments, putting it meantime in the barrel of my pistol,
by a stroke of ingenuity which it gives me a grim pleasure to recall; for
no maternal or other female eyes would explore the cavity of that dread
implement in search of contraband commodities.

It was settled, then, that I should go to Phillips Academy, and
preparations were made that I might join the school at the beginning of
the autumn.

In due time I took my departure in the old carriage, a little modernized
from the pattern of my Lady Bountiful's, and we jogged soberly
along,--kind parents and slightly nostalgic boy,--towards the seat of
learning, some twenty miles away. Up the old West Cambridge road, now
North Avenue; past Davenport's tavern, with its sheltering tree and
swinging sign; past the old powder-house, looking like a colossal conical
ball set on end; past the old Tidd House, one of the finest of the
ante-Revolutionary mansions; past Miss Swan's great square
boarding-school, where the music of girlish laughter was ringing through
the windy corridors; so on to Stoneham, town of the bright lake, then
darkened with the recent memory of the barbarous murder done by its
lonely shore; through pleasant Reading, with its oddly named village
centres, "Trapelo," "Read'nwoodeend," as rustic speech had it, and the
rest; through Wilmington, then renowned for its hops; so at last into the
hallowed borders of the academic town.

It was a shallow, two-story white house before which we stopped, just at
the entrance of the central village, the residence of a very worthy
professor in the theological seminary,--learned, amiable, exemplary, but
thought by certain experts to be a little questionable in the matter of
homoousianism, or some such doctrine. There was a great rock that showed
its round back in the narrow front yard. It looked cold and hard; but it
hinted firmness and indifference to the sentiments fast struggling to get
uppermost in my youthful bosom; for I was not too old for
home-sickness,--who is: The carriage and my fond companions had to leave
me at last. I saw it go down the declivity that sloped southward, then
climb the next ascent, then sink gradually until the window in the back
of it disappeared like an eye that shuts, and leaves the world dark to
some widowed heart.

Sea-sickness and home-sickness are hard to deal with by any remedy but
time. Mine was not a bad case, but it excited sympathy. There was an
ancient, faded old lady in the house, very kindly, but very deaf,
rustling about in dark autumnal foliage of silk or other murmurous
fabric, somewhat given to snuff, but a very worthy gentlewoman of the
poor-relation variety. She comforted me, I well remember, but not with
apples, and stayed me, but not with flagons. She went in her benevolence,
and, taking a blue and white soda-powder, mingled the same in water, and
encouraged me to drink the result. It might be a specific for
seasickness, but it was not for home-sickness. The fiz was a mockery,
and the saline refrigerant struck a colder chill to my despondent heart.
I did not disgrace myself, however, and a few days cured me, as a week on
the water often cures seasickness.

There was a sober-faced boy of minute dimensions in the house, who began
to make some advances to me, and who, in spite of all the conditions
surrounding him, turned out, on better acquaintance, to be one of the
most amusing, free-spoken, mocking little imps I ever met in my life. My
room-mate came later. He was the son of a clergyman in a neighboring
town,--in fact I may remark that I knew a good many clergymen's sons at
Andover. He and I went in harness together as well as most boys do, I
suspect; and I have no grudge against him, except that once, when I was
slightly indisposed, he administered to me,--with the best intentions, no
doubt,--a dose of Indian pills, which effectually knocked me out of time,
as Mr. Morrissey would say,--not quite into eternity, but so near it
that I perfectly remember one of the good ladies told me (after I had
come to my senses a little, and was just ready for a sip of cordial and a
word of encouragement), with that delightful plainness of speech which so
brings realities home to the imagination, that "I never should look any
whiter when I was laid out as a corpse." After my room-mate and I had
been separated twenty-five years, fate made us fellow-townsmen and
acquaintances once more in Berkshire, and now again we are close literary
neighbors; for I have just read a very pleasant article, signed by him,
in the last number of the "Galaxy." Does it not sometimes seem as if we
were all marching round and round in a circle, like the supernumeraries
who constitute the "army" of a theatre, and that each of us meets and is
met by the same and only the same people, or their doubles, twice,
thrice, or a little oftener, before the curtain drops and the "army" puts
off its borrowed clothes?

The old Academy building had a dreary look, with its flat face, bare and
uninteresting as our own "University Building" at Cambridge, since the
piazza which relieved its monotony was taken away, and, to balance the
ugliness thus produced, the hideous projection was added to "Harvard
Hall." Two masters sat at the end of the great room,--the principal and
his assistant. Two others presided in separate rooms, one of them the
late Rev. Samuel Horatio Stearns, an excellent and lovable man, who
looked kindly on me, and for whom I always cherished a sincere regard, a
clergyman's son, too, which privilege I did not always find the warrant
of signal virtues; but no matter about that here, and I have promised
myself to be amiable.

On the side of the long room was a large clock-dial, bearing these words:

YOUTH IS THE SEED-TIME OF LIFE.

I had indulged in a prejudice, up to that hour, that youth was the
budding time of life, and this clock-dial, perpetually twitting me with
its seedy moral, always had a forbidding look to my vernal apprehension.

I was put into a seat with an older and much bigger boy, or youth, with a
fuliginous complexion, a dilating and whitening nostril, and a singularly
malignant scowl. Many years afterwards he committed an act of murderous
violence, and ended by going to finish his days in a madhouse. His
delight was to kick my shins with all his might, under the desk, not at
all as an act of hostility, but as a gratifying and harmless pastime.
Finding this, so far as I was concerned, equally devoid of pleasure and
profit, I managed to get a seat by another boy, the son of a very
distinguished divine. He was bright enough, and more select in his
choice of recreations, at least during school hours, than my late
homicidal neighbor. But the principal called me up presently, and
cautioned me against him as a dangerous companion. Could it be so? If
the son of that boy's father could not be trusted, what boy in
Christendom could? It seemed like the story of the youth doomed to be
slain by a lion before reaching a certain age, and whose fate found him
out in the heart of the tower where his father had shut him up for
safety. Here was I, in the very dove's nest of Puritan faith, and out of
one of its eggs a serpent had been hatched and was trying to nestle in my
bosom! I parted from him, however, none the worse for his companionship
so far as I can remember.

Of the boys who were at school with me at Andover one has acquired great
distinction among the scholars of the land. One day I observed a new boy
in a seat not very far from my own. He was a little fellow, as I
recollect him, with black hair and very bright black eyes, when at length
I got a chance to look at them. Of all the new-comers during my whole
year he was the only one whom the first glance fixed in my memory, but
there he is now, at this moment, just as he caught my eye on the morning
of his entrance. His head was between his hands (I wonder if he does not
sometimes study in that same posture nowadays!) and his eyes were
fastened to his book as if he had been reading a will that made him heir
to a million. I feel sure that Professor Horatio Balch Hackett will not
find fault with me for writing his name under this inoffensive portrait.
Thousands of faces and forms that I have known more or less familiarly
have faded from my remembrance, but this presentment of the youthful
student, sitting there entranced over the page of his text-book,--the
child-father of the distinguished scholar that was to be,--is not a
picture framed and hung up in my mind's gallery, but a fresco on its
walls, there to remain so long as they hold together.

My especial intimate was a fine, rosy-faced boy, not quite so free of
speech as myself, perhaps, but with qualities that promised a noble
manhood, and ripened into it in due season. His name was Phinehas
Barnes, and, if he is inquired after in Portland or anywhere in the State
of Maine, something will be heard to his advantage from any honest and
intelligent citizen of that Commonwealth who answers the question. This
was one of two or three friendships that lasted. There were other friends
and classmates, one of them a natural humorist of the liveliest sort, who
would have been quarantined in any Puritan port, his laugh was so
potently contagious.

Of the noted men of Andover the one whom I remember best was Professor
Moses Stuart. His house was nearly opposite the one in which I resided
and I often met him and listened to him in the chapel of the Seminary. I
have seen few more striking figures in my life than his, as I remember
it. Tall, lean, with strong, bold features, a keen, scholarly,
accipitrine nose, thin, expressive lips, great solemnity and
impressiveness of voice and manner, he was my early model of a classic
orator. 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.

Dr. Porter was an invalid, with the prophetic handkerchief bundling his
throat, and his face "festooned"--as I heard Hillard say once, speaking
of one of our College professors--in folds and wrinkles. Ill health gives
a certain common character to all faces, as Nature has a fixed course
which she follows in dismantling a human countenance: the noblest and the
fairest is but a death's-head decently covered over for the transient
ceremony of life, and the drapery often falls half off before the
procession has passed.

Dr. Woods looked his creed more decidedly, perhaps, than any of the
Professors. He had the firm fibre of a theological athlete, and lived to
be old without ever mellowing, I think, into a kind of half-heterodoxy,
as old ministers of stern creed are said to do now and then,--just as old
doctors grow to be sparing of the more exasperating drugs in their later
days. He had manipulated the mysteries of the Infinite so long and so
exhaustively, that he would have seemed more at home among the mediaeval
schoolmen than amidst the working clergy of our own time.

All schools have their great men, for whose advent into life the world is
waiting in dumb expectancy. In due time the world seizes upon these
wondrous youth, opens the shell of their possibilities like the valves of
an oyster, swallows them at a gulp, and they are for the most part heard
of no more. We had two great men, grown up both of them. Which was the
more awful intellectual power to be launched upon society, we debated.
Time cut the knot in his rude fashion by taking one away early, and
padding the other with prosperity so that his course was comparatively
noiseless and ineffective. We had our societies, too; one in particular,
"The Social Fraternity," the dread secrets of which I am under a lifelong
obligation never to reveal. The fate of William Morgan, which the
community learned not long after this time, reminds me of the danger of
the ground upon which I am treading.

There were various distractions to make the time not passed in study a
season of relief. One good lady, I was told, was in the habit of asking
students to her house on Saturday afternoons and praying with and for
them. Bodily exercise was not, however, entirely superseded by spiritual
exercises, and a rudimentary form of base-ball and the heroic sport of
football were followed with some spirit.

A slight immature boy finds his materials of though and enjoyment in very
shallow and simple sources. Yet a kind of romance gilds for me the sober
tableland of that cold New England hill where I came 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 Shawshine was our swimming-school, and the great Merrimack,
the right arm of four toiling cities, was within reach of a morning
stroll. At home we had the small imp to make us laugh at his enormities,
for he spared nothing in his talk, and was the drollest little living
protest against the prevailing solemnities of the locality. It did not
take much to please us, I suspect, and it is a blessing that this is apt
to be so with young people. What else could have made us think it great
sport to leave our warm beds in the middle of winter and "camp out,"--on
the floor of our room,--with blankets disposed tent-wise, except the fact
that to a boy a new discomfort in place of an old comfort is often a
luxury.

More exciting occupation than any of these was to watch one of the
preceptors to see if he would not drop dead while he was praying. He had
a dream one night that he should, and looked upon it as a warning, and
told it round very seriously, and asked the boys to come and visit him in
turn, as one whom they were soon to lose. 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
the hope, of seeing the lion bite his head off sooner or later.

Let me not forget to recall the interesting visit to Haverhill with my
room-mate, and how he led me to the mighty bridge over the Merrimack
which defied the ice-rafts of the river; and to the old meetinghouse,
where, in its porch, I saw the door of the ancient parsonage, with the
bullet-hole in it through which Benjamin Rolfe, the minister, was shot by
the Indians on the 29th of August, 1708. What a vision it was 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.

My literary performances at Andover, if any reader who may have survived
so far cares to know, included a translation from Virgil, out of which I
remember this couplet, which had the inevitable cockney rhyme of
beginners:

"Thus by the power of Jove's imperial arm
The boiling ocean trembled into calm."

Also a discussion with Master Phinehas Barnes on the case of Mary, Queen
of Scots, which he treated argumentatively and I rhetorically and
sentimentally. My sentences were praised and his conclusions adopted.
Also an Essay, spoken at the great final exhibition, held in the large
hall up-stairs, which hangs oddly enough from the roof, suspended by iron
rods. Subject, Fancy. Treatment, brief but comprehensive, illustrating
the magic power of that brilliant faculty in charming life into
forgetfulness of all the ills that flesh is heir to,--the gift of Heaven
to every condition and every clime, from the captive in his dungeon to
the monarch on his throne; from the burning sands of the desert to the
frozen icebergs of the poles, from--but I forget myself.

This was the last of my coruscations at Andover. I went from the Academy
to Harvard College, and did not visit the sacred hill again for a long
time.

On the last day of August, 1867, not having been at Andover, for many
years, I took the cars at noon, and in an hour or a little more found
myself at the station,--just at the foot of the hill. My first
pilgrimage was to the old elm, which I remembered so well as standing by
the tavern, and of which they used to tell the story that it held, buried
in it by growth, the iron rings put round it in the old time to keep the
Indians from chopping it with their tomahawks. I then began the once
familiar toil of ascending the long declivity. Academic villages seem to
change very slowly. Once in a hundred years the library burns down with
all its books. A new edifice or two may be put up, and a new library
begun in the course of the same century; but these places are poor, for
the most part, and cannot afford to pull down their old barracks.

These sentimental journeys to old haunts must be made alone. The story
of them must be told succinctly. It is like the opium-smoker's showing
you the pipe from which he has just inhaled elysian bliss, empty of the
precious extract which has given him his dream.

I did not care much for the new Academy building on my right, nor for the
new library building on my left. But for these it was surprising to see
how little the scene I remembered in my boyhood had changed. The
Professors' houses looked just as they used to, and the stage-coach
landed its passengers at the Mansion House as of old. The pale brick
seminary buildings were behind me on the left, looking as if "Hollis" and
"Stoughton" had been transplanted from Cambridge,--carried there in the
night by orthodox angels, perhaps, like the Santa Casa. Away to my left
again, but abreast of me, was the bleak, bare old Academy building; and
in front of me stood unchanged the shallow oblong white house where I
lived a year in the days of James Monroe and of John Quincy Adams.