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 Master paused and fell into a deep thinking fit, as he does
sometimes. He had had his own say, it is true, but he had established
his character as a listener to my own perfect satisfaction, for I, too,
was conscious of having preached with a certain prolixity.

--I am always troubled when I think of my very limited mathematical
capacities. It seems as if every well-organized mind should be able to
handle numbers and quantities through their symbols to an indefinite
extent; and yet, I am puzzled by what seems to a clever boy with a turn
for calculation as plain as counting his fingers. I don't think any man
feels well grounded in knowledge unless he has a good basis of
mathematical certainties, and knows how to deal with them and apply them
to every branch of knowledge where they can come in to advantage.

Our Young Astronomer is known for his mathematical ability, and I asked
him what he thought was the difficulty in the minds that are weak in that
particular direction, while they may be of remarkable force in other
provinces of thought, as is notoriously the case with some men of great
distinction in science.

The young man smiled and wrote a few letters and symbols on a piece of
paper.---Can you see through that at once?--he said.

I puzzled over it for some minutes and gave it up.

--He said, as I returned it to him, You have heard military men say that
such a person had an eye for country, have n't you? One man will note
all the landmarks, keep the points of compass in his head, observe how
the streams run, in short, carry a map in his brain of any region that he
has marched or galloped through. Another man takes no note of any of
these things; always follows somebody else's lead when he can, and gets
lost if he is left to himself; a mere owl in daylight. Just so some men
have an eye for an equation, and would read at sight the one that you
puzzled over. It is told of Sir Isaac Newton that he required no
demonstration of the propositions in Euclid's Geometry, but as soon as he
had read the enunciation the solution or answer was plain at once. The
power may be cultivated, but I think it is to a great degree a natural
gift, as is the eye for color, as is the ear for music.

--I think I could read equations readily enough,--I said,--if I could
only keep my attention fixed on them; and I think I could keep my
attention on them if I were imprisoned in a thinking-cell, such as the
Creative Intelligence shapes for its studio when at its divinest work.

The young man's lustrous eyes opened very widely as he asked me to
explain what I meant.

--What is the Creator's divinest work?--I asked.

--Is there anything more divine than the sun; than a sun with its planets
revolving about it, warming them, lighting them, and giving conscious
life to the beings that move on them?

--You agree, then, that conscious life is the grand aim and end of all
this vast mechanism. Without life that could feel and enjoy, the
splendors and creative energy would all be thrown away. You know
Harvey's saying, omnia animalia ex ovo,--all animals come from an egg.
You ought to know it, for the great controversy going on about
spontaneous generation has brought it into special prominence lately.
Well, then, the ovum, the egg, is, to speak in human phrase, the
Creator's more private and sacred studio, for his magnum opus. Now, look
at a hen's egg, which is a convenient one to study, because it is large
enough and built solidly enough to look at and handle easily. That would
be the form I would choose for my thinking-cell. Build me an oval with
smooth, translucent walls, and put me in the centre of it with Newton's
"Principia" or Kant's "Kritik," and I think I shall develop "an eye for
an equation," as you call it, and a capacity for an abstraction.

But do tell me,--said the Astronomer, a little incredulously,--what there
is in that particular form which is going to help you to be a
mathematician or a metaphysician?

--It is n't help I want, it is removing hindrances. I don't want to see
anything to draw off my attention. I don't want a cornice, or an angle,
or anything but a containing curve. I want diffused light and no single
luminous centre to fix my eye, and so distract my mind from its one
object of contemplation. The metaphysics of attention have hardly been
sounded to their depths. The mere fixing the look on any single object
for a long time may produce very strange effects. Gibbon's well-known
story of the monks of Mount Athos and their contemplative practice is
often laughed over, but it has a meaning. They were to shut the door of
the cell, recline the beard and chin on the breast, and contemplate the
abdominal centre.

"At first all will be dark and comfortless; but if you persevere day and
night, you will feel an ineffable joy; and no sooner has the soul
discovered the place of the heart, than it is involved in a mystic and
ethereal light." And Mr. Braid produces absolute anaesthesia, so that
surgical operations can be performed without suffering to the patient,
only by making him fix his eyes and his mind on a single object; and
Newton is said to have said, as you remember, "I keep the subject
constantly before me, and wait till the first dawnings open slowly by
little and little into a full and clear light." These are different, but
certainly very wonderful, instances of what can be done by attention.
But now suppose that your mind is in its nature discursive, erratic,
subject to electric attractions and repulsions, volage; it may be
impossible for you to compel your attention except by taking away all
external disturbances. I think the poets have an advantage and a
disadvantage as compared with the steadier-going people. Life is so
vivid to the poet, that he is too eager to seize and exhaust its
multitudinous impressions. Like Sindbad in the valley of precious
stones, he wants to fill his pockets with diamonds, but, lo! there is a
great ruby like a setting sun in its glory, and a sapphire that, like
Bryant's blue gentian, seems to have dropped from the cerulean walls of
heaven, and a nest of pearls that look as if they might be unhatched
angel's eggs, and so he hardly knows what to seize, and tries for too
many, and comes out of the enchanted valley with more gems than he can
carry, and those that he lets fall by the wayside we call his poems. You
may change the image a thousand ways to show you how hard it is to make a
mathematician or a logician out of a poet. He carries the tropics with
him wherever he goes; he is in the true sense felius naturae, and Nature
tempts him, as she tempts a child walking through a garden where all the
finest fruits are hanging over him and dropping round him, where

The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon (his) mouth do crush their wine,
The nectarine and curious peach,
Into (his) hands themselves do reach;

and he takes a bite out of the sunny side of this and the other, and,
ever stimulated and never satisfied, is hurried through the garden, and,
before he knows it, finds himself at an iron gate which opens outward,
and leaves the place he knows and loves--

--For one he will perhaps soon learn to love and know better,--said the
Master.---But I can help you out with another comparison, not quite so
poetical as yours. Why did not you think of a railway-station, where the
cars stop five minutes for refreshments? Is n't that a picture of the
poet's hungry and hurried feast at the banquet of life? The traveller
flings himself on the bewildering miscellany of delicacies spread before
him, the various tempting forms of ambrosia and seducing draughts of
nectar, with the same eager hurry and restless ardor that you describe in
the poet. Dear me! If it wasn't for All aboard! that summons of the
deaf conductor which tears one away from his half-finished sponge-cake
and coffee, how I, who do not call myself a poet, but only a questioner,
should have enjoyed a good long stop--say a couple of thousand years--at
this way-station on the great railroad leading to the unknown terminus!

--You say you are not a poet,--I said, after a little pause, in which I
suppose both of us were thinking where the great railroad would land us
after carrying us into the dark tunnel, the farther end of which no man
has seen and taken a return train to bring us news about it,--you say you
are not a poet, and yet it seems to me you have some of the elements
which go to make one.

--I don't think you mean to flatter me,--the Master answered,--and, what
is more, for I am not afraid to be honest with you, I don't think you do
flatter me. I have taken the inventory of my faculties as calmly as if I
were an appraiser. I have some of the qualities, perhaps I may say many
of the qualities, that make a man a poet, and yet I am not one. And in
the course of a pretty wide experience of men--and women--(the Master
sighed, I thought, but perhaps I was mistaken)--I have met a good many
poets who were not rhymesters and a good many rhymesters who were not
poets. So I am only one of the Voiceless, that I remember one of you
singers had some verses about. I think there is a little music in me, but
it has not found a voice, and it never will. If I should confess the
truth, there is no mere earthly immortality that I envy so much as the
poet's. If your name is to live at all, it is so much more to have it
live in people's hearts than only in their brains! I don't know that
one's eyes fill with tears when he thinks of the famous inventor of
logarithms, but song of Burns's or a hymn of Charles Wesley's goes
straight to your heart, and you can't help loving both of them, the
sinner as well as the saint. The works of other men live, but their
personality dies out of their labors; the poet, who reproduces himself in
his creation, as no other artist does or can, goes down to posterity with
all his personality blended with whatever is imperishable in his song.
We see nothing of the bees that built the honeycomb and stored it with
its sweets, but we can trace the veining in the wings of insects that
flitted through the forests which are now coal-beds, kept unchanging in
the amber that holds them; and so the passion of Sappho, the tenderness
of Simonides, the purity of holy George Herbert, the lofty
contemplativeness of James Shirley, are before us to-day as if they were
living, in a few tears of amber verse. It seems, when one reads,

"Sweet day! so cool, so calm, so bright,"

or,

"The glories of our birth and state,"

as if it were not a very difficult matter to gain immortality,--such an
immortality at least as a perishable language can give. A single lyric
is enough, if one can only find in his soul and finish in his intellect
one of those jewels fit to sparkle "on the stretched forefinger of all
time." A coin, a ring, a string of verses. These last, and hardly
anything else does. Every century is an overloaded ship that must sink
at last with most of its cargo. The small portion of its crew that get
on board the new vessel which takes them off don't pretend to save a
great many of the bulky articles. But they must not and will not leave
behind the hereditary jewels of the race; and if you have found and cut a
diamond, were it only a spark with a single polished facet, it will stand
a better chance of being saved from the wreck than anything, no matter
what, that wants much room for stowage.

The pyramids last, it is true, but most of them have forgotten their
builders' names. But the ring of Thothmes III., who reigned some
fourteen hundred years before our era, before Homer sang, before the
Argonauts sailed, before Troy was built, is in the possession of Lord
Ashburnham, and proclaims the name of the monarch who wore it more than
three thousand years ago. The gold coins with the head of Alexander the
Great are some of them so fresh one might think they were newer than much
of the silver currency we were lately handling. As we have been quoting
from the poets this morning, I will follow the precedent, and give some
lines from an epistle of Pope to Addison after the latter had written,
but not yet published, his Dialogue on Medals. Some of these lines have
been lingering in my memory for a great many years, but I looked at the
original the other day and was so pleased with them that I got them by
heart. I think you will say they are singularly pointed and elegant.

"Ambition sighed; she found it vain to trust
The faithless column and the crumbling bust;
Huge moles, whose shadows stretched from shore to shore,
Their ruins perished, and their place no more!
Convinced, she now contracts her vast design,
And all her triumphs shrink into a coin.
A narrow orb each crowded conquest keeps,
Beneath her palm here sad Judaea weeps;
Now scantier limits the proud arch confine,
And scarce are seen the prostrate Nile or Rhine;
A small Euphrates through the piece is rolled,
And little eagles wave their wings in gold."

It is the same thing in literature. Write half a dozen folios full of
other people's ideas (as all folios are pretty sure to be), and you serve
as ballast to the lower shelves of a library, about as like to be
disturbed as the kentledge in the hold of a ship. Write a story, or a
dozen stories, and your book will be in demand like an oyster while it is
freshly opened, and after tha--. The highways of literature are spread
over with the shells of dead novels, each of which has been swallowed at
a mouthful by the public, and is done with. But write a volume of poems.
No matter if they are all bad but one, if that one is very good. It will
carry your name down to posterity like the ring of Thothmes, like the
coin of Alexander. I don't suppose one would care a great deal about it
a hundred or a thousand years after he is dead, but I don't feel quite
sure. It seems as if, even in heaven, King David might remember "The
Lord is my Shepherd" with a certain twinge of earthly pleasure. But we
don't know, we don't know.

--What in the world can have become of That Boy and his popgun while all
this somewhat extended sermonizing was going on? I don't wonder you ask,
beloved Reader, and I suppose I must tell you how we got on so long
without interruption. Well, the plain truth is, the youngster was
contemplating his gastric centre, like the monks of Mount Athos, but in a
less happy state of mind than those tranquil recluses, in consequence of
indulgence in the heterogeneous assortment of luxuries procured with the
five-cent piece given him by the kind-hearted old Master. But you need
not think I am going to tell you every time his popgun goes off, making a
Selah of him whenever I want to change the subject. Occasionally he was
ill-timed in his artillery practice and ignominiously rebuked, sometimes
he was harmlessly playful and nobody minded him, but every now and then
he came in so apropos that I am morally certain he gets a hint from
somebody who watches the course of the conversation, and means through
him to have a hand in it and stop any of us when we are getting prosy.
But in consequence of That Boy's indiscretion, we were without a check
upon our expansiveness, and ran on in the way you have observed and may
be disposed to find fault with.

One other thing the Master said before we left the table, after our long
talk of that day.

--I have been tempted sometimes,--said he, to envy the immediate triumphs
of the singer. He enjoys all that praise can do for him and at the very
moment of exerting his talent. And the singing women! Once in a while,
in the course of my life, I have found myself in the midst of a tulip-bed
of full-dressed, handsome women in all their glory, and when some one
among them has shaken her gauzy wings, and sat down before the piano, and
then, only giving the keys a soft touch now and then to support her
voice, has warbled some sweet, sad melody intertwined with the longings
or regrets of some tender-hearted poet, it has seemed to me that so to
hush the rustling of the silks and silence the babble of the buds, as
they call the chicks of a new season, and light up the flame of romance
in cold hearts, in desolate ones, in old burnt-out ones,--like mine, I
was going to say, but I won't, for it isn't so, and you may laugh to hear
me say it isn't so, if you like,--was perhaps better than to be
remembered a few hundred years by a few perfect stanzas, when your
gravestone is standing aslant, and your name is covered over with a
lichen as big as a militia colonel's cockade, and nobody knows or cares
enough about you to scrape it off and set the tipsy old slate-stone
upright again.

--I said nothing in reply to this, for I was thinking of a sweet singer
to whose voice I had listened in its first freshness, and which is now
only an echo in my memory. If any reader of the periodical in which
these conversations are recorded can remember so far back as the first
year of its publication, he will find among the papers contributed by a
friend not yet wholly forgotten a few verses, lively enough in their way,
headed "The Boys." The sweet singer was one of this company of college
classmates, the constancy of whose friendship deserves a better tribute
than the annual offerings, kindly meant, as they are, which for many
years have not been wanting at their social gatherings. The small
company counts many noted personages on its list, as is well known to
those who are interested in such local matters, but it is not known that
every fifth man of the whole number now living is more or less of a
poet,--using that word with a generous breadth of significance. But it
should seem that the divine gift it implies is more freely dispensed than
some others, for while there are (or were, for one has taken his Last
Degree) eight musical quills, there was but one pair of lips which could
claim any special consecration to vocal melody. Not that one that should
undervalue the half-recitative of doubtful barytones, or the brilliant
escapades of slightly unmanageable falsettos, or the concentrated efforts
of the proprietors of two or three effective notes, who may be observed
lying in wait for them, and coming down on them with all their might, and
the look on their countenances of "I too am a singer." But the voice
that led all, and that all loved to listen to, the voice that was at once
full, rich, sweet, penetrating, expressive, whose ample overflow drowned
all the imperfections and made up for all the shortcomings of the others,
is silent henceforth forevermore for all earthly listeners.

And these were the lines that one of "The Boys," as they have always
called themselves for ever so many years, read at the first meeting after
the voice which had never failed them was hushed in the stillness of
death.

J. A.

1871.

One memory trembles on our lips
It throbs in every breast;
In tear-dimmed eyes, in mirth's eclipse,
The shadow stands confessed.

O silent voice, that cheered so long
Our manhood's marching day,
Without thy breath of heavenly song,
How weary seems the way!

Vain every pictured phrase to tell
Our sorrowing hearts' desire;
The shattered harp, the broken shell,
The silent unstrung lyre;

For youth was round us while he sang;
It glowed in every tone;
With bridal chimes the echoes rang,
And made the past our own.

O blissful dream! Our nursery joys
We know must have an end,
But love and friendships broken toys
May God's good angels mend!

The cheering smile, the voice of mirth
And laughter's gay surprise
That please the children born of earth,
Why deem that Heaven denies?

Methinks in that refulgent sphere
That knows not sun or moon,
An earth-born saint might long to hear
One verse of "Bonny Doon";

Or walking through the streets of gold
In Heaven's unclouded light,
His lips recall the song of old
And hum "The sky is bright."

And can we smile when thou art dead?
Ah, brothers, even so!
The rose of summer will be red,
In spite of winter's snow.

Thou wouldst not leave us all in gloom
Because thy song is still,
Nor blight the banquet-garland's bloom
With grief's untimely chill.

The sighing wintry winds complain,
The singing bird has flown,
--Hark! heard I not that ringing strain,
That clear celestial tone?

How poor these pallid phrases seem,
How weak this tinkling line,
As warbles through my waking dream
That angel voice of thine!

Thy requiem asks a sweeter lay;
It falters on my tongue;
For all we vainly strive to say,
Thou shouldst thyself have sung!




V

I fear that I have done injustice in my conversation and my report of it
to a most worthy and promising young man whom I should be very sorry to
injure in any way. Dr. Benjamin Franklin got hold of my account of my
visit to him, and complained that I had made too much of the expression
he used. He did not mean to say that he thought I was suffering from the
rare disease he mentioned, but only that the color reminded him of it.
It was true that he had shown me various instruments, among them one for
exploring the state of a part by means of a puncture, but he did not
propose to make use of it upon my person. In short, I had colored the
story so as to make him look ridiculous.

--I am afraid I did,--I said,--but was n't I colored myself so as to look
ridiculous? I've heard it said that people with the jaundice see
everything yellow; perhaps I saw things looking a little queerly, with
that black and blue spot I could n't account for threatening to make a
colored man and brother of me. But I am sorry if I have done you any
wrong. I hope you won't lose any patients by my making a little fun of
your meters and scopes and contrivances. They seem so odd to us outside
people. Then the idea of being bronzed all over was such an alarming
suggestion. But I did not mean to damage your business, which I trust is
now considerable, and I shall certainly come to you again if I have need
of the services of a physician. Only don't mention the names of any
diseases in English or Latin before me next time. I dreamed about cutis
oenea half the night after I came to see you.

Dr. Benjamin took my apology very pleasantly. He did not want to be
touchy about it, he said, but he had his way to make in the world, and
found it a little hard at first, as most young men did. People were
afraid to trust them, no matter how much they knew. One of the old
doctors asked him to come in and examine a patient's heart for him the
other day. He went with him accordingly, and when they stood by the
bedside, he offered his stethoscope to the old doctor. The old doctor
took it and put the wrong end to his ear and the other to the patient's
chest, and kept it there about two minutes, looking all the time as wise
as an old owl. Then he, Dr. Benjamin, took it and applied it properly,
and made out where the trouble was in no time at all. But what was the
use of a young man's pretending to know anything in the presence of an
old owl? I saw by their looks, he said, that they all thought I used
the, stethoscope wrong end up, and was nothing but a 'prentice hand to
the old doctor.

--I am much pleased to say that since Dr. Benjamin has had charge of a
dispensary district, and been visiting forty or fifty patients a day, I
have reason to think he has grown a great deal more practical than when I
made my visit to his office. I think I was probably one of his first
patients, and that he naturally made the most of me. But my second trial
was much more satisfactory. I got an ugly cut from the carving-knife in
an affair with a goose of iron constitution in which I came off second
best. I at once adjourned with Dr. Benjamin to his small office, and put
myself in his hands. It was astonishing to see what a little experience
of miscellaneous practice had done for him. He did not ask me anymore
questions about my hereditary predispositions on the paternal and
maternal sides. He did not examine me with the stethoscope or the
laryngoscope. He only strapped up my cut, and informed me that it would
speedily get well by the "first intention,"--an odd phrase enough, but
sounding much less formidable than cutis oenea.

I am afraid I have had something of the French prejudice which embodies
itself in the maxim "young surgeon, old physician." But a young
physician who has been taught by great masters of the profession, in
ample hospitals, starts in his profession knowing more than some old
doctors have learned in a lifetime. Give him a little time to get the
use of his wits in emergencies, and to know the little arts that do so
much for a patient's comfort,--just as you give a young sailor time to
get his sea-legs on and teach his stomach to behave itself,--and he will
do well enough.