The Poet at the Breakfast Table

O >> Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. >> The Poet at the Breakfast Table


The estate was the third lot of the eighth "Squadron" (whatever that
might be), and in the year 1707 was allotted in the distribution of
undivided lands to "Mr. ffox," the Reverend Jabez Fox of Woburn, it may
be supposed, as it passed from his heirs to the first Jonathan Hastings;
from him to his son, the long remembered College Steward; from him in the
year 1792 to the Reverend Eliphalet Pearson, Professor of Hebrew and
other Oriental languages in Harvard College, whose large personality swam
into my ken when I was looking forward to my teens; from him the
progenitors of my unborn self.

I wonder if there are any such beings nowadays as the great Eliphalet,
with his large features and conversational basso profundo, seemed to me.
His very name had something elephantine about it, and it seemed to me
that the house shook from cellar to garret at his footfall. Some have
pretended that he had Olympian aspirations, and wanted to sit in the seat
of Jove and bear the academic thunderbolt and the aegis inscribed Christo
et Ecclesiae. It is a common weakness enough to wish to find one's self
in an empty saddle; Cotton Mather was miserable all his days, I am
afraid, after that entry in his Diary: "This Day Dr. Sewall was chosen
President, for his Piety."

There is no doubt that the men of the older generation look bigger and
more formidable to the boys whose eyes are turned up at their venerable
countenances than the race which succeeds them, to the same boys grown
older. Everything is twice as large, measured on a three-year-olds
three-foot scale as on a thirty-year-olds six-foot scale; but age
magnifies and aggravates persons out of due proportion. Old people are a
kind of monsters to little folks; mild manifestations of the terrible, it
may be, but still, with their white locks and ridged and grooved
features, which those horrid little eyes exhaust of their details, like
so many microscopes not exactly what human beings ought to be. The
middle-aged and young men have left comparatively faint impressions in my
memory, but how grandly the procession of the old clergymen who filled
our pulpit from time to time, and passed the day under our roof, marches
before my closed eyes! At their head the most venerable David Osgood,
the majestic minister of Medford, with massive front and shaggy
over-shadowing eyebrows; following in the train, mild-eyed John Foster of
Brighton, with the lambent aurora of a smile about his pleasant mouth,
which not even the "Sabbath" could subdue to the true Levitical aspect;
and bulky Charles Steams of Lincoln, author of "The Ladies' Philosophy of
Love. A Poem. 1797" (how I stared at him! he was the first living
person ever pointed out to me as a poet); and Thaddeus Mason Harris of
Dorchester (the same who, a poor youth, trudging along, staff in hand,
being then in a stress of sore need, found all at once that somewhat was
adhering to the end of his stick, which somewhat proved to be a gold ring
of price, bearing the words, "God speed thee, Friend!"), already in
decadence as I remember him, with head slanting forward and downward as
if looking for a place to rest in after his learned labors; and that
other Thaddeus, the old man of West Cambridge, who outwatched the rest so
long after they had gone to sleep in their own churchyards, that it
almost seemed as if he meant to sit up until the morning of the
resurrection; and bringing up the rear, attenuated but vivacious little
Jonathan Homer of Newton, who was, to look upon, a kind of expurgated,
reduced and Americanized copy of Voltaire, but very unlike him in
wickedness or wit. The good-humored junior member of our family always
loved to make him happy by setting him chirruping about Miles Coverdale's
Version, and the Bishop's Bible, and how he wrote to his friend Sir Isaac
(Coffin) about something or other, and how Sir Isaac wrote back that he
was very much pleased with the contents of his letter, and so on about
Sir Isaac, ad libitum,--for the admiral was his old friend, and he was
proud of him. The kindly little old gentleman was a collector of Bibles,
and made himself believe he thought he should publish a learned
Commentary some day or other; but his friends looked for it only in the
Greek Calends,--say on the 31st of April, when that should come round, if
you would modernize the phrase. I recall also one or two exceptional and
infrequent visitors with perfect distinctness: cheerful Elijah Kellogg, a
lively missionary from the region of the Quoddy Indians, with much
hopeful talk about Sock Bason and his tribe; also poor old
Poor-house-Parson Isaac Smith, his head going like a China mandarin, as
he discussed the possibilities of the escape of that distinguished
captive whom he spoke of under the name, if I can reproduce phonetically
its vibrating nasalities of "General Mmbongaparty,"--a name suggestive to
my young imagination of a dangerous, loose-jointed skeleton, threatening
us all like the armed figure of Death in my little New England Primer.

I have mentioned only the names of those whose images come up pleasantly
before me, and I do not mean to say anything which any descendant might
not read smilingly. But there were some of the black-coated gentry whose
aspect was not so agreeable to me. It is very curious to me to look back
on my early likes and dislikes, and see how as a child I was attracted or
repelled by such and such ministers, a good deal, as I found out long
afterwards, according to their theological beliefs. On the whole, I
think the old-fashioned New England divine softening down into
Arminianism was about as agreeable as any of them. And here I may
remark, that a mellowing rigorist is always a much pleasanter object to
contemplate than a tightening liberal, as a cold day warming up to 32
Fahrenheit is much more agreeable than a warm one chilling down to the
same temperature. The least pleasing change is that kind of mental
hemiplegia which now and then attacks the rational side of a man at about
the same period of life when one side of the body is liable to be
palsied, and in fact is, very probably, the same thing as palsy, in
another form. The worst of it is that the subjects of it never seem to
suspect that they are intellectual invalids, stammerers and cripples at
best, but are all the time hitting out at their old friends with the well
arm, and calling them hard names out of their twisted mouths.

It was a real delight to have one of those good, hearty, happy, benignant
old clergymen pass the Sunday, with us, and I can remember some whose
advent made the day feel almost like "Thanksgiving." But now and then
would come along a clerical visitor with a sad face and a wailing voice,
which sounded exactly as if somebody must be lying dead up stairs, who
took no interest in us children, except a painful one, as being in a bad
way with our cheery looks, and did more to unchristianize us with his
woebegone ways than all his sermons were like to accomplish in the other
direction. I remember one in particular, who twitted me so with my
blessings as a Christian child, and whined so to me about the naked black
children who, like the "Little Vulgar Boy," "had n't got no supper and
hadn't got no ma," and hadn't got no Catechism, (how I wished for the
moment I was a little black boy!) that he did more in that one day to
make me a heathen than he had ever done in a month to make a Christian
out of an infant Hottentot. What a debt we owe to our friends of the
left centre, the Brooklyn and the Park Street and the Summer street
ministers; good, wholesome, sound-bodied, one-minded, cheerful-spirited
men, who have taken the place of those wailing poitrinaires with the
bandanna handkerchiefs round their meagre throats and a funeral service
in their forlorn physiognomies! I might have been a minister myself, for
aught I know, if this clergyman had not looked and talked so like an
undertaker.

All this belongs to one of the side-shows, to which I promised those who
would take tickets to the main exhibition should have entrance gratis.
If I were writing a poem you would expect, as a matter of course, that
there would be a digression now and then.

To come back to the old house and its former tenant, the Professor of
Hebrew and other Oriental languages. Fifteen years he lived with his
family under its roof. I never found the slightest trace of him
until a few years ago, when I cleaned and brightened with pious hands
the brass lock of "the study," which had for many years been covered
with a thick coat of paint. On that I found scratched; as with a
nail or fork, the following inscription:

E PE

Only that and nothing more, but the story told itself. Master Edward
Pearson, then about as high as the lock, was disposed to immortalize
himself in monumental brass, and had got so far towards it, when a sudden
interruption, probably a smart box on the ear, cheated him of his fame,
except so far as this poor record may rescue it. Dead long ago. I
remember him well, a grown man, as a visitor at a later period; and, for
some reason, I recall him in the attitude of the Colossus of Rhodes,
standing full before a generous wood-fire, not facing it, but quite the
contrary, a perfect picture of the content afforded by a blazing hearth
contemplated from that point of view, and, as the heat stole through his
person and kindled his emphatic features, seeming to me a pattern of
manly beauty. What a statue gallery of posturing friends we all have in
our memory! The old Professor himself sometimes visited the house after
it had changed hands. Of course, my recollections are not to be wholly
trusted, but I always think I see his likeness in a profile face to be
found among the illustrations of Rees's Cyclopaedia. (See Plates, Vol.
IV., Plate 2, Painting, Diversities of the Human Face, Fig. 4.)

And now let us return to our chief picture. In the days of my earliest
remembrance, a row of tall Lombardy poplars mounted guard on the western
side of the old mansion. Whether, like the cypress, these trees suggest
the idea of the funeral torch or the monumental spire, whether their
tremulous leaves make wits afraid by sympathy with their nervous thrills,
whether the faint balsamic smell of their foliage and their closely
swathed limbs have in them vague hints of dead Pharaohs stiffened in
their cerements, I will guess; but they always seemed to me to give an of
sepulchral sadness to the house before which stood sentries. Not so with
the row of elms which you may see leading up towards the western
entrance. I think the patriarch of them all went over in the great gale
of 1815; I know I used to shake the youngest of them with my hands, stout
as it is now, with a trunk that would defy the bully of Crotona, or the
strong man whose liaison with the Lady Delilah proved so disastrous.

The College plain would be nothing without its elms. As the long hair of
a woman is a glory to her, are these green tresses that bank themselves
against sky in thick clustered masses the ornament and the pride of the
classic green. You know the "Washington elm," or if you do not, you had
better rekindle our patriotism by reading the inscription, which tells
you that under its shadow the great leader first drew his sword at the
head of an American army. In a line with that you may see two others:
the coral fan, as I always called it from its resemblance in form to that
beautiful marine growth, and a third a little farther along. I have
heard it said that all three were planted at the same time, and that the
difference of their growth is due to the slope of the ground,--the
Washington elm being lower than either of the others. There is a row of
elms just in front of the old house on the south. When I was a child the
one at the southwest corner was struck by lightning, and one of its limbs
and a long ribbon of bark torn away. The tree never fully recovered its
symmetry and vigor, and forty years and more afterwards a second
thunderbolt crashed upon it and set its heart on fire, like those of the
lost souls in the Hall of Eblis. Heaven had twice blasted it, and the
axe finished what the lightning had begun.

The soil of the University town is divided into patches of sandy and of
clayey ground. The Common and the College green, near which the old
house stands, are on one of the sandy patches. Four curses are the local
inheritance: droughts, dust, mud, and canker-worms. I cannot but think
that all the characters of a region help to modify the children born in
it. I am fond of making apologies for human nature, and I think I could
find an excuse for myself if I, too, were dry and barren and muddy-witted
and "cantankerous,"--disposed to get my back up, like those other natives
of the soil.

I know this, that the way Mother Earth treats a boy shapes out a kind of
natural theology for him. I fell into Manichean ways of thinking from
the teaching of my garden experiences. Like other boys in the country, I
had my patch of ground, to which, in the spring-time, I entrusted the
seeds furnished me, with a confident trust in their resurrection and
glorification in the better world of summer. But I soon found that my
lines had fallen in a place where a vegetable growth had to run the
gauntlet of as many foes and dials as a Christian pilgrim. Flowers would
not Blow; daffodils perished like criminals in their cone demned caps,
without their petals ever seeing daylight; roses were disfigured with
monstrous protrusions through their very centres,--something that looked
like a second bud pushing through the middle of the corolla; lettuces and
cabbages would not head; radishes knotted themselves until they looked
like centenerians' fingers; and on every stem, on every leaf, and both
sides of it, and at the root of everything that dew, was a professional
specialist in the shape of grub, caterpillar, aphis, or other expert,
whose business it was to devour that particular part, and help order the
whole attempt at vegetation. Such experiences must influence a child
born to them. A sandy soil, where nothing flourishes but weeds and evil
beasts of small dimensions, must breed different qualities in its human
offspring from one of those fat and fertile spots which the wit whom I
have once before noted described so happily that, if I quoted the
passage, its brilliancy would spoil one of my pages, as a diamond
breastpin sometimes kills the social effect of the wearer, who might have
passed for a gentleman without it. Your arid patch of earth should seem
to the natural birthplace of the leaner virtues and the abler vices,--of
temperance and the domestic proprieties on the one hand, with a tendency
to light weights in groceries and provisions, and to clandestine
abstraction from the person on the other, as opposed to the free
hospitality, the broadly planned burglaries, and the largely conceived
homicides of our rich Western alluvial regions. Yet Nature is never
wholly unkind. Economical as she was in my unparadised Eden, hard as it
was to make some of my floral houris unveil, still the damask roses
sweetened the June breezes, the bladed and plumed flower-de-luces
unfolded their close-wrapped cones, and larkspurs and lupins, lady's
delights,--plebeian manifestations of the pansy,--self-sowing marigolds,
hollyhocks, the forest flowers of two seasons, and the perennial lilacs
and syringas,--all whispered to' the winds blowing over them that some
caressing presence was around me.

Beyond the garden was "the field," a vast domain of four acres or
thereabout, by the measurement of after years, bordered to the north by a
fathomless chasm,--the ditch the base-ball players of the present era
jump over; on the east by unexplored territory; on the south by a barren
enclosure, where the red sorrel proclaimed liberty and equality under its
drapeau rouge, and succeeded in establishing a vegetable commune where
all were alike, poor, mean, sour, and uninteresting; and on the west by
the Common, not then disgraced by jealous enclosures, which make it look
like a cattle-market. Beyond, as I looked round, were the Colleges, the
meeting-house, the little square market-house, long vanished; the
burial-ground where the dead Presidents stretched their weary bones under
epitaphs stretched out at as full length as their subjects; the pretty
church where the gouty Tories used to kneel on their hassocks; the
district schoolhouse, and hard by it Ma'am Hancock's cottage, never so
called in those days, but rather "tenfooter"; then houses scattered near
and far, open spaces, the shadowy elms, round hilltops in the distance,
and over all the great bowl of the sky. Mind you, this was the WORLD, as
I first knew it; terra veteribus cognita, as Mr. Arrowsmith would have
called it, if he had mapped the universe of my infancy:

But I am forgetting the old house again in the landscape. The worst of a
modern stylish mansion is, that it has no place for ghosts. I watched
one building not long since. It had no proper garret, to begin with,
only a sealed interval between the roof and attics, where a spirit could
not be accommodated, unless it were flattened out like Ravel, Brother,
after the millstone had fallen on him. There was not a nook or a corner
in the whole horse fit to lodge any respectable ghost, for every part was
as open to observation as a literary man's character and condition, his
figure and estate, his coat and his countenance, are to his (or her)
Bohemian Majesty on a tour of inspection through his (or her) subjects'
keyholes.

Now the old house had wainscots, behind which the mice were always
scampering and squeaking and rattling down the plaster, and enacting
family scenes and parlor theatricals. It had a cellar where the cold
slug clung to the walls, and the misanthropic spider withdrew from the
garish day; where the green mould loved to grow, and the long white
potato-shoots went feeling along the floor, if haply they might find the
daylight; it had great brick pillars, always in a cold sweat with holding
up the burden they had been aching under day and night far a century and
more; it had sepulchral arches closed by rough doors that hung on hinges
rotten with rust, behind which doors, if there was not a heap of bones
connected with a mysterious disappearance of long ago, there well might
have been, for it was just the place to look for them. It had a garret;
very nearly such a one as it seems to me one of us has described in one
of his books; but let us look at this one as I can reproduce it from
memory. It has a flooring of laths with ridges of mortar squeezed up
between them, which if you tread on you will go to--the Lord have mercy
on you! where will you go to?--the same being crossed by narrow bridges
of boards, on which you may put your feet, but with fear and trembling.
Above you and around you are beams and joists, on some of which you may
see, when the light is let in, the marks of the conchoidal clippings of
the broadaxe, showing the rude way in which the timber was shaped as it
came, full of sap, from the neighboring forest. It is a realm of
darkness and thick dust, and shroud-like cobwebs and dead things they
wrap in their gray folds. For a garret is like a seashore, where wrecks
are thrown up and slowly go to pieces. There is the cradle which the old
man you just remember was rocked in; there is the ruin of the bedstead he
died on; that ugly slanting contrivance used to be put under his pillow
in the days when his breath came hard; there is his old chair with both
arms gone, symbol of the desolate time when he had nothing earthly left
to lean on; there is the large wooden reel which the blear-eyed old
deacon sent the minister's lady, who thanked him graciously, and twirled
it smilingly, and in fitting season bowed it out decently to the limbo of
troublesome conveniences. And there are old leather portmanteaus, like
stranded porpoises, their mouths gaping in gaunt hunger for the food with
which they used to be gorged to bulging repletion; and old brass
andirons, waiting until time shall revenge them on their paltry
substitutes, and they shall have their own again, and bring with them the
fore-stick and the back-log of ancient days; and the empty churn, with
its idle dasher, which the Nancys and Phoebes, who have left their
comfortable places to the Bridgets and Norahs, used to handle to good
purpose; and the brown, shaky old spinning-wheel, which was running, it
may be, in the days when they were hinging the Salem witches.

Under the dark and haunted garret were attic chambers which themselves
had histories. On a pane in the northeastern chamber may be read these
names:

"John Tracy," "Robert Roberts," "Thomas Prince;" "Stultus" another hand
had added. When I found these names a few years ago (wrong side up, for
the window had been reversed), I looked at once in the Triennial to find
them, for the epithet showed that they were probably students. I found
them all under the years 1771 and 1773. Does it please their thin ghosts
thus to be dragged to the light of day? Has "Stultus" forgiven the
indignity of being thus characterized?

The southeast chamber was the Library Hospital. Every scholar should
have a book infirmary attached his library. There should find a
peaceable refuge the many books, invalids from their birth, which are
sent "with the best regards of the Author"; the respected, but
unpresentable cripples which have lost cover; the odd volumes of honored
sets which go mourning all their days for their lost brother; the
school-books which have been so often the subjects of assault and
battery, that they look as if the police must know them by heart; these
and still more the pictured story-books, beginning with Mother Goose
(which a dear old friend of mine has just been amusing his philosophic
leisure with turning most ingeniously and happily into the tongues of
Virgil and Homer), will be precious mementos by and by, when children and
grandchildren come along. What would I not give for that dear little
paper-bound quarto, in large and most legible type, on certain pages of
which the tender hand that was the shield of my infancy had crossed out
with deep black marks something awful, probably about BEARS, such as once
tare two-and-forty of us little folks for making faces, and the very name
of which made us hide our heads under the bedclothes.

I made strange acquaintances in that book infirmary up in the southeast
attic. The "Negro Plot" at New York helped to implant a feeling in me
which it took Mr. Garrison a good many years to root out. "Thinks I to
Myself," an old novel, which has been attributed to a famous statesman,
introduced me to a world of fiction which was not represented on the
shelves of the library proper, unless perhaps by Coelebs in Search of a
Wife, or allegories of the bitter tonic class, as the young doctor that
sits on the other side of the table would probably call them. I always,
from an early age, had a keen eye for a story with a moral sticking out
of it, and gave it a wide berth, though in my later years I have myself
written a couple of "medicated novels," as one of my dearest and
pleasantest old friends wickedly called them, when somebody asked her if
she had read the last of my printed performances. I forgave the satire
for the charming esprit of the epithet. Besides the works I have
mentioned, there was an old, old Latin alchemy book, with the manuscript
annotations of some ancient Rosicrucian, in the pages of which I had a
vague notion that I might find the mighty secret of the Lapis
Philosophorum, otherwise called Chaos, the Dragon, the Green Lion, the
Quinta Essentia, the Soap of Sages, the Vinegar of Philosophers, the Dew
of Heavenly Grace, the Egg, the Old Man, the Sun, the Moon, and by all
manner of odd aliases, as I am assured by the plethoric little book
before me, in parchment covers browned like a meerschaum with the smoke
of furnaces and the thumbing of dead gold seekers, and the fingering of
bony-handed book-misers, and the long intervals of dusty slumber on the
shelves of the bouquiniste; for next year it will be three centuries old,
and it had already seen nine generations of men when I caught its eye
(Alchemiae Doctrina) and recognized it at pistol-shot distance as a
prize, among the breviaries and Heures and trumpery volumes of the old
open-air dealer who exposed his treasures under the shadow of St.
Sulpice. I have never lost my taste for alchemy since I first got hold
of the Palladium Spagyricum of Peter John Faber, and sought--in vain, it
is true--through its pages for a clear, intelligible, and practical
statement of how I could turn my lead sinkers and the weights of tall
kitchen clock into good yellow gold, specific gravity 19.2, and
exchangeable for whatever I then wanted, and for many more things than I
was then aware of. One of the greatest pleasures of childhood found in
the mysteries which it hides from the skepticism of the elders, and works
up into small mythologies of its own. I have seen all this played over
again in adult life,--the same delightful bewilderment semi-emotional
belief in listening to the gaseous praises of this or that fantastic
system, that I found in the pleasing mirages conjured up for me by the
ragged old volume I used to pore over in the southeast attic-chamber.