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.


Respectfully yours,

MYRTLE HAZARD.


The Rev. Mr. Stoker uttered a cry of rage as he finished this awkwardly
written, but tolerably intelligible letter. What could he do about it?
It would hardly do to stab Myrtle Hazard, and shoot Byles Gridley, and
strangle Mrs. Hopkins, every one of which homicides he felt at the moment
that he could have committed. And here he was in a frantic paroxysm, and
the next day was Sunday, and his morning's discourse was unwritten. His
savage mediaeval theology came to his relief, and he clutched out of a
heap of yellow manuscripts his well-worn "convulsion-fit" sermon. He
preached it the next day as if it did his heart good, but Myrtle Hazard
did not hear it, for she had gone to St. Bartholomew's with Olive
Eveleth.




CHAPTER XVII.

SAINT AND SINNER

It happened a little after this time that the minister's invalid wife
improved--somewhat unexpectedly in health, and, as Bathsheba was
beginning to suffer from imprisonment in her sick-chamber, the physician
advised very strongly that she should vary the monotony of her life by
going out of the house daily for fresh air and cheerful companionship.
She was therefore frequently at the house of Olive Eveleth; and as Myrtle
wanted to see young people, and had her own way now as never before, the
three girls often met at the parsonage. Thus they became more and more
intimate, and grew more and more into each other's affections.

These girls presented three types of spiritual character which are to be
found in all our towns and villages. Olive had been carefully trained,
and at the proper age confirmed. Bathsheba had been prayed for, and in
due time startled and converted. Myrtle was a simple daughter of Eve,
with many impulses like those of the other two girls, and some that
required more watching. She was not so safe, perhaps, as either of the
other girls, for this world or the next; but she was on some accounts
more interesting, as being a more genuine representative of that
inexperienced and too easily deluded, yet always cherished, mother of our
race, whom we must after all accept as embodying the creative idea of
woman, and who might have been alive and happy now (though at a great
age) but for a single fatal error.

The Rev. Ambrose Eveleth, Rector of Saint Bartholomew's, Olive's father,
was one of a class numerous in the Anglican Church, a cultivated man,
with pure tastes, with simple habits, a good reader, a neat writer, a
safe thinker, with a snug and well-fenced mental pasturage, which his
sermons kept cropped moderately close without any exhausting demand upon
the soil. Olive had grown insensibly into her religious maturity, as
into her bodily and intellectual developments, which one might suppose
was the natural order of things in a well-regulated Christian--household,
where the children are brought up in the nurture and admonition of the
Lord.

Bathsheba had been worried over and perplexed and depressed with vague
apprehensions about her condition, conveyed in mysterious phrases and
graveyard expressions of countenance, until about the age of fourteen
years, when she had one of those emotional paroxysms very commonly
considered in some Protestant sects as essential to the formation of
religious character. It began with a shivering sense of enormous guilt,
inherited and practised from her earliest infancy. Just as every breath
she ever drew had been malignantly poisoning the air with carbonic acid,
so her every thought and feeling had been tainting the universe with sin.
This spiritual chill or rigor had in due order been followed by the
fever-flush of hope, and that in its turn had ushered in the last stage,
the free opening of all the spiritual pores in the peaceful relaxation of
self-surrender.

Good Christians are made by many very different processes. Bathsheba had
taken her religion after the fashion of her sect; but it was genuine, in
spite of the cavils of the formalists, who could not understand that the
spirit which kept her at her mother's bedside was the same as that which
poured the tears of Mary of Magdala on the feet of her Lord, and led her
forth at early dawn with the other Mary to visit his sepulchre.

Myrtle was a child of nature, and of course, according to the out-worn
formulae which still shame the distorted religion of humanity, hateful to
the Father in Heaven who made her. She had grown up in antagonism with
all that surrounded her. She had been talked to about her corrupt nature
and her sinful heart, until the words had become an offence and an
insult. Bathsheba knew her father's fondness for young company too well
to suppose that his intercourse with Myrtle had gone beyond the
sentimental and poetical stage, and was not displeased when she found
that there was some breach between them. Myrtle herself did not profess
to have passed through the technical stages of the customary spiritual
paroxysm. Still, the gentle daughter of the terrible preacher loved her
and judged her kindly. She was modest enough to think that perhaps the
natural state of some girls might be at least as good as her own after
the spiritual change of which she had been the subject. A manifest
heresy, but not new, nor unamiable, nor inexplicable.

The excellent Bishop Joseph Hall, a painful preacher and solid divine of
Puritan tendencies, declares that he prefers good-nature before grace in
the election of a wife; because, saith he, "it will be a hard Task, where
the Nature is peevish and froward, for Grace to make an entire Conquest
whilst Life lasteth." An opinion apparently entertained by many modern
ecclesiastics, and one which may be considered very encouraging to those
young ladies of the politer circles who have a fancy for marrying bishops
and other fashionable clergymen. Not of course that "grace" is so rare a
gift among the young ladies of the upper social sphere; but they are in
the habit of using the word with a somewhat different meaning from that
which the good Bishop attached to it.




CHAPTER XVIII.

VILLAGE POET.

It was impossible for Myrtle to be frequently at Olive's without often
meeting Olive's brother, and her reappearance with the bloom on her cheek
was a signal which her other admirers were not likely to overlook as a
hint to recommence their flattering demonstrations; and so it was that
she found herself all at once the centre of attraction to three young men
with whom we have made some acquaintance, namely, Cyprian Eveleth, Gifted
Hopkins, and Murray Bradshaw.

When the three girls were together at the house of Olive, it gave Cyprian
a chance to see something of Myrtle in the most natural way. Indeed, they
all became used to meeting him in a brotherly sort of relation; only, as
he was not the brother of two of them, it gave him the inside track, as
the sporting men say, with reference to any rivals for the good-will of
either of these. Of course neither Bathsheba nor Myrtle thought of him
in any other light than as Olive's brother, and would have been surprised
with the manifestation on his part of any other feeling, if it existed.
So he became very nearly as intimate with them as Olive was, and hardly
thought of his intimacy as anything more than friendship, until one day
Myrtle sang some hymns so sweetly that Cyprian dreamed about her that
night; and what young person does not know that the woman or the man once
idealized and glorified in the exalted state of the imagination belonging
to sleep becomes dangerous to the sensibilities in the waking hours that
follow? Yet something drew Cyprian to the gentler and more subdued
nature of Bathsheba, so that he often thought, like a gayer personage
than himself, whose divided affections are famous in song, that he could
have been blessed to share her faithful heart, if Myrtle had not
bewitched him with her unconscious and innocent sorceries. As for poor,
modest Bathsheba, she thought nothing of herself, but was almost as much
fascinated by Myrtle as if she had been one of the sex she was born to
make in love with her.

The first rival Cyprian was to encounter in his admiration of Myrtle
Hazard was Mr. Gifted Hopkins. This young gentleman had the enormous
advantage of that all-subduing accomplishment, the poetical endowment.
No woman, it is pretty generally understood, can resist the youth or man
who addresses her in verse. The thought that she is the object of a
poet's love is one which fills a woman's ambition more completely than
all that wealth or office or social eminence can offer. Do the young
millionnaires and the members of the General Court get letters from
unknown ladies, every day, asking for their autographs and photographs?
Well, then!

Mr. Gifted Hopkins, being a poet, felt that it was so, to the very depth
of his soul. Could he not confer that immortality so dear to the human
heart? Not quite yet, perhaps,--though the "Banner and Oracle" gave him
already "an elevated niche in the Temple of Fame," to quote its own
words,--but in that glorious summer of his genius, of which these spring
blossoms were the promise. It was a most formidable battery, then, which
Cyprian's first rival opened upon the fortress of Myrtle's affections.

His second rival, Mr. William Murray Bradshaw, had made a half-playful
bet with his fair relative, Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, that he would bag a girl
within twelve months of date who should unite three desirable qualities,
specified in the bet, in a higher degree than any one of the five who
were on the matrimonial programme which she had laid out for him,--and
Myrtle was the girl with whom he meant to win the bet. When a young
fellow like him, cool and clever, makes up his mind to bring down his
bird, it is no joke, but a very serious and a tolerably certain piece of
business. Not being made a fool of by any boyish nonsense,--passion and
all that,--he has a great advantage. Many a woman rejects a man because
he is in love with her, and accepts another because he is not. The first
is thinking too much of himself and his emotions,--the other makes a
study of her and her friends, and learns what ropes to pull. But then it
must be remembered that Murray Bradshaw had a poet for his rival, to say
nothing of the brother of a bosom friend.

The qualities of a young poet are so exceptional, and such interesting
objects of study, that a narrative like this can well afford to linger
awhile in the delineation of this most envied of all the forms of genius.
And by contrasting the powers and limitations of two such young persons
as Gifted Hopkins and Cyprian Eveleth, we may better appreciate the
nature of that divine inspiration which gives to poetry the superiority
it claims over every other form of human expression.

Gifted Hopkins had shown an ear for rhythm, and for the simpler forms of
music, from his earliest childhood. He began beating with his heels the
accents of the psalm tunes sung at meeting at a very tender age,--a
habit, indeed, of which he had afterwards to correct himself, as, though
it shows a sensibility to rhythmical impulses like that which is
beautifully illustrated when a circle join hands and emphasize by
vigorous downward movements the leading syllables in the tune of Auld
Lang Syne, yet it is apt to be too expressive when a large number of
boots join in the performance. He showed a remarkable talent for playing
on one of the less complex musical instruments, too limited in compass to
satisfy exacting ears, but affording excellent discipline to those who
wish to write in the simpler metrical forms,--the same which summons the
hero from his repose and stirs his blood in battle.

By the time he was twelve years old he was struck with the pleasing
resemblance of certain vocal sounds which, without being the same, yet
had a curious relation which made them agree marvellously well in
couples; as eyes with skies; as heart with art, also with part and smart;
and so of numerous others, twenty or thirty pairs, perhaps, which number
he considerably increased as he grew older, until he may have had fifty
or more such pairs at his command.

The union of so extensive a catalogue of words which matched each other,
and of an ear so nice that it could tell if there were nine or eleven
syllables in an heroic line, instead of the legitimate ten, constituted a
rare combination of talents in the opinion of those upon whose judgment
he relied. He was naturally led to try his powers in the expression of
some just thought or natural sentiment in the shape of verse, that
wonderful medium of imparting thought and feeling to his fellow-creatures
which a bountiful Providence had made his rare and inestimable endowment.

It was at about this period of his life, that is to say, when he was of
the age of thirteen, or we may perhaps say fourteen years, for we do not
wish to overstate his precocity, that he experienced a sensation so
entirely novel, that, to the best of his belief, it was such as no other
young person had ever known, at least in anything like the same degree.
This extraordinary emotion was brought on by the sight of Myrtle Hazard,
with whom he had never before had any near relations, as they had been at
different schools, and Myrtle was too reserved to be very generally known
among the young people of his age.

Then it was that he broke forth in his virgin effort, "Lines to M----e,"
which were published in the village paper, and were claimed by all
possible girls but the right one; namely, by two Mary Annes, one Minnie,
one Mehitable, and one Marthie, as she saw fit to spell the name borrowed
from her who was troubled about many things.

The success of these lines, which were in that form of verse known to the
hymn-books as "common metre," was such as to convince the youth that,
whatever occupation he might be compelled to follow for a time to obtain
a livelihood or to assist his worthy parent, his true destiny was the
glorious career of a poet. It was a most pleasing circumstance, that his
mother, while she fully recognized the propriety of his being diligent in
the prosaic line of business to which circumstances had called him, was
yet as much convinced as he himself that he was destined to achieve
literary fame. She had read Watts and Select Hymns all through, she
said, and she did n't see but what Gifted could make the verses come out
jest as slick, and the sound of the rhymes jest as pooty, as Izik Watts
or the Selectmen, whoever they was,--she was sure they couldn't be the
selectmen of this town, wherever they belonged. It is pleasant to say
that the young man, though favored by nature with this rarest of talents,
did not forget the humbler duties that Heaven, which dresses few
singing-birds in the golden plumes of fortune, had laid upon him. After
having received a moderate amount of instruction at one of the less
ambitious educational institutions of the town, supplemented, it is true,
by the judicious and gratuitous hints of Master Gridley, the young poet,
in obedience to a feeling which did him the highest credit, relinquished,
at least for the time, the Groves of Academus, and offered his youth at
the shrine of Plutus, that is, left off studying and took to business.
He became what they call a "clerk" in what they call a "store" up in the
huckleberry districts, and kept such accounts as were required by the
business of the establishment. His principal occupation was, however, to
attend to the details of commerce as it was transacted over the counter.
This industry enabled him, to his great praise be it spoken, to assist
his excellent parent, to clothe himself in a becoming manner, so that he
made a really handsome figure on Sundays and was always of presentable
aspect, likewise to purchase a book now and then, and to subscribe for
that leading periodical which furnishes the best models to the youth of
the country in the various modes of composition.

Though Master Gridley was very kind to the young man, he was rather
disposed to check the exuberance of his poetical aspirations. The truth
was, that the old classical scholar did not care a great deal for modern
English poetry. Give him an Ode of Horace, or a scrap from the Greek
Anthology, and he would recite it with great inflation of spirits; but he
did not think very much of "your Keatses, and your Tennysons, and the
whole Hasheesh crazy lot," as he called the dreamily sensuous idealists
who belong to the same century that brought in ether and chloroform. He
rather shook his head at Gifted Hopkins for indulging so largely in
metrical composition.

"Better stick to your ciphering, my young friend," he said to him, one
day. "Figures of speech are all very well, in their way; but if you
undertake to deal much in them, you'll figure down your prospects into a
mighty small sum. There's some danger that it will take all the sense
out of you, if you keep writing verses at this rate. You young
scribblers think any kind of nonsense will do for the public, if it only
has a string of rhymes tacked to it. Cut off the bobs of your kite,
Gifted Hopkins, and see if it does n't pitch, and stagger, and come down
head-foremost. Don't write any stuff with rhyming tails to it that won't
make a decent show for itself after you've chopped all the rhyming tails
off. That's my advice, Gifted Hopkins. Is there any book you would like
to have out of my library? Have you ever read Spenser's Faery Queen?"

He had tried, the young man answered, on the recommendation of Cyprian
Eveleth, but had found it rather hard reading.

Master Gridley lifted his eyebrows very slightly, remembering that some
had called Spenser the poet's poet. "What a pity," he said to himself,
"that this Gifted Hopkins has n't got the brains of that William Murray
Bradshaw! What's the reason, I wonder, that all the little earthen pots
blow their covers off and froth over in rhymes at such a great rate,
while the big iron pots keep their lids on, and do all their simmering
inside?"

That is the way these old pedants will talk, after all their youth and
all their poetry, if they ever had any, are gone. The smiles of woman,
in the mean time, encouraged the young poet to smite the lyre. Fame
beckoned him upward from her templed steep. The rhymes which rose before
him unbidden were as the rounds of Jacob's ladder, on which he would
climb to a heaven of-glory.

Master Gridley threw cold water on the young man's too sanguine
anticipations of success. "All up with the boy, if he's going to take to
rhyming when he ought to be doing up papers of brown sugar and weighing
out pounds of tea. Poor-house,--that 's what it'll end in. Poets, to be
sure! Sausage-makers! Empty skins of old phrases,--stuff 'em with odds
and ends of old thoughts that never were good for anything,--cut 'em up
in lengths and sell'em to fools!

"And if they ain't big fools enough to buy 'em, give'em away; and if you
can't do that, pay folks to take'em. Bah! what a fine style of genius
common-sense is! There's a passage in the book that would fit half these
addle-headed rhymesters. What is that saying of mine about I squinting
brains?"

He took down "Thoughts on the Universe," and read:--

"Of Squinting Brains.

"Where there is one man who squints with his eyes, there are a dozen who
squint with their brains. It is an infirmity in one of the eyes, making
the two unequal in power, that makes men squint. Just so it is an
inequality in the two halves of the brain that makes some men idiots and
others rascals. I knows a fellow whose right half is a genius, but his
other hemisphere belongs to a fool; and I had a friend perfectly honest
on one side, but who was sent to jail because the other had an inveterate
tendency in the direction of picking pockets and appropriating aes
alienum."

All this, talking and reading to himself in his usual fashion.

The poetical faculty which was so freely developed in Gifted Hopkins had
never manifested itself in Cyprian Eveleth, whose look and voice might,
to a stranger, have seemed more likely to imply an imaginative nature.
Cyprian was dark, slender, sensitive, contemplative, a lover of lonely
walks,--one who listened for the whispers of Nature and watched her
shadows, and was alive to the symbolisms she writes over everything. But
Cyprian had never shown the talent or the inclination for writing in
verse.

He was on the pleasantest terms with the young poet, and being somewhat
older, and having had the advantage of academic and college culture,
often gave him useful hints as to the cultivation of his powers, such as
genius frequently requires at the hands of humbler intelligences.
Cyprian was incapable of jealousy; and although the name of Gifted
Hopkins was getting to be known beyond the immediate neighborhood, and
his autograph had been requested by more than one young lady living in
another county, he never thought of envying the young poet's spreading
popularity.

That the poet himself was flattered by these marks of public favor may be
inferred from the growing confidence with which he expressed himself in
his conversations with Cyprian, more especially in one which was held at
the "store" where he officiated as "clerk."

"I become more and more assured, Cyprian," he said, leaning over the
counter, "that I was born to be a poet. I feel it in my marrow. I must
succeed. I must win the laurel of fame. I must taste the sweets of"--

"Molasses," said a bareheaded girl of ten who entered at that moment,
bearing in her hand a cracked pitcher, "ma wants three gills of
molasses."

Gifted Hopkins dropped his subject and took up a tin measure. He served
the little maid with a benignity quite charming to witness, made an entry
on a slate of .08, and resumed the conversation.

"Yes, I am sure of it, Cyprian. The very last piece I wrote was copied
in two papers. It was 'Contemplations in Autumn,' and--don't think I am
too vain--one young lady has told me that it reminded her of Pollok. You
never wrote in verse, did you, Cyprian?"

"I never wrote at all, Gifted, except school and college exercises, and a
letter now and then. Do you find it an easy and pleasant exercise to
make rhymes?"

Pleasant! Poetry is to me a delight and a passion. I never know what I
am going to write when I sit down. And presently the rhymes begin
pounding in my brain,--it seems as if there were a hundred couples of
them, paired like so many dancers,--and then these rhymes seem to take
possession of me, like a surprise party, and bring in all sorts of
beautiful thoughts, and I write and write, and the verses run measuring
themselves out like"--

"Ribbins,--any narrer blue ribbins, Mr. Hopkins? Five eighths of a yard,
if you please, Mr. Hopkins. How's your folks?" Then, in a lower tone,
"Those last verses of yours in the Bannernoracle were sweet pooty."

Gifted Hopkins meted out the five eighths of blue ribbon by the aid of
certain brass nails on the counter. He gave good measure, not prodigal,
for he was loyal to his employer, but putting a very moderate strain on
the ribbon, and letting the thumb-nail slide with a contempt of
infinitesimals which betokened a large soul in its genial mood.

The young lady departed, after casting upon him one of those bewitching
glances which the young poet--let us rather say the poet, without making
odious distinctions--is in the confirmed habit of receiving from dear
woman.

Mr. Gifted Hopkins resumed: "I do not know where this talent, as my
friends call it, of mine, comes from. My father used to carry a chain
for a surveyor sometimes, and there is a ten-foot pole in the house he
used to measure land with. I don't see why that should make me a poet.
My mother was always fond of Dr. Watts's hymns; but so are other young
men's mothers, and yet they don't show poetical genius. But wherever I
got it, it comes as easy to me to write in verse as to write in prose,
almost. Don't you ever feel a longing to send your thoughts forth in
verse, Cyprian?"

"I wish I had a greater facility of expression very often," Cyprian
answered; "but when I have my best thoughts I do not find that I have
words that seem fitting to clothe them. I have imagined a great many
poems, Gifted, but I never wrote a rhyming verse, or verse of any kind.
Did you ever hear Olive play 'Songs without Words'? If you have ever
heard her, you will know what I mean by unrhymed and unversed poetry."

"I am sure I don't know what you mean, Cyprian, by poetry without rhyme
or verse, any more than I should if you talked about pictures that were
painted on nothing, or statues that were made out of nothing. How can
you tell that anything is poetry, I should like to know, if there is
neither a regular line with just so many syllables, nor a rhyme? Of
course you can't. I never have any thoughts too beautiful to put in
verse: nothing can be too beautiful for it."

Cyprian left the conversation at this point. It was getting more
suggestive than interpenetrating, and he thought he might talk the matter
over better with Olive. Just then a little boy came in, and bargained
with Gifted for a Jews-harp, which, having obtained, he placed against
his teeth, and began playing upon it with a pleasure almost equal to that
of the young poet reciting his own verses.