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.


--The divinity-student wished to know what I thought of affinities,
as well as of antipathies; did I believe in love at first sight?

Sir,--said I,--all men love all women. That is the prima-facie
aspect of the case. The Court of Nature assumes the law to be,
that all men do so; and the individual man is bound to show cause
why he does not love any particular woman. A man, says one of my
old black-letter law-books, may show divers good reasons, as thus:
He hath not seen the person named in the indictment; she is of
tender age, or the reverse of that; she hath certain personal
disqualifications,--as, for instance, she is a blackamoor, or hath
an ill-favored countenance; or, his capacity of loving being
limited, his affections are engrossed by a previous comer; and so
of other conditions. Not the less is it true that he is bound by
duty and inclined by nature to love each and every woman.
Therefore it is that each woman virtually summons every man to show
cause why he doth not love her. This is not by written document,
or direct speech, for the most part, but by certain signs of silk,
gold, and other materials, which say to all men,--Look on me and
love, as in duty bound. Then the man pleadeth his special
incapacity, whatsoever that may be,--as, for instance,
impecuniosity, or that he hath one or many wives in his household,
or that he is of mean figure, or small capacity; of which reasons
it may be noted, that the first is, according to late decisions, of
chiefest authority.--So far the old law-book. But there is a note
from an older authority, saying that every woman doth also love
each and every man, except there be some good reason to the
contrary; and a very observing friend of mine, a young unmarried
clergyman, tells me, that, so far as his experience goes, he has
reason to think the ancient author had fact to justify his
statement.

I'll tell you how it is with the pictures of women we fall in love
with at first sight.

--We a'n't talking about pictures,--said the landlady's daughter,
--we're talking about women.

I understood that we were speaking of love at sight,--I remarked,
mildly.--Now, as all a man knows about a woman whom he looks at is
just what a picture as big as a copper, or a "nickel," rather, at
the bottom of his eye can teach him, I think I am right in saying
we are talking about the pictures of women.--Well, now, the reason
why a man is not desperately in love with ten thousand women at
once is just that which prevents all our portraits being distinctly
seen upon that wall. They all ARE painted there by reflection from
our faces, but because ALL of them are painted on each spot, and
each on the same surface, and many other objects at the same time,
no one is seen as a picture. But darken a chamber and let a single
pencil of rays in through a key-hole, then you have a picture on
the wall. We never fall in love with a woman in distinction from
women, until we can get an image of her through a pin-hole; and
then we can see nothing else, and nobody but ourselves can see the
image in our mental camera-obscura.

--My friend, the Poet, tells me he has to leave town whenever the
anniversaries come round.

What's the difficulty?--Why, they all want him to get up and make
speeches, or songs, or toasts; which is just the very thing he
doesn't want to do. He is an old story, he says, and hates to show
on these occasions. But they tease him, and coax him, and can't do
without him, and feel all over his poor weak head until they get
their fingers on the fontanelle, (the Professor will tell you what
this means,--he says the one at the top of the head always remains
open in poets,) until, by gentle pressure on that soft pulsating
spot, they stupefy him to the point of acquiescence.

There are times, though, he says, when it is a pleasure, before
going to some agreeable meeting, to rush out into one's garden and
clutch up a handful of what grows there,--weeds and violets
together,--not cutting them off, but pulling them up by the roots
with the brown earth they grow in sticking to them. That's his
idea of a post-prandial performance. Look here, now. These verses
I am going to read you, he tells me, were pulled up by the roots
just in that way, the other day.--Beautiful entertainment,--names
there on the plates that flow from all English-speaking tongues as
familiarly as AND or THE; entertainers known wherever good poetry
and fair title-pages are held in esteem; guest a kind-hearted,
modest, genial, hopeful poet, who sings to the hearts of his
countrymen, the British people, the songs of good cheer which the
better days to come, as all honest souls trust and believe, will
turn into the prose of common life. My friend, the Poet, says you
must not read such a string of verses too literally. If he trimmed
it nicely below, you wouldn't see the roots, he says, and he likes
to keep them, and a little of the soil clinging to them.

This is the farewell my friend, the Poet, read to his and our
friend, the Poet:-


A GOOD TIME GOING!

Brave singer of the coming time,
Sweet minstrel of the joyous present,
Crowned with the noblest wreath of rhyme,
The holly-leaf of Ayrshire's peasant,
Good-bye! Good-bye!--Our hearts and hands,
Our lips in honest Saxon phrases,
Cry, God be with him, till he stands
His feet among the English daisies!

'Tis here we part;--for other eyes
The busy deck, the flattering streamer,
The dripping arms that plunge and rise,
The waves in foam, the ship in tremor,
The kerchiefs waving from the pier,
The cloudy pillar gliding o'er him,
The deep blue desert, lone and drear,
With heaven above and home before him!

His home!--the Western giant smiles,
And twirls the spotty globe to find it;--
This little speck the British Isles?
'Tis but a freckle,--never mind it!--
He laughs, and all his prairies roll,
Each gurgling cataract roars and chuckles,
And ridges stretched from pole to pole
Heave till they crack their iron knuckles!

But memory blushes at the sneer,
And Honor turns with frown defiant,
And Freedom, leaning on her spear,
Laughs louder than the laughing giant:-
"An islet is a world," she said,
"When glory with its dust has blended,
And Britain kept her noble dead
Till earth and seas and skies are rended!"

Beneath each swinging forest-bough
Some arm as stout in death reposes,--
From wave-washed foot to heaven-kissed brow
Her valor's life-blood runs in roses;
Nay, let our brothers of the West
Write smiling in their florid pages,
One-half her soil has walked the rest
In poets, heroes, martyrs, sages!

Hugged in the clinging billow's clasp,
From sea-weed fringe to mountain heather,
The British oak with rooted grasp
Her slender handful holds together;--
With cliffs of white and bowers of green,
And Ocean narrowing to caress her,
And hills and threaded streams between,--
Our little mother isle, God bless her!

In earth's broad temple where we stand,
Fanned by the eastern gales that brought us,
We hold the missal in our hand,
Bright with the lines our Mother taught us;
Where'er its blazoned page betrays
The glistening links of gilded fetters,
Behold, the half-turned leaf displays
Her rubric stained in crimson letters!

Enough! To speed a parting friend
'Tis vain alike to speak and listen;--
Yet stay,--these feeble accents blend
With rays of light from eyes that glisten.
Good-bye! once more,--and kindly tell
In words of peace the young world's story,--
And say, besides,--we love too well
Our mother's soil, our father's glory!

When my friend, the Professor, found that my friend, the Poet, had
been coming out in this full-blown style, he got a little excited,
as you may have seen a canary, sometimes, when another strikes up.
The Professor says he knows he can lecture, and thinks he can write
verses. At any rate, he has often tried, and now he was determined
to try again. So when some professional friends of his called him
up, one day, after a feast of reason and a regular "freshet" of
soul which had lasted two or three hours, he read them these
verses. He introduced them with a few remarks, he told me, of
which the only one he remembered was this: that he had rather
write a single line which one among them should think worth
remembering than set them all laughing with a string of epigrams.
It was all right, I don't doubt; at any rate, that was his fancy
then, and perhaps another time he may be obstinately hilarious;
however, it may be that he is growing graver, for time is a fact so
long as clocks and watches continue to go, and a cat can't be a
kitten always, as the old gentleman opposite said the other day.

You must listen to this seriously, for I think the Professor was
very much in earnest when he wrote it.


THE TWO ARMIES.

As Life's unending column pours,
Two marshalled hosts are seen,--
Two armies on the trampled shores
That Death flows black between.

One marches to the drum-beat's roll,
The wide-mouthed clarion's bray,
And bears upon a crimson scroll,
"Our glory is to slay."

One moves in silence by the stream,
With sad, yet watchful eyes,
Calm as the patient planet's gleam
That walks the clouded skies.

Along its front no sabres shine,
No blood-red pennons wave;
Its banner bears the single line,
"Our duty is to save."

For those no death-bed's lingering shade;
At Honor's trumpet-call,
With knitted brow and lifted blade
In Glory's arms they fall.

For these no clashing falchions bright,
No stirring battle-cry;
The bloodless stabber calls by night,--
Each answers, "Here am I!"

For those the sculptor's laurelled bust,
The builder's marble piles,
The anthems pealing o'er their dust
Through long cathedral aisles.

For these the blossom-sprinkled turf
That floods the lonely graves,
When Spring rolls in her sea-green surf
In flowery-foaming waves.

Two paths lead upward from below,
And angels wait above,
Who count each burning life-drop's flow,
Each falling tear of Love.

Though from the Hero's bleeding breast
Her pulses Freedom drew,
Though the white lilies in her crest
Sprang from that scarlet dew,--

While Valor's haughty champions wait
Till all their scars are shown,
Love walks unchallenged through the gate,
To sit beside the Throne!



CHAPTER X



[The schoolmistress came down with a rose in her hair,--a fresh
June rose. She has been walking early; she has brought back two
others,--one on each cheek.

I told her so, in some such pretty phrase as I could muster for the
occasion. Those two blush-roses I just spoke of turned into a
couple of damasks. I suppose all this went through my mind, for
this was what I went on to say:-]

I love the damask rose best of all. The flowers our mothers and
sisters used to love and cherish, those which grow beneath our
eaves and by our doorstep, are the ones we always love best. If
the Houyhnhnms should ever catch me, and, finding me particularly
vicious and unmanageable, send a man-tamer to Rareyfy me, I'll tell
you what drugs he would have to take and how he would have to use
them. Imagine yourself reading a number of the Houyhnhnm Gazette,
giving an account of such an experiment.

"MAN-TAMING EXTRAORDINARY.

"THE soft-hoofed semi-quadruped recently captured was subjected to
the art of our distinguished man-tamer in presence of a numerous
assembly. The animal was led in by two stout ponies, closely
confined by straps to prevent his sudden and dangerous tricks of
shoulder-hitting and foot-striking. His countenance expressed the
utmost degree of ferocity and cunning.

"The operator took a handful of BUDDING LILAC-LEAVES, and crushing
them slightly between his hoofs, so as to bring out their peculiar
fragrance, fastened them to the end of a long pole and held them
towards the creature. Its expression changed in an instant,--it
drew in their fragrance eagerly, and attempted to seize them with
its soft split hoofs. Having thus quieted his suspicious subject,
the operator proceeded to tie a BLUE HYACINTH to the end of the
pole and held it out towards the wild animal. The effect was
magical. Its eyes filled as if with raindrops, and its lips
trembled as it pressed them to the flower. After this it was
perfectly quiet, and brought a measure of corn to the man-tamer,
without showing the least disposition to strike with the feet or
hit from the shoulder."


That will do for the Houyhnhnm Gazette.--Do you ever wonder why
poets talk so much about flowers? Did you ever hear of a poet who
did not talk about them? Don't you think a poem, which, for the
sake of being original, should leave them out, would be like those
verses where the letter A or E or some other is omitted? No,--they
will bloom over and over again in poems as in the summer fields, to
the end of time, always old and always new. Why should we be more
shy of repeating ourselves than the spring be tired of blossoms or
the night of stars? Look at Nature. She never wearies of saying
over her floral pater-noster. In the crevices of Cyclopean walls,
--in the dust where men lie, dust also,--on the mounds that bury
huge cities, the wreck of Nineveh and the Babel-heap,--still that
same sweet prayer and benediction. The Amen! of Nature is always a
flower.

Are you tired of my trivial personalities,--those splashes and
streaks of sentiment, sometimes perhaps of sentimentality, which
you may see when I show you my heart's corolla as if it were a
tulip? Pray, do not give yourself the trouble to fancy me an idiot
whose conceit it is to treat himself as an exceptional being. It
is because you are just like me that I talk and know that you will
listen. We are all splashed and streaked with sentiments,--not
with precisely the same tints, or in exactly the same patterns, but
by the same hand and from the same palette.

I don't believe any of you happen to have just the same passion for
the blue hyacinth which I have,--very certainly not for the crushed
lilac-leaf-buds; many of you do not know how sweet they are. You
love the smell of the sweet-fern and the bayberry-leaves, I don't
doubt; but I hardly think that the last bewitches you with young
memories as it does me. For the same reason I come back to damask
roses, after having raised a good many of the rarer varieties. I
like to go to operas and concerts, but there are queer little old
homely sounds that are better than music to me. However, I suppose
it's foolish to tell such things.

--It is pleasant to be foolish at the right time,--said the
divinity-student;--saying it, however, in one of the dead
languages, which I think are unpopular for summer-reading, and
therefore do not bear quotation as such.

Well, now,--said I,--suppose a good, clean, wholesome-looking
countryman's cart stops opposite my door.--Do I want any
huckleberries?--If I do not, there are those that do. Thereupon my
soft-voiced handmaid bears out a large tin pan, and then the
wholesome countryman, heaping the peck-measure, spreads his broad
hands around its lower arc to confine the wild and frisky berries,
and so they run nimbly along the narrowing channel until they
tumble rustling down in a black cascade and tinkle on the
resounding metal beneath.--I won't say that this rushing
huckleberry hail-storm has not more music for me than the "Anvil
Chorus."

--I wonder how my great trees are coming on this summer.

--Where are your great trees, Sir?--said the divinity-student.

Oh, all round about New England. I call all trees mine that I have
put my wedding-ring on, and I have as many tree-wives as Brigham
Young has human ones.

--One set's as green as the other,--exclaimed a boarder, who has
never been identified.

They're all Bloomers,--said the young fellow called John.

[I should have rebuked this trifling with language, if our
landlady's daughter had not asked me just then what I meant by
putting my wedding-ring on a tree.]

Why, measuring it with my thirty-foot tape, my dear,--said I,--I
have worn a tape almost out on the rough barks of our old New
England elms and other big trees.--Don't you want to hear me talk
trees a little now? That is one of my specialities.

[So they all agreed that they should like to hear me talk about
trees.]

I want you to understand, in the first place, that I have a most
intense, passionate fondness for trees in general, and have had
several romantic attachments to certain trees in particular. Now,
if you expect me to hold forth in a "scientific" way about my
tree-loves,--to talk, for instance, of the Ulmus Americana, and
describe the ciliated edges of its samara, and all that,--you are an
anserine individual, and I must refer you to a dull friend who will
discourse to you of such matters. What should you think of a lover
who should describe the idol of his heart in the language of
science, thus: Class, Mammalia; Order, Primates; Genus, Homo;
Species, Europeus; Variety, Brown; Individual, Ann Eliza; Dental
Formula

2-2 1-1 2-2 3-3
i---c---p---m---
2-2 1-1 2-2 3-3'

and so on?

No, my friends, I shall speak of trees as we see them, love them,
adore them in the fields, where they are alive, holding their green
sun-shades over our heads, talking to us with their hundred
thousand whispering tongues, looking down on us with that sweet
meekness which belongs to huge, but limited organisms,--which one
sees in the brown eyes of oxen, but most in the patient posture,
the outstretched arms, and the heavy-drooping robes of these vast
beings endowed with life, but not with soul,--which outgrow us and
outlive us, but stand helpless,--poor things!--while Nature dresses
and undresses them, like so many full-sized, but under-witted
children.

Did you ever read old Daddy Gilpin? Slowest of men, even of
English men; yet delicious in his slowness, as is the light of a
sleepy eye in woman. I always supposed "Dr. Syntax" was written to
make fun of him. I have a whole set of his works, and am very
proud of it, with its gray paper, and open type, and long ff, and
orange-juice landscapes. The Pere Gilpin had the kind of science I
like in the study of Nature,--a little less observation than White
of Selborne, but a little more poetry.--Just think of applying the
Linnaean system to an elm! Who cares how many stamens or pistils
that little brown flower, which comes out before the leaf, may have
to classify it by? What we want is the meaning, the character, the
expression of a tree, as a kind and as an individual.

There is a mother-idea in each particular kind of tree, which, if
well marked, is probably embodied in the poetry of every language.
Take the oak, for instance, and we find it always standing as a
type of strength and endurance. I wonder if you ever thought of
the single mark of supremacy which distinguishes this tree from all
our other forest-trees? All the rest of them shirk the work of
resisting gravity; the oak alone defies it. It chooses the
horizontal direction for its limbs, so that their whole weight may
tell,--and then stretches them out fifty or sixty feet, so that the
strain may be mighty enough to be worth resisting. You will find,
that, in passing from the extreme downward droop of the branches of
the weeping-willow to the extreme upward inclination of those of
the poplar, they sweep nearly half a circle. At 90 degrees the oak
stops short; to slant upward another degree would mark infirmity of
purpose; to bend downwards, weakness of organization. The American
elm betrays something of both; yet sometimes, as we shall see, puts
on a certain resemblance to its sturdier neighbor.

It won't do to be exclusive in our taste about trees. There is
hardly one of them which has not peculiar beauties in some fitting
place for it. I remember a tall poplar of monumental proportions
and aspect, a vast pillar of glossy green, placed on the summit of
a lofty hill, and a beacon to all the country round. A native of
that region saw fit to build his house very near it, and, having a
fancy that it might blow down some time or other, and exterminate
himself and any incidental relatives who might be "stopping" or
"tarrying" with him,--also laboring under the delusion that human
life is under all circumstances to be preferred to vegetable
existence,--had the great poplar cut down. It is so easy to say,
"It is only a poplar!" and so much harder to replace its living
cone than to build a granite obelisk!

I must tell you about some of my tree-wives. I was at one period
of my life much devoted to the young lady-population of Rhode
Island, a small, but delightful State in the neighborhood of
Pawtucket. The number of inhabitants being not very large, I had
leisure, during my visits to the Providence Plantations, to inspect
the face of the country in the intervals of more fascinating
studies of physiognomy. I heard some talk of a great elm a short
distance from the locality just mentioned. "Let us see the great
elm,"--I said, and proceeded to find it,--knowing that it was on a
certain farm in a place called Johnston, if I remember rightly. I
shall never forget my ride and my introduction to the great
Johnston elm.

I always tremble for a celebrated tree when I approach it for the
first time. Provincialism has no SCALE of excellence in man or
vegetable; it never knows a first-rate article of either kind when
it has it, and is constantly taking second and third rate ones for
Nature's best. I have often fancied the tree was afraid of me, and
that a sort of shiver came over it as over a betrothed maiden when
she first stands before the unknown to whom she has been plighted.
Before the measuring-tape the proudest tree of them all quails and
shrinks into itself. All those stories of four or five men
stretching their arms around it and not touching each other's
fingers, if one's pacing the shadow at noon and making it so many
hundred feet, die upon its leafy lips in the presence of the awful
ribbon which has strangled so many false pretensions.

As I rode along the pleasant way, watching eagerly for the object
of my journey, the rounded tops of the elms rose from time to time
at the road-side. Wherever one looked taller and fuller than the
rest, I asked myself,--"Is this it?" But as I drew nearer, they
grew smaller,--or it proved, perhaps, that two standing in a line
had looked like one, and so deceived me. At last, all at once,
when I was not thinking of it,--I declare to you it makes my flesh
creep when I think of it now,--all at once I saw a great, green
cloud swelling in the horizon, so vast, so symmetrical, of such
Olympian majesty and imperial supremacy among the lesser
forest-growths, that my heart stopped short, then jumped at my ribs
as a hunter springs at a five-barred gate, and I felt all through me,
without need of uttering the words,--"This is it!"

You will find this tree described, with many others, in the
excellent Report upon the Trees and Shrubs of Massachusetts. The
author has given my friend the Professor credit for some of his
measurements, but measured this tree himself, carefully. It is a
grand elm for size of trunk, spread of limbs, and muscular
development,--one of the first, perhaps the first, of the first
class of New England elms.

The largest actual girth I have ever found at five feet from the
ground is in the great elm lying a stone's throw or two north of
the main road (if my points of compass are right) in Springfield.
But this has much the appearance of having been formed by the union
of two trunks growing side by side.

The West-Springfield elm and one upon Northampton meadows, belong
also to the first class of trees.

There is a noble old wreck of an elm at Hatfield, which used to
spread its claws out over a circumference of thirty-five feet or
more before they covered the foot of its bole up with earth. This
is the American elm most like an oak of any I have ever seen.

The Sheffield elm is equally remarkable for size and perfection of
form. I have seen nothing that comes near it in Berkshire County,
and few to compare with it anywhere. I am not sure that I remember
any other first-class elms in New England, but there may be many.

--What makes a first-class elm?--Why, size, in the first place, and
chiefly. Anything over twenty feet of clear girth, five feet above
the ground, and with a spread of branches a hundred feet across,
may claim that title, according to my scale. All of them, with the
questionable exception of the Springfield tree above referred to,
stop, so far as my experience goes, at about twenty-two or
twenty-three feet of girth and a hundred and twenty of spread.

Elms of the second class, generally ranging from fourteen to
eighteen feet, are comparatively common. The queen of them all is
that glorious tree near one of the churches in Springfield.
Beautiful and stately she is beyond all praise. The "great tree"
on Boston Common comes in the second rank, as does the one at
Cohasset, which used to have, and probably has still, a head as
round as an apple-tree, and that at Newburyport, with scores of
others which might be mentioned. These last two have perhaps been
over-celebrated. Both, however, are pleasing vegetables. The poor
old Pittsfield elm lives on its past reputation. A wig of false
leaves is indispensable to make it presentable.