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.


With far different emotions we look upon the spot where lie buried many
of the Herbert family, among the rest,

"Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother,"

for whom Ben Jonson wrote the celebrated epitaph. I am almost afraid to
say it, but I never could admire the line,

"Lies the subject of all verse,"

nor the idea of Time dropping his hour-glass and scythe to throw a dart
at the fleshless figure of Death. This last image seems to me about the
equivalent in mortuary poetry of Roubiliac's monument to Mrs.
Nightingale in mortuary sculpture,--poor conceits both of them, without
the suggestion of a tear in the verses or in the marble; but the
rhetorical exaggeration does not prevent us from feeling that we are
standing by the resting-place of one who was

"learn'd and fair and good"

enough to stir the soul of stalwart Ben Jonson, and the names of Sidney
and Herbert make us forget the strange hyperboles.

History meets us everywhere, as we stray among these ancient monuments.
Under that effigy lie the great bones of Sir John Cheyne, a mighty man
of war, said to have been "overthrown" by Richard the Third at the
battle of Bosworth Field. What was left of him was unearthed in 1789 in
the demolition of the Beauchamp chapel, and his thigh-bone was found to
be four inches longer than that of a man of common stature.

The reader may remember how my recollections started from their
hiding-place when I came, in one of our excursions, upon the name of
Lechmere, as belonging to the owner of a fine estate by or through which
we were driving. I had a similar twinge of reminiscence at meeting with
the name of Gorges, which is perpetuated by a stately monument at the
end of the north aisle of the cathedral. Sir Thomas Gorges, Knight of
Longford Castle, may or may not have been of the same family as the
well-remembered grandiose personage of the New England Pilgrim period.
The title this gentleman bore had a far more magnificent sound than
those of his contemporaries, Governor Carver and Elder Brewster. No
title ever borne among us has filled the mouth quite so full as that of
"Sir Ferdinando Gorges, Lord Palatine of the Province of Maine," a
province with "Gorgeana" (late the plantation of Agamenticus) as its
capital. Everywhere in England a New Englander is constantly meeting
with names of families and places which remind him that he comes of a
graft from an old tree on a new stock. I could not keep down the
associations called up by the name of Gorges. There is a certain
pleasure in now and then sprinkling our prosaic colonial history with
the holy water of a high-sounding title; not that a "Sir" before a man's
name makes him any better,--for are we not all equal, and more than
equal, to each other?--but it sounds pleasantly. Sir Harry Vane and Sir
Harry Frankland look prettily on the printed page, as the illuminated
capital at the head of a chapter in an old folio pleases the eye of the
reader. Sir Thomas Gorges was the builder of Longford Castle, now the
seat of the Earl of Radnor, whose family name is Bouverie. Whether our
Sir Ferdinando was of the Longford Castle stock or not I must leave to
my associates of the Massachusetts Historical Society to determine.

We lived very quietly at our temporary home in Salisbury Close. A
pleasant dinner with the Dean, a stroll through the grounds of the
episcopal palace, with that perpetual feast of the eyes which the
cathedral offered us, made our residence delightful at the time, and
keeps it so in remembrance. Besides the cathedral there were the very
lovely cloisters, the noble chapter-house with its central pillar,--this
structure has been restored and rejuvenated since my earlier visit,--and
there were the peaceful dwellings, where I insist on believing that only
virtue and happiness are ever tenants. Even outside the sacred enclosure
there is a great deal to enjoy, in the ancient town of Salisbury. One
may rest under the Poultry Cross, where twenty or thirty generations
have rested before him. One may purchase his china at the well-furnished
establishment of the tenant of a spacious apartment of ancient
date,--"the Halle of John Halle," a fine private edifice built in the
year 1470, restored and beautified in 1834; the emblazonment of the
royal arms having been executed by the celebrated architectural artist
Pugin. The old houses are numerous, and some of them eminently
picturesque.

Salisbury was formerly very unhealthy, on account of the low, swampy
nature of its grounds. The Sanitary Reform, dating from about thirty
years ago, had a great effect on the condition of the place. Before the
drainage the annual mortality was twenty-seven in the thousand; since
the drainage twenty in the thousand, which is below that of Boston. In
the Close, which is a little Garden of Eden, with no serpent in it that
I could hear of, the deaths were only fourteen in a thousand. Happy
little enclosure, where thieves cannot break through and steal, where
Death himself hesitates to enter, and makes a visit only now and then at
long intervals, lest the fortunate inhabitants should think they had
already reached the Celestial City!

[Illustration: Salisbury Cathedral.]

It must have been a pretty bitter quarrel that drove the tenants of the
airy height of Old Sarum to remove to the marshy level of the present
site of the cathedral and the town. I wish we could have given more time
to the ancient fortress and cathedral town. This is one of the most
interesting historic localities of Great Britain. We looked from
different points of view at the mounds and trenches which marked it as a
strongly fortified position. For many centuries it played an important
part in the history of England. At length, however, the jealousies of
the laity and the clergy, a squabble like that of "town and gown," but
with graver underlying causes, broke up the harmony and practically
ended the existence of the place except as a monument of the past. It
seems a pity that the headquarters of the Prince of Peace could not have
managed to maintain tranquillity within its own borders. But so it was;
and the consequence followed that Old Sarum, with all its grand
recollections, is but a collection of mounds and hollows,--as much a
tomb of its past as Birs Nimroud of that great city, Nineveh. Old Sarum
is now best remembered by its long-surviving privilege, as a borough, of
sending two members to Parliament. The farcical ceremony of electing two
representatives who had no real constituency behind them was put an end
to by the Reform Act of 1832.

Wilton, the seat of the Earl of Pembroke, within an easy drive's
distance from Salisbury, was the first nobleman's residence I saw in my
early visit. Not a great deal of what I then saw had survived in my
memory. I recall the general effect of the stately mansion and its
grounds. A picture or two of Vandyke's had not quite faded out of my
recollection. I could not forget the armor of Anne de Montmorenci,--not
another Maid of Orleans, but Constable of France,--said to have been
taken in battle by an ancestor of the Herberts. It was one of the first
things that made me feel I was in the Old World. Miles Standish's sword
was as far back as New England collections of armor carried us at that
day. The remarkable gallery of ancient sculptures impressed me at the
time, but no one bust or statue survived as a distinct image. Even the
beautiful Palladian bridge had not pictured itself on my mental tablet
as it should have done, and I could not have taken my oath that I had
seen it. But the pretty English maidens whom we met on the day of our
visit to Wilton,--daughters or granddaughters of a famous inventor and
engineer,--still lingered as vague and pleasing visions, so lovely had
they seemed among the daisies and primroses. The primroses and daisies
were as fresh in the spring of 1886 as they were in the spring of 1833,
but I hardly dared to ask after the blooming maidens of that early
period.

One memory predominates over all others, in walking through the halls,
or still more in wandering through the grounds, of Wilton House. Here
Sir Philip Sidney wrote his "Arcadia," and the ever youthful presence of
the man himself rather than the recollection of his writings takes
possession of us. There are three young men in history whose names
always present themselves to me in a special companionship: Pico della
Mirandola, "the Phoenix of the Age" for his contemporaries; "the
Admirable Crichton," accepting as true the accounts which have come down
to us of his wonderful accomplishments; and Sidney, the Bayard of
England, "that glorious star, that lively pattern of virtue and the
lovely joy of all the learned sort, ... born into the world to show unto
our age a sample of ancient virtue." The English paragon of excellence
was but thirty-two years old when he was slain at Zutphen, the Italian
Phoenix but thirty-one when he was carried off by a fever, and the
Scotch prodigy of gifts and attainments was only twenty-two when he was
assassinated by his worthless pupil. Sir Philip Sidney is better
remembered by the draught of water he gave the dying soldier than by all
the waters he ever drew from the fountain of the Muses, considerable as
are the merits of his prose and verse. But here, where he came to cool
his fiery spirit after the bitter insult he had received from the Earl
of Leicester; here, where he mused and wrote, and shaped his lofty plans
for a glorious future, he lives once more in our imagination, as if his
spirit haunted the English Arcadia he loved so dearly.

The name of Herbert, which we have met with in the cathedral, and which
belongs to the Earls of Pembroke, presents itself to us once more in a
very different and very beautiful aspect. Between Salisbury and Wilton,
three miles and a half distant, is the little village of Bemerton, where
"holy George Herbert" lived and died, and where he lies buried. Many
Americans who know little else of him recall the lines borrowed from him
by Irving in the "Sketch-Book" and by Emerson in "Nature." The
"Sketch-Book" gives the lines thus:--

"Sweet day, so pure, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky."

In other versions the fourth word is _cool_ instead of _pure_,
and _cool_ is, I believe, the correct reading. The day when we
visited Bemerton was, according to A----'s diary, "perfect." I was
struck with the calm beauty of the scene around us, the fresh greenness
of all growing things, and the stillness of the river which mirrored the
heavens above it. It must have been this reflection which the poet was
thinking of when he spoke of the bridal of the earth and sky. The river
is the Wiltshire Avon; not Shakespeare's Avon, but the southern stream
of the same name, which empties into the British Channel.

So much of George Herbert's intellectual and moral character repeat
themselves in Emerson that if I believed in metempsychosis I should
think that the English saint had reappeared in the American philosopher.
Their features have a certain resemblance, but the type, though an
exceptional and fine one, is not so very rare. I found a portrait in the
National Gallery which was a good specimen of it; the bust of a near
friend of his, more intimate with him than almost any other person, is
often taken for that of Emerson. I see something of it in the portrait
of Sir Philip Sidney, and I doubt not that traces of a similar mental
resemblance ran through the whole group, with individual characteristics
which were in some respects quite different. I will take a single verse
of Herbert's from Emerson's "Nature,"--one of the five which he
quotes:--

"Nothing hath got so far
But man hath caught and kept it as his prey;
His eyes dismount the highest star:
He is in little all the sphere.
Herbs gladly cure our flesh because that they
Find their acquaintance there."

Emerson himself fully recognizes his obligations to "the beautiful
psalmist of the seventeenth century," as he calls George Herbert. There
are many passages in his writings which sound as if they were
paraphrases from the elder poet. From him it is that Emerson gets a word
he is fond of, and of which his imitators are too fond:--

"Who sweeps a room as for thy laws
Makes that and the action _fine_."

The little chapel in which Herbert officiated is perhaps half as long
again as the room in which I am writing, but it is four or five feet
narrower,--and I do not live in a palace. Here this humble servant of
God preached and prayed, and here by his faithful and loving service he
so endeared himself to all around him that he has been canonized by an
epithet no other saint of the English Church has had bestowed upon him.
His life as pictured by Izaak Walton is, to borrow one of his own lines,

"A box where sweets compacted lie;"

and I felt, as I left his little chapel and the parsonage which he
rebuilt as a free-will offering, as a pilgrim might feel who had just
left the holy places at Jerusalem.

Among the places which I saw in my first visit was Longford Castle, the
seat of the Earl of Radnor. I remembered the curious triangular
building, constructed with reference to the doctrine of the Trinity, as
churches are built in the form of the cross. I remembered how the
omnipresent spire of the great cathedral, three miles away, looked down
upon the grounds about the building as if it had been their next-door
neighbor. I had not forgotten the two celebrated Claudes, Morning and
Evening. My eyes were drawn to the first of these two pictures when I
was here before; now they turned naturally to the landscape with the
setting sun. I have read my St. Ruskin with due reverence, but I have
never given up my allegiance to Claude Lorraine. But of all the fine
paintings at Longford Castle, no one so much impressed me at my recent
visit as the portrait of Erasmus by Hans Holbein. This is one of those
pictures which help to make the Old World worth a voyage across the
Atlantic. Portraits of Erasmus are not uncommon; every scholar would
know him if he met him in the other world with the look he wore on
earth. All the etchings and their copies give a characteristic
presentation of the spiritual precursor of Luther, who pricked the false
image with his rapier which the sturdy monk slashed with his broadsword.
What a face it is which Hans Holbein has handed down to us in this
wonderful portrait at Longford Castle! How dry it is with scholastic
labor, how keen with shrewd scepticism, how worldly-wise, how conscious
of its owner's wide-awake sagacity! Erasmus and Rabelais,--Nature used
up all her arrows for their quivers, and had to wait a hundred years and
more before she could find shafts enough for the outfit of Voltaire,
leaner and keener than Erasmus, and almost as free in his language as
the audacious creator of Gargantua and Pantagruel.

I have not generally given descriptions of the curious objects which I
saw in the great houses and museums which I visited. There is, however,
a work of art at Longford Castle so remarkable that I must speak of it.
I was so much struck by the enormous amount of skilful ingenuity and
exquisite workmanship bestowed upon it that I looked up its history,
which I found in the "Beauties of England and Wales." This is what is
there said of the wonderful steel chair: "It was made by Thomas Rukers
at the city of Augsburgh, in the year 1575, and consists of more than
130 compartments, all occupied by groups of figures representing a
succession of events in the annals of the Roman Empire, from the landing
of AEneas to the reign of Rodolphus the Second." It looks as if a life
had gone into the making of it, as a pair or two of eyes go to the
working of the bridal veil of an empress.

Fifty years ago and more, when I was at Longford Castle with my two
companions, who are no more with us, we found there a pleasant, motherly
old housekeeper, or attendant of some kind, who gave us a draught of
home-made ale and left a cheerful remembrance with us, as, I need hardly
say, we did with her, in a materialized expression of our good-will. It
always rubbed very hard on my feelings to offer money to any persons who
had served me well, as if they were doing it for their own pleasure. It
may have been the granddaughter of the kindly old matron of the year
1833 who showed us round, and possibly, if I had sunk a shaft of
inquiry, I might have struck a well of sentiment. But

"Take, O boatman, thrice thy fee,"

carried into practical life, is certain in its financial result to the
subject of the emotional impulse, but is less sure to call forth a
tender feeling in the recipient. One will hardly find it worth while to
go through the world weeping over his old recollections, and paying gold
instead of silver and silver instead of copper to astonished boatmen and
bewildered chambermaids.

On Sunday, the 18th of July, we attended morning service at the
cathedral. The congregation was not proportioned to the size of the
great edifice. These vast places of worship were built for ages when
faith was the rule and questioning the exception. I will not say that
faith has grown cold, but it has cooled from white heat to cherry red or
a still less flaming color. As to church attendance, I have heard the
saying attributed to a great statesman, that "once a day is Orthodox,
but twice a day is Puritan." No doubt many of the same class of people
that used to fill the churches stay at home and read about evolution or
telepathy, or whatever new gospel they may have got hold of. Still the
English seem to me a religious people; they have leisure enough to say
grace and give thanks before and after meals, and their institutions
tend to keep alive the feelings of reverence which cannot be said to be
distinctive of our own people.

In coming out of the cathedral, on the Sunday I just mentioned, a
gentleman addressed me as a fellow-countryman. There is something,--I
will not stop now to try and define it,--but there is something by which
we recognize an American among the English before he speaks and betrays
his origin. Our new friend proved to be the president of one of our
American colleges; an intelligent and well-instructed gentleman, of
course. By the invitation of our host he came in to visit us in the
evening, and made himself very welcome by his agreeable conversation.

I took great delight in wandering about the old town of Salisbury. There
are no such surprises in our oldest places as one finds in Chester, or
Tewkesbury, or Stratford, or Salisbury, and I have no doubt in scores or
hundreds of similar places which I have never visited. The best
substitute for such rambles as one can take through these mouldy
boroughs (or burrows) is to be found in such towns as Salem,
Newburyport, Portsmouth. Without imagination, Shakespeare's birthplace
is but a queer old house, and Anne Hathaway's home a tumble-down
cottage. With it, one can see the witches of Salem Village sailing out
of those little square windows, which look as if they were made on
purpose for them, or stroll down to Derby's wharf and gaze at
"Cleopatra's Barge," precursor of the yachts of the Astors and Goulds
and Vanderbilts, as she comes swimming into the harbor in all her gilded
glory. But it must make a difference what the imagination has to work
upon, and I do not at all wonder that Mr. Ruskin would not wish to live
in a land where there are no old ruins of castles and monasteries. Man
will not live on bread only; he wants a great deal more, if he can get
it,--frosted cake as well as corn-bread; and the New World keeps the
imagination on plain and scanty diet, compared to the rich traditional
and historic food which furnishes the banquets of the Old World.

What memories that week in Salisbury and the excursions from it have
left in my mind's picture gallery! The spire of the great cathedral had
been with me as a frequent presence during the last fifty years of my
life, and this second visit has deepened every line of the impression,
as Old Mortality refreshed the inscriptions on the tombstones of the
Covenanters. I find that all these pictures which I have brought home
with me to look at, with

"that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude,"

are becoming clearer and brighter as the excitement of overcrowded days
and weeks gradually calms down. I can _be_ in those places where I
passed days and nights, and became habituated to the sight of the
cathedral, or of the Church of the Holy Trinity, at morning, at noon, at
evening, whenever I turned my eyes in its direction. I often close my
eyelids, and startle my household by saying, "Now I am in Salisbury," or
"Now I am in Stratford." It is a blessed thing to be able, in the
twilight of years, to illuminate the soul with such visions. The
Charles, which flows beneath my windows, which I look upon between the
words of the sentence I am now writing, only turning my head as I sit at
my table,--the Charles is hardly more real to me than Shakespeare's
Avon, since I floated on its still waters, or strayed along its banks
and saw the cows reflected in the smooth expanse, their legs upward, as
if they were walking the skies as the flies walk the ceiling. Salisbury
Cathedral stands as substantial in my thought as our own King's Chapel,
since I slumbered by its side, and arose in the morning to find it still
there, and not one of those unsubstantial fabrics built by the architect
of dreams.

On Thursday, the 22d of July, we left Salisbury for Brighton, where we
were to be guests at Arnold House, the residence of our kind host. Here
we passed another delightful week, with everything around us to
contribute to our quiet comfort and happiness. The most thoughtful of
entertainers, a house filled with choice works of art, fine paintings,
and wonderful pottery, pleasant walks and drives, a visitor now and
then, Mr. and Mrs. Goldwin Smith among the number, rest and peace in a
magnificent city built for enjoyment,--what more could we have asked to
make our visit memorable? Many watering-places look forlorn and desolate
in the intervals of "the season." This was not the time of Brighton's
influx of visitors, but the city was far from dull. The houses are very
large, and have the grand air, as if meant for princes; the shops are
well supplied; the salt breeze comes in fresh and wholesome, and the
noble esplanade is lively with promenaders and Bath chairs, some of them
occupied by people evidently ill or presumably lame, some, I suspect,
employed by healthy invalids who are too lazy to walk. I took one
myself, drawn by an old man, to see how I liked it, and found it very
convenient, but I was tempted to ask him to change places and let me
drag him.

With the aid of the guide-book I could describe the wonders of the
pavilion and the various changes which have come over the great
watering-place. The grand walks, the two piers, the aquarium, and all
the great sights which are shown to strangers deserve full attention
from the tourist who writes for other travellers, but none of these
things seem to me so interesting as what we saw and heard in a little
hamlet which has never, so far as I know, been vulgarized by sightseers.
We drove in an open carriage,--Mr. and Mrs. Willett, A----, and
myself,--into the country, which soon became bare, sparsely settled, a
long succession of rounded hills and hollows. These are the South Downs,
from which comes the famous mutton known all over England, not unknown
at the table of our Saturday Club and other well-spread boards. After a
drive of ten miles or more we arrived at a little "settlement," as we
Americans would call it, and drove up to the door of a modest parsonage,
where dwells the shepherd of the South Down flock of Christian
worshippers. I hope that the good clergyman, if he ever happens to see
what I am writing, will pardon me for making mention of his hidden
retreat, which he himself speaks of as "one of the remoter nooks of the
old country." Nothing I saw in England brought to my mind Goldsmith's
picture of "the man to all the country dear," and his surroundings, like
this visit. The church dates, if I remember right, from the thirteenth
century. Some of its stones show marks, as it is thought, of having
belonged to a Saxon edifice. The massive leaden font is of a very great
antiquity. In the wall of the church is a narrow opening, at which the
priest is supposed to have sat and listened to the confession of the
sinner on the outside of the building. The dead lie all around the
church, under stones bearing the dates of several centuries. One
epitaph, which the unlettered Muse must have dictated, is worth
recording. After giving the chief slumberer's name the epitaph adds,--

"Here lies on either side, the remains of each of his former wives."

Those of a third have found a resting-place close by, behind him.

It seemed to me that Mr. Bunner's young man in search of Arcady might
look for it here with as good a chance of being satisfied as anywhere I
can think of. But I suppose that men and women and especially boys,
would prove to be a good deal like the rest of the world, if one lived
here long enough to learn all about them. One thing I can safely
say,--an English man or boy never goes anywhere without his fists. I saw
a boy of ten or twelve years, whose pleasant face attracted my
attention. I said to the rector, "That is a fine-looking little fellow,
and I should think an intelligent and amiable kind of boy." "Yes," he
said, "yes; he can strike from the shoulder pretty well, too. I had to
stop him the other day, indulging in that exercise." Well, I said to
myself, we have not yet reached the heaven on earth which I was fancying
might be embosomed in this peaceful-looking hollow. Youthful angels can
hardly be in the habit of striking from the shoulder. But the well-known
phrase, belonging to the pugilist rather than to the priest, brought me
back from the ideal world into which my imagination had wandered.