The Complete PG Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

O >> Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist) >> The Complete PG Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.


Cato is the chief speaker in the dialogue. A good deal of it is
what would be called in vulgar phrase "slow." It unpacks and
unfolds incidental illustrations which a modern writer would look
at the back of, and toss each to its pigeon-hole. I think ancient
classics and ancient people are alike in the tendency to this kind
of expansion.

An old doctor came to me once (this is literal fact) with some
contrivance or other for people with broken kneepans. As the
patient would be confined for a good while, he might find it dull
work to sit with his hands in his lap. Reading, the ingenious
inventor suggested, would be an agreeable mode of passing the time.
He mentioned, in his written account of his contrivance, various
works that might amuse the weary hour. I remember only three,--Don
Quixote, Tom Jones, and WATTS ON THE MIND.

It is not generally understood that Cicero's essay was delivered as
a lyceum lecture, (concio popularis,) at the Temple of Mercury.
The journals (papyri) of the day ("Tempora Quotidiana,"--"Tribuinus
Quirinalis,"--"Praeco Romanus," and the rest) gave abstracts of it,
one of which I have translated and modernized, as being a
substitute for the analysis I intended to make.

IV. Kal. Mart. . . . .

The lecture at the Temple of Mercury, last evening, was well
attended by the elite of our great city. Two hundred thousand
sestertia were thought to have been represented in the house. The
doors were besieged by a mob of shabby fellows, (illotum vulgus,)
who were at length quieted after two or three had been somewhat
roughly handled (gladio jugulati). The speaker was the well-known
Mark Tully, Eq.,--the subject Old Age. Mr. T. has a lean and
scraggy person, with a very unpleasant excrescence upon his nasal
feature, from which his nickname of CHICK-PEA (Cicero) is said by
some to be derived. As a lecturer is public property, we may
remark, that his outer garment (toga) was of cheap stuff and
somewhat worn, and that his general style and appearance of dress
and manner (habitus, vestitusque) were somewhat provincial.

The lecture consisted of an imaginary dialogue between Cato and
Laelius. We found the first portion rather heavy, and retired a
few moments for refreshment (pocula quaedam vini).--All want to
reach old age, says Cato, and grumble when they get it; therefore
they are donkeys.--The lecturer will allow us to say that he is the
donkey; we know we shall grumble at old age, but we want to live
through youth and manhood, IN SPITE of the troubles we shall groan
over.--There was considerable prosing as to what old age can do and
can't.--True, but not new. Certainly, old folks can't jump,--break
the necks of their thigh-bones, (femorum cervices,) if they do;
can't crack nuts with their teeth; can't climb a greased pole
(malum inunctum scandere non possunt); but they can tell old
stories and give you good advice; if they know what you have made
up your mind to do when you ask them.--All this is well enough, but
won't set the Tiber on fire (Tiberim accendere nequaquam potest.)

There were some clever things enough, (dicta hand inepta,) a few of
which are worth reporting.--Old people are accused of being
forgetful; but they never forget where they have put their money.
--Nobody is so old he doesn't think he can live a year.--The lecturer
quoted an ancient maxim,--Grow old early, if you would be old
long,--but disputed it.--Authority, he thought, was the chief
privilege of age.--It is not great to have money, but fine to
govern those that have it.--Old age begins at FORTY-SIX years,
according to the common opinion.--It is not every kind of old age
or of wine that grows sour with time.--Some excellent remarks were
made on immortality, but mainly borrowed from and credited to
Plato.--Several pleasing anecdotes were told.--Old Milo, champion
of the heavy weights in his day, looked at his arms and whimpered,
"They are dead." Not so dead as you, you old fool,--says Cato;
--you never were good for anything but for your shoulders and
flanks.--Pisistratus asked Solon what made him dare to be so
obstinate. Old age, said Solon.

The lecture was on the whole acceptable, and a credit to our
culture and civilization.--The reporter goes on to state that there
will be no lecture next week, on account of the expected combat
between the bear and the barbarian. Betting (sponsio) two to one
(duo ad unum) on the bear.


--After all, the most encouraging things I find in the treatise,
"De Senectute," are the stories of men who have found new
occupations when growing old, or kept up their common pursuits in
the extreme period of life. Cato learned Greek when he was old,
and speaks of wishing to learn the fiddle, or some such instrument,
(fidibus,) after the example of Socrates. Solon learned something
new, every day, in his old age, as he gloried to proclaim. Cyrus
pointed out with pride and pleasure the trees he had planted with
his own hand. [I remember a pillar on the Duke of Northumberland's
estate at Alnwick, with an inscription in similar words, if not the
same. That, like other country pleasures, never wears out. None
is too rich, none too poor, none too young, none too old to enjoy
it.] There is a New England story I have heard more to the point,
however, than any of Cicero's. A young farmer was urged to set out
some apple-trees.--No, said he, they are too long growing, and I
don't want to plant for other people. The young farmer's father
was spoken to about it, but he, with better reason, alleged that
apple-trees were slow and life was fleeting. At last some one
mentioned it to the old grandfather of the young farmer. He had
nothing else to do,--so he stuck in some trees. He lived long
enough to drink barrels of cider made from the apples that grew on
those trees.

As for myself, after visiting a friend lately,--[Do remember all
the time that this is the Professor's paper.]--I satisfied myself
that I had better concede the fact that--my contemporaries are not
so young as they have been,--and that,--awkward as it is,--science
and history agree in telling me that I can claim the immunities and
must own the humiliations of the early stage of senility. Ah! but
we have all gone down the hill together. The dandies of my time
have split their waistbands and taken to high-low shoes. The
beauties of my recollections--where are they? They have run the
gantlet of the years as well as I. First the years pelted them
with red roses till their cheeks were all on fire. By and by they
began throwing white roses, and that morning flush passed away. At
last one of the years threw a snow-ball, and after that no year let
the poor girls pass without throwing snow-balls. And then came
rougher missiles,--ice and stones; and from time to time an arrow
whistled, and down went one of the poor girls. So there are but
few left; and we don't call those few GIRLS, but--

Ah, me! Here am I groaning just as the old Greek sighed Ai, ai!
and the old Roman, Eheu! I have no doubt we should die of shame
and grief at the indignities offered us by age, if it were not that
we see so many others as badly or worse off than ourselves. We
always compare ourselves with our contemporaries.

[I was interrupted in my reading just here. Before I began at the
next breakfast, I read them these verses;--I hope you will like
them, and get a useful lesson from them.]


THE LAST BLOSSOM.


Though young no more, we still would dream
Of beauty's dear deluding wiles;
The leagues of life to graybeards seem
Shorter than boyhood's lingering miles.

Who knows a woman's wild caprice?
It played with Goethe's silvered hair,
And many a Holy Father's "niece"
Has softly smoothed the papal chair.

When sixty bids us sigh in vain
To melt the heart of sweet sixteen,
We think upon those ladies twain
Who loved so well the tough old Dean.

We see the Patriarch's wintry face,
The maid of Egypt's dusky glow,
And dream that Youth and Age embrace,
As April violets fill with snow.

Tranced in her Lord's Olympian smile
His lotus-loving Memphian lies,--
The musky daughter of the Nile
With plaited hair and almond eyes.

Might we but share one wild caress
Ere life's autumnal blossoms fall,
And Earth's brown, clinging lips impress
The long cold kiss that waits us all!

My bosom heaves, remembering yet
The morning of that blissful day
When Rose, the flower of spring, I met,
And gave my raptured soul away.

Flung from her eyes of purest blue,
A lasso, with its leaping chain
Light as a loop of larkspurs, flew
O'er sense and spirit, heart and brain.

Thou com'st to cheer my waning age,
Sweet vision, waited for so long!
Dove that would seek the poet's cage
Lured by the magic breath of song!

She blushes! Ah, reluctant maid,
Love's drapeau rouge the truth has told!
O'er girlhood's yielding barricade
Floats the great Leveller's crimson fold!

Come to my arms!--love heeds not years
No frost the bud of passion knows.--
Ha! what is this my frenzy hears?
A voice behind me uttered,--Rose!

Sweet was her smile,--but not for me;
Alas, when woman looks TOO kind,
Just turn your foolish head and see,--
Some youth is walking close behind!


As to GIVING UP because the almanac or the Family-Bible says that
it is about time to do it, I have no intention of doing any such
thing. I grant you that I burn less carbon than some years ago. I
see people of my standing really good for nothing, decrepit,
effete, la levre inferieure deja pendante, with what little life
they have left mainly concentrated in their epigastrium. But as
the disease of old age is epidemic, endemic, and sporadic, and
everybody that lives long enough is sure to catch it, I am going to
say, for the encouragement of such as need it, how I treat the
malady in my own case.

First. As I feel, that, when I have anything to do, there is less
time for it than when I was younger, I find that I give my
attention more thoroughly, and use my time more economically than
ever before; so that I can learn anything twice as easily as in my
earlier days. I am not, therefore, afraid to attack a new study.
I took up a difficult language a very few years ago with good
success, and think of mathematics and metaphysics by-and-by.

Secondly. I have opened my eyes to a good many neglected
privileges and pleasures within my reach, and requiring only a
little courage to enjoy them. You may well suppose it pleased me
to find that old Cato was thinking of learning to play the fiddle,
when I had deliberately taken it up in my old age, and satisfied
myself that I could get much comfort, if not much music, out of it.

Thirdly. I have found that some of those active exercises, which
are commonly thought to belong to young folks only, may be enjoyed
at a much later period.

A young friend has lately written an admirable article in one of
the journals, entitled, "Saints and their Bodies." Approving of
his general doctrines, and grateful for his records of personal
experience, I cannot refuse to add my own experimental confirmation
of his eulogy of one particular form of active exercise and
amusement, namely, BOATING. For the past nine years, I have rowed
about, during a good part of the summer, on fresh or salt water.
My present fleet on the river Charles consists of three row-boats.
1. A small flat-bottomed skiff of the shape of a flat-iron, kept
mainly to lend to boys. 2. A fancy "dory" for two pairs of sculls,
in which I sometimes go out with my young folks. 3. My own
particular water-sulky, a "skeleton" or "shell" race-boat,
twenty-two feet long, with huge outriggers, which boat I pull with
ten-foot sculls,--alone, of course, as it holds but one, and tips him
out, if he doesn't mind what he is about. In this I glide around
the Back Bay, down the stream, up the Charles to Cambridge and
Watertown, up the Mystic, round the wharves, in the wake of
steamboats which leave a swell after them delightful to rock upon;
I linger under the bridges,--those "caterpillar bridges," as my
brother professor so happily called them; rub against the black
sides of old wood-schooners; cool down under the overhanging stern
of some tall Indiaman; stretch across to the Navy-Yard, where the
sentinel warns me off from the Ohio,--just as if I should hurt her
by lying in her shadow; then strike out into the harbor, where the
water gets clear and the air smells of the ocean,--till all at once
I remember, that, if a west wind blows up of a sudden, I shall
drift along past the islands, out of sight of the dear old
State-house,--plate, tumbler, knife and fork all waiting at home,
but no chair drawn up at the table,--all the dear people waiting,
waiting, waiting, while the boat is sliding, sliding, sliding into
the great desert, where there is no tree and no fountain. As I don't
want my wreck to be washed up on one of the beaches in company with
devil's-aprons, bladder-weeds, dead horse-shoes, and bleached
crab-shells, I turn about and flap my long narrow wings for home.
When the tide is running out swiftly, I have a splendid fight to get
through the bridges, but always make it a rule to beat,--though I
have been jammed up into pretty tight places at times, and was caught
once between a vessel swinging round and the pier, until our bones
(the boat's, that is) cracked as if we had been in the jaws of
Behemoth. Then back to my moorings at the foot of the Common, off
with the rowing-dress, dash under the green translucent wave, return
to the garb of civilization, walk through my Garden, take a look at
my elms on the Common, and, reaching my habitat, in consideration of
my advanced period of life, indulge in the Elysian abandonment of a
huge recumbent chair.

When I have established a pair of well-pronounced feathering-
calluses on my thumbs, when I am in training so that I can do my
fifteen miles at a stretch without coming to grief in any way, when
I can perform my mile in eight minutes or a little less, then I
feel as if I had old Time's head in chancery, and could give it to
him at my leisure.

I do not deny the attraction of walking. I have bored this ancient
city through and through in my daily travels, until I know it as an
old inhabitant of a Cheshire knows his cheese. Why, it was I who,
in the course of these rambles, discovered that remarkable avenue
called Myrtle Street, stretching in one long line from east of the
Reservoir to a precipitous and rudely paved cliff which looks down
on the grim abode of Science, and beyond it to the far hills; a
promenade so delicious in its repose, so cheerfully varied with
glimpses down the northern slope into busy Cambridge Street with
its iron river of the horse-railroad, and wheeled barges gliding
back and forward over it,--so delightfully closing at its western
extremity in sunny courts and passages where I know peace, and
beauty, and virtue, and serene old age must be perpetual tenants,
--so alluring to all who desire to take their daily stroll, in the
words of Dr. Watts,--

"Alike unknowing and unknown,"--

that nothing but a sense of duty would have prompted me to reveal
the secret of its existence. I concede, therefore, that walking is
an immeasurably fine invention, of which old age ought constantly
to avail itself.

Saddle-leather is in some respects even preferable to sole-leather.
The principal objection to it is of a financial character. But you
may be sure that Bacon and Sydenham did not recommend it for
nothing. One's hepar, or, in vulgar language, liver,--a ponderous
organ, weighing some three or four pounds,--goes up and down like
the dasher of a churn in the midst of the other vital arrangements,
at every step of a trotting horse. The brains also are shaken up
like coppers in a money-box. Riding is good, for those that are
born with a silver-mounted bridle in their hand, and can ride as
much and as often as they like, without thinking all the time they
hear that steady grinding sound as the horse's jaws triturate with
calm lateral movement the bank-bills and promises to pay upon which
it is notorious that the profligate animal in question feeds day
and night.

Instead, however, of considering these kinds of exercise in this
empirical way, I will devote a brief space to an examination of
them in a more scientific form.

The pleasure of exercise is due first to a purely physical
impression, and secondly to a sense of power in action. The first
source of pleasure varies of course with our condition and the
state of the surrounding circumstances; the second with the amount
and kind of power, and the extent and kind of action. In all forms
of active exercise there are three powers simultaneously in
action,--the will, the muscles, and the intellect. Each of these
predominates in different kinds of exercise. In walking, the will
and muscles are so accustomed to work together and perform their
task with so little expenditure of force, that the intellect is
left comparatively free. The mental pleasure in walking, as such,
is in the sense of power over all our moving machinery. But in
riding, I have the additional pleasure of governing another will,
and my muscles extend to the tips of the animal's ears and to his
four hoofs, instead of stopping at my hands and feet. Now in this
extension of my volition and my physical frame into another animal,
my tyrannical instincts and my desire for heroic strength are at
once gratified. When the horse ceases to have a will of his own
and his muscles require no special attention on your part, then you
may live on horseback as Wesley did, and write sermons or take
naps, as you like. But you will observe, that, in riding on
horseback, you always have a feeling, that, after all, it is not
you that do the work, but the animal, and this prevents the
satisfaction from being complete.

Now let us look at the conditions of rowing. I won't suppose you
to be disgracing yourself in one of those miserable tubs, tugging
in which is to rowing the true boat what riding a cow is to
bestriding an Arab. You know the Esquimaux kayak, (if that is the
name of it,) don't you? Look at that model of one over my door.
Sharp, rather?--On the contrary, it is a lubber to the one you and
I must have; a Dutch fish-wife to Psyche, contrasted with what I
will tell you about.--Our boat, then, is something of the shape of
a pickerel, as you look down upon his back, he lying in the
sunshine just where the sharp edge of the water cuts in among the
lily-pads. It is a kind of a giant pod, as one may say,--tight
everywhere, except in a little place in the middle, where you sit.
Its length is from seven to ten yards, and as it is only from
sixteen to thirty inches wide in its widest part, you understand
why you want those "outriggers," or projecting iron frames with the
rowlocks in which the oars play. My rowlocks are five feet apart;
double the greatest width of the boat.

Here you are, then, afloat with a body a rod and a half long, with
arms, or wings, as you may choose to call them, stretching more
than twenty feet from tip to tip; every volition of yours extending
as perfectly into them as if your spinal cord ran down the centre
strip of your boat, and the nerves of your arms tingled as far as
the broad blades of your oars,--oars of spruce, balanced,
leathered, and ringed under your own special direction. This, in
sober earnest, is the nearest approach to flying that man has ever
made or perhaps ever will make. As the hawk sails without flapping
his pinions, so you drift with the tide when you will, in the most
luxurious form of locomotion indulged to an embodied spirit. But
if your blood wants rousing, turn round that stake in the river,
which you see a mile from here; and when you come in in sixteen
minutes, (if you do, for we are old boys, and not champion
scullers, you remember,) then say if you begin to feel a little
warmed up or not! You can row easily and gently all day, and you
can row yourself blind and black in the face in ten minutes, just
as you like. It has been long agreed that there is no way in which
a man can accomplish so much labor with his muscles as in rowing.
It is in the boat, then, that man finds the largest extension of
his volitional and muscular existence; and yet he may tax both of
them so slightly, in that most delicious of exercises, that he
shall mentally write his sermon, or his poem, or recall the remarks
he has made in company and put them in form for the public, as well
as in his easy-chair.

I dare not publicly name the rare joys, the infinite delights, that
intoxicate me on some sweet June morning, when the river and bay
are smooth as a sheet of beryl-green silk, and I run along ripping
it up with my knife-edged shell of a boat, the rent closing after
me like those wounds of angels which Milton tells of, but the seam
still shining for many a long rood behind me. To lie still over
the Flats, where the waters are shallow, and see the crabs crawling
and the sculpins gliding busily and silently beneath the boat,--to
rustle in through the long harsh grass that leads up some tranquil
creek,--to take shelter from the sunbeams under one of the
thousand-footed bridges, and look down its interminable colonnades,
crusted with green and oozy growths, studded with minute barnacles,
and belted with rings of dark muscles, while overhead streams and
thunders that other river whose every wave is a human soul flowing
to eternity as the river below flows to the ocean,--lying there
moored unseen, in loneliness so profound that the columns of Tadmor
in the Desert could not seem more remote from life,--the cool
breeze on one's forehead, the stream whispering against the
half-sunken pillars,--why should I tell of these things, that I
should live to see my beloved haunts invaded and the waves blackened
with boats as with a swarm of water-beetles? What a city of idiots
we must be not to have covered this glorious bay with gondolas and
wherries, as we have just learned to cover the ice in winter with
skaters!

I am satisfied that such a set of black-coated, stiff-jointed,
soft-muscled, paste-complexioned youth as we can boast in our
Atlantic cities never before sprang from loins of Anglo-Saxon
lineage. Of the females that are the mates of these males I do not
here speak. I preached my sermon from the lay-pulpit on this
matter a good while ago. Of course, if you heard it, you know my
belief is that the total climatic influences here are getting up a
number of new patterns of humanity, some of which are not an
improvement on the old model. Clipper-built, sharp in the bows,
long in the spars, slender to look at, and fast to go, the ship,
which is the great organ of our national life of relation, is but a
reproduction of the typical form which the elements impress upon
its builder. All this we cannot help; but we can make the best of
these influences, such as they are. We have a few good boatmen,
--no good horsemen that I hear of,--I cannot speak for cricketing,
--but as for any great athletic feat performed by a gentleman in
these latitudes, society would drop a man who should run round the
Common in five minutes. Some of our amateur fencers, single-stick
players, and boxers, we have no reason to be ashamed of. Boxing is
rough play, but not too rough for a hearty young fellow. Anything
is better than this white-blooded degeneration to which we all
tend.

I dropped into a gentlemen's sparring exhibition only last evening.
It did my heart good to see that there were a few young and
youngish youths left who could take care of their own heads in case
of emergency. It is a fine sight, that of a gentleman resolving
himself into the primitive constituents of his humanity. Here is a
delicate young man now, with an intellectual countenance, a slight
figure, a sub-pallid complexion, a most unassuming deportment, a
mild adolescent in fact, that any Hiram or Jonathan from between
the ploughtails would of course expect to handle with perfect ease.
Oh, he is taking off his gold-bowed spectacles! Ah, he is
divesting himself of his cravat! Why, he is stripping off his
coat! Well, here he is, sure enough, in a tight silk shirt, and
with two things that look like batter puddings in the place of his
fists. Now see that other fellow with another pair of batter
puddings,--the big one with the broad shoulders; he will certainly
knock the little man's head off, if he strikes him. Feinting,
dodging, stopping, hitting, countering,--little man's head not off
yet. You might as well try to jump upon your own shadow as to hit
the little man's intellectual features. He needn't have taken off
the gold-bowed spectacles at all. Quick, cautious, shifty, nimble,
cool, he catches all the fierce lunges or gets out of their reach,
till his turn comes, and then, whack goes one of the batter
puddings against the big one's ribs, and bang goes the other into
the big one's face, and, staggering, shuffling, slipping, tripping,
collapsing, sprawling, down goes the big one in a miscellaneous
bundle.--If my young friend, whose excellent article I have
referred to, could only introduce the manly art of self-defence
among the clergy, I am satisfied that we should have better sermons
and an infinitely less quarrelsome church-militant. A bout with
the gloves would let off the ill-nature, and cure the indigestion,
which, united, have embroiled their subject in a bitter
controversy. We should then often hear that a point of difference
between an infallible and a heretic, instead of being vehemently
discussed in a series of newspaper articles, had been settled by a
friendly contest in several rounds, at the close of which the
parties shook hands and appeared cordially reconciled.