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.



CONTENTMENT.

"Man wants but little here below."

Little I ask, my wants are few;
I only wish a hut of stone,
(A VERY PLAIN brown stone will do,)
That I may call my own;--
And close at hand is such a one,
In yonder street that fronts the sun.

Plain food is quite enough for me;
Three courses are as good as ten;--
If Nature can subsist on three,
Thank heaven for three. Amen!
I always thought cold victual nice;--
My CHOICE would be vanilla-ice.

I care not much for gold or land;--
Give me a mortgage here and there,--
Some good bank-stock,--some note of hand,
Or trifling railroad share;--
I only ask that Fortune send
A LITTLE more than I shall spend.

Honors are silly toys, I know,
And titles are but empty names;--
I would, PERHAPS, be Plenipo,--
But only near St. James;--
I'm very sure I should not care
To fill our Gubernator's chair.

Jewels are baubles; 'tis a sin
To care for such unfruitful things;--
One good-sized diamond in a pin,--
Some, NOT SO LARGE, in rings,--
A ruby and a pearl, or so,
Will do for me;--I laugh at show.

My dame should dress in cheap attire;
(Good, heavy silks are never dear;)--
I own perhaps I MIGHT desire
Some shawls of true cashmere,--
Some marrowy crapes of China silk,
Like wrinkled skins on scalded milk.

I would not have the horse I drive
So fast that folks must stop and stare
An easy gait--two, forty-five--
Suits me; I do not care;--
Perhaps, for just a SINGLE SPURT,
Some seconds less would do no hurt.

Of pictures, I should like to own
Titians and Raphaels three or four,--
I love so much their style and tone,--
One Turner, and no more,--
(A landscape,--foreground golden dirt
The sunshine painted with a squirt.)

Of books but few,--some fifty score
For daily use, and bound for wear;
The rest upon an upper floor;--
Some LITTLE luxury THERE
Of red morocco's gilded gleam,
And vellum rich as country cream.

Busts, cameos, gems,--such things as these,
Which others often show for pride,
_I_ value for their power to please,
And selfish churls deride;--
ONE Stradivarius, I confess,
TWO Meerschaums, I would fain possess.

Wealth's wasteful tricks I will not learn,
Nor ape the glittering upstart fool;--
Shall not carved tables serve my turn,
But ALL must be of buhl?
Give grasping pomp its double share,--
I ask but ONE recumbent chair.

Thus humble let me live and die,
Nor long for Midas' golden touch,
If Heaven more generous gifts deny,
I shall not miss them MUCH,--
Too grateful for the blessing lent
Of simple tastes and mind content!


MY LAST WALK WITH THE SCHOOLMISTRESS.
(A Parenthesis.)

I can't say just how many walks she and I had taken together before
this one. I found the effect of going out every morning was
decidedly favorable on her health. Two pleasing dimples, the
places for which were just marked when she came, played, shadowy,
in her freshening cheeks when she smiled and nodded good-morning to
me from the school-house-steps.

I am afraid I did the greater part of the talking. At any rate, if
I should try to report all that I said during the first half-dozen
walks we took together, I fear that I might receive a gentle hint
from my friends the publishers, that a separate volume, at my own
risk and expense, would be the proper method of bringing them
before the public.

--I would have a woman as true as Death. At the first real lie
which works from the heart outward, she should be tenderly
chloroformed into a better world, where she can have an angel for a
governess, and feed on strange fruits which will make her all over
again, even to her bones and marrow.--Whether gifted with the
accident of beauty or not, she should have been moulded in the
rose-red clay of Love, before the breath of life made a moving
mortal of her. Love-capacity is a congenital endowment; and I
think, after a while, one gets to know the warm-hued natures it
belongs to from the pretty pipe-clay counterfeits of them.--Proud
she may be, in the sense of respecting herself; but pride in the
sense of contemning others less gifted than herself, deserves the
two lowest circles of a vulgar woman's Inferno, where the
punishments are Smallpox and Bankruptcy.--She who nips off the end
of a brittle courtesy, as one breaks the tip of an icicle, to
bestow upon those whom she ought cordially and kindly to recognize,
proclaims the fact that she comes not merely of low blood, but of
bad blood. Consciousness of unquestioned position makes people
gracious in proper measure to all; but if a woman puts on airs with
her real equals, she has something about herself or her family she
is ashamed of, or ought to be. Middle, and more than middle-aged
people, who know family histories, generally see through it. An
official of standing was rude to me once. Oh, that is the maternal
grandfather,--said a wise old friend to me,--he was a boor.--Better
too few words, from the woman we love, than too many: while she is
silent, Nature is working for her; while she talks, she is working
for herself.--Love is sparingly soluble in the words of men;
therefore they speak much of it; but one syllable of woman's speech
can dissolve more of it than a man's heart can hold.

--Whether I said any or all of these things to the schoolmistress,
or not,--whether I stole them out of Lord Bacon,--whether I cribbed
them from Balzac,--whether I dipped them from the ocean of
Tupperian wisdom,--or whether I have just found them in my head,
laid there by that solemn fowl, Experience, (who, according to my
observation, cackles oftener than she drops real live eggs,) I
cannot say. Wise men have said more foolish things,--and foolish
men, I don't doubt, have said as wise things. Anyhow, the
schoolmistress and I had pleasant walks and long talks, all of
which I do not feel bound to report.

--You are a stranger to me, Ma'am.--I don't doubt you would like to
know all I said to the schoolmistress.--I sha'n't do it;--I had
rather get the publishers to return the money you have invested in
this. Besides, I have forgotten a good deal of it. I shall tell
only what I like of what I remember.

--My idea was, in the first place, to search out the picturesque
spots which the city affords a sight of, to those who have eyes. I
know a good many, and it was a pleasure to look at them in company
with my young friend. There were the shrubs and flowers in the
Franklin-Place front-yards or borders; Commerce is just putting his
granite foot upon them. Then there are certain small seraglio-
gardens, into which one can get a peep through the crevices of high
fences,--one in Myrtle Street, or backing on it,--here and there
one at the North and South Ends. Then the great elms in Essex
Street. Then the stately horse-chestnuts in that vacant lot in
Chambers Street, which hold their outspread hands over your head,
(as I said in my poem the other day,) and look as if they were
whispering, "May grace, mercy, and peace be with you!"--and the
rest of that benediction. Nay, there are certain patches of
ground, which, having lain neglected for a time, Nature, who always
has her pockets full of seeds, and holes in all her pockets, has
covered with hungry plebeian growths, which fight for life with
each other, until some of them get broad-leaved and succulent, and
you have a coarse vegetable tapestry which Raphael would not have
disdained to spread over the foreground of his masterpiece. The
Professor pretends that he found such a one in Charles Street,
which, in its dare-devil impudence of rough-and-tumble vegetation,
beat the pretty-behaved flower-beds of the Public Garden as
ignominiously as a group of young tatterdemalions playing
pitch-and-toss beats a row of Sunday-school-boys with their
teacher at their head.

But then the Professor has one of his burrows in that region, and
puts everything in high colors relating to it. That is his way
about everything. I hold any man cheap,--he said,--of whom nothing
stronger can be uttered than that all his geese are swans.--How is
that, Professor?--said I;--I should have set you down for one of
that sort.--Sir,--said he,--I am proud to say, that Nature has so
far enriched me, that I cannot own so much as a duck without seeing
in it as pretty a swan as ever swam the basin in the garden of the
Luxembourg. And the Professor showed the whites of his eyes
devoutly, like one returning thanks after a dinner of many courses.

I don't know anything sweeter than this leaking in of Nature
through all the cracks in the walls and floors of cities. You heap
up a million tons of hewn rocks on a square mile or two of earth
which was green once. The trees look down from the hill-sides and
ask each other, as they stand on tiptoe,--"What are these people
about?" And the small herbs at their feet look up and whisper
back,--"We will go and see." So the small herbs pack themselves up
in the least possible bundles, and wait until the wind steals to
them at night and whispers, "Come with me." Then they go softly
with it into the great city,--one to a cleft in the pavement, one
to a spout on the roof, one to a seam in the marbles over a rich
gentleman's bones, and one to the grave without a stone where
nothing but a man is buried,--and there they grow, looking down on
the generations of men from mouldy roofs, looking up from between
the less-trodden pavements, looking out through iron cemetery-
railings. Listen to them, when there is only a light breath
stirring, and you will hear them saying to each other,--"Wait
awhile!" The words run along the telegraph of those narrow green
lines that border the roads leading from the city, until they reach
the slope of the hills, and the trees repeat in low murmurs to each
other,--"Wait awhile!" By-and-by the flow of life in the streets
ebbs, and the old leafy inhabitants--the smaller tribes always in
front--saunter in, one by one, very careless seemingly, but very
tenacious, until they swarm so that the great stones gape from each
other with the crowding of their roots, and the feldspar begins to
be picked out of the granite to find them food. At last the trees
take up their solemn line of march, and never rest until they have
encamped in the market-place. Wait long enough and you will find
an old doting oak hugging a huge worn block in its yellow
underground arms; that was the cornerstone of the State-House. Oh,
so patient she is, this imperturbable Nature!

--Let us cry!--

But all this has nothing to do with my walks and talks with the
schoolmistress. I did not say that I would not tell you something
about them. Let me alone, and I shall talk to you more than I
ought to, probably. We never tell our secrets to people that pump
for them.

Books we talked about, and education. It was her duty to know
something of these, and of course she did. Perhaps I was somewhat
more learned than she, but I found that the difference between her
reading and mine was like that of a man's and a woman's dusting a
library. The man flaps about with a bunch of feathers; the woman
goes to work softly with a cloth. She does not raise half the
dust, nor fill her own eyes and mouth with it,--but she goes into
all the corners, and attends to the leaves as much as the covers.
--Books are the NEGATIVE pictures of thought, and the more sensitive
the mind that receives their images, the more nicely the finest
lines are reproduced. A woman, (of the right kind,) reading after
a man, follows him as Ruth followed the reapers of Boaz, and her
gleanings are often the finest of the wheat.

But it was in talking of Life that we came most clearly together.
I thought I knew something about that,--that I could speak or write
about it somewhat to the purpose.

To take up this fluid earthly being of ours as a sponge sucks up
water,--to be steeped and soaked in its realities as a hide fills
its pores lying seven years in a tan-pit,--to have winnowed every
wave of it as a mill-wheel works up the stream that runs through
the flume upon its float-boards,--to have curled up in the keenest
spasms and flattened out in the laxest languors of this breathing-
sickness, which keeps certain parcels of matter uneasy for three or
four score years,--to have fought all the devils and clasped all
the angels of its delirium,--and then, just at the point when the
white-hot passions have cooled down to cherry-red, plunge our
experience into the ice-cold stream of some human language or
other, one might think would end in a rhapsody with something of
spring and temper in it. All this I thought my power and province.

The schoolmistress had tried life, too. Once in a while one meets
with a single soul greater than all the living pageant which passes
before it. As the pale astronomer sits in his study with sunken
eyes and thin fingers, and weighs Uranus or Neptune as in a
balance, so there are meek, slight women who have weighed all which
this planetary life can offer, and hold it like a bauble in the
palm of their slender hands. This was one of them. Fortune had
left her, sorrow had baptized her; the routine of labor and the
loneliness of almost friendless city-life were before her. Yet, as
I looked upon her tranquil face, gradually regaining a cheerfulness
which was often sprightly, as she became interested in the various
matters we talked about and places we visited, I saw that eye and
lip and every shifting lineament were made for love,--unconscious
of their sweet office as yet, and meeting the cold aspect of Duty
with the natural graces which were meant for the reward of nothing
less than the Great Passion.

--I never addressed one word of love to the schoolmistress in the
course of these pleasant walks. It seemed to me that we talked of
everything but love on that particular morning. There was,
perhaps, a little more timidity and hesitancy on my part than I
have commonly shown among our people at the boarding-house. In
fact, I considered myself the master at the breakfast-table; but,
somehow, I could not command myself just then so well as usual.
The truth is, I had secured a passage to Liverpool in the steamer
which was to leave at noon,--with the condition, however, of being
released in case circumstances occurred to detain me. The
schoolmistress knew nothing about all this, of course, as yet.

It was on the Common that we were walking. The MALL, or boulevard
of our Common, you know, has various branches leading from it in
different directions. One of these runs down from opposite Joy
Street southward across the whole length of the Common to Boylston
Street. We called it the long path, and were fond of it.

I felt very weak indeed (though of a tolerably robust habit) as we
came opposite the head of this path on that morning. I think I
tried to speak twice without making myself distinctly audible. At
last I got out the question,--Will you take the long path with me?
--Certainly,--said the schoolmistress,--with much pleasure.--Think,
--I said,--before you answer; if you take the long path with
me now, I shall interpret it that we are to part no more!--The
schoolmistress stepped back with a sudden movement, as if an arrow
had struck her.

One of the long granite blocks used as seats was hard by,--the one
you may still see close by the Gingko-tree.--Pray, sit down,--I
said.--No, no, she answered, softly,--I will walk the LONG PATH
with you!

--The old gentleman who sits opposite met us walking, arm in arm,
about the middle of the long path, and said, very charmingly,
--"Good morning, my dears!"



CHAPTER XII



[I did not think it probable that I should have a great many more
talks with our company, and therefore I was anxious to get as much
as I could into every conversation. That is the reason why you
will find some odd, miscellaneous facts here, which I wished to
tell at least once, as I should not have a chance to tell them
habitually at our breakfast-table.--We're very free and easy, you
know; we don't read what we don't like. Our parish is so large,
one can't pretend to preach to all the pews at once. One can't be
all the time trying to do the best of one's best if a company works
a steam fire-engine, the firemen needn't be straining themselves
all day to squirt over the top of the flagstaff. Let them wash
some of those lower-story windows a little. Besides, there is no
use in our quarrelling now, as you will find out when you get
through this paper.]

--Travel, according to my experience, does not exactly correspond
to the idea one gets of it out of most books of travels. I am
thinking of travel as it was when I made the Grand Tour, especially
in Italy. Memory is a net; one finds it full of fish when he takes
it from the brook; but a dozen miles of water have run through it
without sticking. I can prove some facts about travelling by a
story or two. There are certain principles to be assumed,--such
as these:--He who is carried by horses must deal with rogues.
--To-day's dinner subtends a larger visual angle than yesterday's
revolution. A mote in my eye is bigger to me than the biggest of
Dr. Gould's private planets.--Every traveller is a self-taught
entomologist.--Old jokes are dynamometers of mental tension; an old
joke tells better among friends travelling than at home,--which
shows that their minds are in a state of diminished, rather than
increased vitality. There was a story about "strahps to your
pahnts," which was vastly funny to us fellows--on the road from
Milan to Venice.--Caelum, non animum,--travellers change their
guineas, but not their characters. The bore is the same, eating
dates under the cedars of Lebanon, as over a plate of baked beans
in Beacon Street.--Parties of travellers have a morbid instinct for
"establishing raws" upon each other.--A man shall sit down with his
friend at the foot of the Great Pyramid and they will take up the
question they had been talking about under "the great elm," and
forget all about Egypt. When I was crossing the Po, we were all
fighting about the propriety of one fellow's telling another that
his argument was absurd; one maintaining it to be a perfectly
admissible logical term, as proved by the phrase "reductio ad
absurdum;" the rest badgering him as a conversational bully.
Mighty little we troubled ourselves for Padus, the Po, "a river
broader and more rapid than the Rhone," and the times when Hannibal
led his grim Africans to its banks, and his elephants thrust their
trunks into the yellow waters over which that pendulum ferry-boat
was swinging back and forward every ten minutes!

--Here are some of those reminiscences, with morals prefixed, or
annexed, or implied.

Lively emotions very commonly do not strike us full in front, but
obliquely from the side; a scene or incident in UNDRESS often
affects us more than one in full costume.


"Is this the mighty ocean?--is this all?"


says the Princess in Gebir. The rush that should have flooded my
soul in the Coliseum did not come. But walking one day in the
fields about the city, I stumbled over a fragment of broken
masonry, and lo! the World's Mistress in her stone girdle--alta
maenia Romae--rose before me and whitened my cheek with her pale
shadow as never before or since.

I used very often, when coming home from my morning's work at one
of the public institutions of Paris, to stop in at the dear old
church of St. Etienne du Mont. The tomb of St. Genevieve,
surrounded by burning candles and votive tablets, was there; the
mural tablet of Jacobus Benignus Winslow was there; there was a
noble organ with carved figures; the pulpit was borne on the oaken
shoulders of a stooping Samson; and there was a marvellous
staircase like a coil of lace. These things I mention from memory,
but not all of them together impressed me so much as an inscription
on a small slab of marble fixed in one of the walls. It told how
this church of St. Stephen was repaired and beautified in the year
16**, and how, during the celebration of its reopening, two girls
of the parish (filles de la paroisse) fell from the gallery,
carrying a part of the balustrade with them, to the pavement, but
by a miracle escaped uninjured. Two young girls, nameless, but
real presences to my imagination, as much as when they came
fluttering down on the tiles with a cry that outscreamed the
sharpest treble in the Te Deum. (Look at Carlyle's article on
Boswell, and see how he speaks of the poor young woman Johnson
talked with in the streets one evening.) All the crowd gone but
these two "filles de la paroisse,"--gone as utterly as the dresses
they wore, as the shoes that were on their feet, as the bread and
meat that were in the market on that day.

Not the great historical events, but the personal incidents that
call up single sharp pictures of some human being in its pang or
struggle, reach us most nearly. I remember the platform at Berne,
over the parapet of which Theobald Weinzapfli's restive horse
sprung with him and landed him more than a hundred feet beneath in
the lower town, not dead, but sorely broken, and no longer a wild
youth, but God's servant from that day forward. I have forgotten
the famous bears, and all else.--I remember the Percy lion on the
bridge over the little river at Alnwick,--the leaden lion with his
tail stretched out straight like a pump-handle,--and why? Because
of the story of the village boy who must fain bestride the leaden
tail, standing out over the water,--which breaking, he dropped into
the stream far below, and was taken out an idiot for the rest of
his life.

Arrow-heads must be brought to a sharp point, and the guillotine-
axe must have a slanting edge. Something intensely human, narrow,
and definate pierces to the seat of our sensibilities more readily
than huge occurrences and catastrophes. A nail will pick a lock
that defies hatchet and hammer. "The Royal George" went down with
all her crew, and Cowper wrote an exquisitely simple poem about it;
but the leaf which holds it is smooth, while that which bears the
lines on his mother's portrait is blistered with tears.

My telling these recollections sets me thinking of others of the
same kind which strike the imagination, especially when one is
still young. You remember the monument in Devizes market to the
woman struck dead with a lie in her mouth. I never saw that, but
it is in the books. Here is one I never heard mentioned;--if any
of the "Note and Query" tribe can tell the story, I hope they will.
Where is this monument? I was riding on an English stage-coach
when we passed a handsome marble column (as I remember it) of
considerable size and pretensions.--What is that?--I said.--That,
--answered the coachman,--is THE HANGMAN'S PILLAR. Then he told me
how a man went out one night, many years ago, to steal sheep. He
caught one, tied its legs together, passed the rope over his head,
and started for home. In climbing a fence, the rope slipped,
caught him by the neck, and strangled him. Next morning he was
found hanging dead on one side of the fence and the sheep on the
other; in memory whereof the lord of the manor caused this monument
to be erected as a warning to all who love mutton better than
virtue. I will send a copy of this record to him or her who shall
first set me right about this column and its locality.

And telling over these old stories reminds me that I have something
which may interest architects and perhaps some other persons. I
once ascended the spire of Strasburg Cathedral, which is the
highest, I think, in Europe. It is a shaft of stone filigree-work,
frightfully open, so that the guide puts his arms behind you to
keep you from falling. To climb it is a noonday nightmare, and to
think of having climbed it crisps all the fifty-six joints of one's
twenty digits. While I was on it, "pinnacled dim in the intense
inane," a strong wind was blowing, and I felt sure that the spire
was rocking. It swayed back and forward like a stalk of rye or a
cat-o'nine-tails (bulrush) with a bobolink on it. I mentioned it
to the guide, and he said that the spire did really swing back and
forward,--I think he said some feet.

Keep any line of knowledge ten years and some other line will
intersect it. Long afterwards I was hunting out a paper of
Dumeril's in an old journal,--the "Magazin Encyclopedique" for l'an
troisieme, (1795,) when I stumbled upon a brief article on the
vibrations of the spire of Strasburg Cathedral. A man can shake it
so that the movement shall be shown in a vessel of water nearly
seventy feet below the summit, and higher up the vibration is like
that of an earthquake. I have seen one of those wretched wooden
spires with which we very shabbily finish some of our stone
churches (thinking that the lidless blue eye of heaven cannot tell
the counterfeit we try to pass on it,) swinging like a reed, in a
wind, but one would hardly think of such a thing's happening in a
stone spire. Does the Bunker-Hill Monument bend in the blast like
a blade of grass? I suppose so.

You see, of course, that I am talking in a cheap way;--perhaps we
will have some philosophy by and by;--let me work out this thin
mechanical vein.--I have something more to say about trees. I have
brought down this slice of hemlock to show you. Tree blew down in
my woods (that were) in 1852. Twelve feet and a half round, fair
girth;--nine feet, where I got my section, higher up. This is a
wedge, going to the centre, of the general shape of a slice of
apple-pie in a large and not opulent family. Length, about
eighteen inches. I have studied the growth of this tree by its
rings, and it is curious. Three hundred and forty-two rings.
Started, therefore, about 1510. The thickness of the rings tells
the rate at which it grew. For five or six years the rate was
slow,--then rapid for twenty years. A little before the year 1550
it began to grow very slowly, and so continued for about seventy
years. In 1620 it took a new start and grew fast until 1714 then
for the most part slowly until 1786, when it started again and grew
pretty well and uniformly until within the last dozen years, when
it seems to have got on sluggishly.