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.


A Club is the next best thing to this, strung like a harp, with
about a dozen ringing intelligences, each answering to some chord
of the macrocosm. They do well to dine together once in a while.
A dinner-party made up of such elements is the last triumph of
civilization over barbarism. Nature and art combine to charm the
senses; the equatorial zone of the system is soothed by
well-studied artifices; the faculties are off duty, and fall into
their natural attitudes; you see wisdom in slippers and science in a
short jacket.

The whole force of conversation depends on how much you can take
for granted. Vulgar chess-players have to play their game out;
nothing short of the brutality of an actual checkmate satisfies
their dull apprehensions. But look at two masters of that noble
game! White stands well enough, so far as you can see; but Red
says, Mate in six moves;--White looks,--nods;--the game is over.
Just so in talking with first-rate men; especially when they are
good-natured and expansive, as they are apt to be at table. That
blessed clairvoyance which sees into things without opening them,
--that glorious license, which, having shut the door and driven the
reporter from its key-hole, calls upon Truth, majestic virgin! to
get off from her pedestal and drop her academic poses, and take a
festive garland and the vacant place on the medius lectus,--that
carnival-shower of questions and replies and comments, large axioms
bowled over the mahogany like bomb-shells from professional
mortars, and explosive wit dropping its trains of many-colored
fire, and the mischief-making rain of bon-bons pelting everybody
that shows himself,--the picture of a truly intellectual banquet is
one which the old Divinities might well have attempted to reproduce
in their--

--"Oh, oh, oh!" cried the young fellow whom they call John,--"that
is from one of your lectures!"

I know it, I replied,--I concede it, I confess it, I proclaim it.


"The trail of the serpent is over them all!"


All lecturers, all professors, all schoolmasters, have ruts and
grooves in their minds into which their conversation is perpetually
sliding. Did you never, in riding through the woods of a still
June evening, suddenly feel that you had passed into a warm stratum
of air, and in a minute or two strike the chill layer of atmosphere
beyond? Did you never, in cleaving the green waters of the Back
Bay,--where the Provincial blue-noses are in the habit of beating
the "Metropolitan" boat-clubs,--find yourself in a tepid streak, a
narrow, local gulf-stream, a gratuitous warm-bath a little
underdone, through which your glistening shoulders soon flashed, to
bring you back to the cold realities of full-sea temperature? Just
so, in talking with any of the characters above referred to, one
not unfrequently finds a sudden change in the style of the
conversation. The lack-lustre eye rayless as a Beacon-Street
door-plate in August, all at once fills with light; the face flings
itself wide open like the church-portals when the bride and
bridegroom enter; the little man grows in stature before your eyes,
like the small prisoner with hair on end, beloved yet dreaded of
early childhood; you were talking with a dwarf and an imbecile,
--you have a giant and a trumpet-tongued angel before you!--Nothing
but a streak out of a fifty-dollar lecture.--As when, at some
unlooked-for moment, the mighty fountain-column springs into the
air before the astonished passer-by,--silver-footed, diamond-
crowned, rainbow-scarfed,--from the bosom of that fair sheet,
sacred to the hymns of quiet batrachians at home, and the epigrams
of a less amiable and less elevated order of reptilia in other
latitudes.

--Who was that person that was so abused some time since for saying
that in the conflict of two races our sympathies naturally go with
the higher? No matter who he was. Now look at what is going on in
India,--a white, superior "Caucasian" race, against a dark-skinned,
inferior, but still "Caucasian" race,--and where are English and
American sympathies? We can't stop to settle all the doubtful
questions; all we know is, that the brute nature is sure to come
out most strongly in the lower race, and it is the general law that
the human side of humanity should treat the brutal side as it does
the same nature in the inferior animals,--tame it or crush it. The
India mail brings stories of women and children outraged and
murdered; the royal stronghold is in the hands of the babe-killers.
England takes down the Map of the World, which she has girdled with
empire, and makes a correction thus: [DELPHI] Dele. The civilized
world says, Amen.

--Do not think, because I talk to you of many subjects briefly,
that I should not find it much lazier work to take each one of them
and dilute it down to an essay. Borrow some of my old college
themes and water my remarks to suit yourselves, as the Homeric
heroes did with their melas oinos,--that black sweet, syrupy wine
(?) which they used to alloy with three parts or more of the
flowing stream. [Could it have been melasses, as Webster and his
provincials spell it,--or Molossa's, as dear old smattering,
chattering, would-be-College-President, Cotton Mather, has it in
the "Magnalia"? Ponder thereon, ye small antiquaries who make
barn-door-fowl flights of learning in "Notes and Queries!"--ye
Historical Societies, in one of whose venerable triremes I, too,
ascend the stream of time, while other hands tug at the oars!--ye
Amines of parasitical literature, who pick up your grains of
native-grown food with a bodkin, having gorged upon less honest
fare, until, like the great minds Goethe speaks of, you have "made
a Golgotha" of your pages!--ponder thereon!]

--Before you go, this morning, I want to read you a copy of verses.
You will understand by the title that they are written in an
imaginary character. I don't doubt they will fit some family-man
well enough. I send it forth as "Oak Hall" projects a coat, on a
priori grounds of conviction that it will suit somebody. There is
no loftier illustration of faith than this. It believes that a
soul has been clad in flesh; that tender parents have fed and
nurtured it; that its mysterious compages or frame-work has
survived its myriad exposures and reached the stature of maturity;
that the Man, now self-determining, has given in his adhesion to
the traditions and habits of the race in favor of artificial
clothing; that he will, having all the world to choose from, select
the very locality where this audacious generalization has been
acted upon. It builds a garment cut to the pattern of an Idea, and
trusts that Nature will model a material shape to fit it. There is
a prophecy in every seam, and its pockets are full of inspiration.
--Now hear the verses.


THE OLD MAN DREAMS.


O for one hour of youthful joy!
Give back my twentieth spring!
I'd rather laugh a bright-haired boy
Than reign a gray-beard king!

Off with the wrinkled spoils of age!
Away with learning's crown!
Tear out life's wisdom-written page,
And dash its trophies down!

One moment let my life-blood stream
From boyhood's fount of flame!
Give me one giddy, reeling dream
Of life all love and fame!

--My listening angel heard the prayer,
And calmly smiling, said,
"If I but touch thy silvered hair,
Thy hasty wish hath sped.

"But is there nothing in thy track
To bid thee fondly stay,
While the swift seasons hurry back
To find the wished-for day?"

--Ah, truest soul of womankind!
Without thee, what were life?
One bliss I cannot leave behind:
I'll take--my--precious wife!

--The angel took a sapphire pen
And wrote in rainbow dew,
"The man would be a boy again,
And be a husband too!"

--"And is there nothing yet unsaid
Before the change appears?
Remember, all their gifts have fled
With those dissolving years!"

Why, yes; for memory would recall
My fond paternal joys;
I could not bear to leave them all;
I'll take--my--girl--and--boys!

The smiling angel dropped his pen,--
"Why this will never do;
The man would be a boy again,
And be a father too!"

And so I laughed,--my laughter woke
The household with its noise,--
And wrote my dream, when morning broke,
To please the gray-haired boys.



CHAPTER IV



[I am so well pleased with my boarding-house that I intend to
remain there, perhaps for years. Of course I shall have a great
many conversations to report, and they will necessarily be of
different tone and on different subjects. The talks are like the
breakfasts,--sometimes dipped toast, and sometimes dry. You must
take them as they come. How can I do what all these letters ask me
to? No. 1. want serious and earnest thought. No. 2. (letter
smells of bad cigars) must have more jokes; wants me to tell a
"good storey" which he has copied out for me. (I suppose two
letters before the word "good" refer to some Doctor of Divinity who
told the story.) No. 3. (in female hand)--more poetry. No. 4.
wants something that would be of use to a practical man.
(Prahctical mahn he probably pronounces it.) No. 5. (gilt-edged,
sweet-scented)--"more sentiment,"--"heart's outpourings."--

My dear friends, one and all, I can do nothing but report such
remarks as I happen to have made at our breakfast-table. Their
character will depend on many accidents,--a good deal on the
particular persons in the company to whom they were addressed. It
so happens that those which follow were mainly intended for the
divinity-student and the school-mistress; though others, whom I
need not mention, saw to interfere, with more or less propriety, in
the conversation. This is one of my privileges as a talker; and of
course, if I was not talking for our whole company, I don't expect
all the readers of this periodical to be interested in my notes of
what was said. Still, I think there may be a few that will rather
like this vein,--possibly prefer it to a livelier one,--serious
young men, and young women generally, in life's roseate parenthesis
from--years of age to--inclusive.

Another privilege of talking is to misquote.--Of course it wasn't
Proserpina that actually cut the yellow hair,--but Iris. (As I
have since told you) it was the former lady's regular business, but
Dido had used herself ungenteelly, and Madame d'Enfer stood firm on
the point of etiquette. So the bathycolpian Here--Juno, in Latin
--sent down Iris instead. But I was mightily pleased to see that one
of the gentlemen that do the heavy articles for the celebrated
"Oceanic Miscellany" misquoted Campbell's line without any excuse.
"Waft us HOME the MESSAGE" of course it ought to be. Will he be
duly grateful for the correction?]

--The more we study the body and the mind, the more we find both to
be governed, not by, but ACCORDING TO laws, such as we observe in
the larger universe.--You think you know all about WALKING,--don't
you, now? Well, how do you suppose your lower limbs are held to
your body? They are sucked up by two cupping vessels, ("cotyloid"
--cup-like--cavities,) and held there as long as you live, and
longer. At any rate, you think you move them backward and forward
at such a rate as your will determines, don't you?--On the
contrary, they swing just as any other pendulums swing, at a fixed
rate, determined by their length. You can alter this by muscular
power, as you can take hold of the pendulum of a clock and make it
move faster or slower; but your ordinary gait is timed by the same
mechanism as the movements of the solar system.

[My friend, the Professor, told me all this, referring me to
certain German physiologists by the name of Weber for proof of the
facts, which, however, he said he had often verified. I
appropriated it to my own use; what can one do better than this,
when one has a friend that tells him anything worth remembering?

The Professor seems to think that man and the general powers of the
universe are in partnership. Some one was saying that it had cost
nearly half a million to move the Leviathan only so far as they had
got it already.--Why,--said the Professor,--they might have hired
an EARTHQUAKE for less money!]

Just as we find a mathematical rule at the bottom of many of the
bodily movements, just so thought may be supposed to have its
regular cycles. Such or such a thought comes round periodically,
in its turn. Accidental suggestions, however, so far interfere
with the regular cycles, that we may find them practically beyond
our power of recognition. Take all this for what it is worth, but
at any rate you will agree that there are certain particular
thoughts that do not come up once a day, nor once a week, but that
a year would hardly go round without your having them pass through
your mind. Here is one which comes up at intervals in this way.
Some one speaks of it, and there is an instant and eager smile of
assent in the listener or listeners. Yes, indeed; they have often
been struck by it.

ALL AT ONCE A CONVICTION FLASHES THROUGH US THAT WE HAVE BEEN IN
THE SAME PRECISE CIRCUMSTANCES AS AT THE PRESENT INSTANT, ONCE OR
MANY TIMES BEFORE.

O, dear, yes!--said one of the company,--everybody has had that
feeling.

The landlady didn't know anything about such notions; it was an
idee in folks' heads, she expected.

The schoolmistress said, in a hesitating sort of way, that she knew
the feeling well, and didn't like to experience it; it made her
think she was a ghost, sometimes.

The young fellow whom they call John said he knew all about it; he
had just lighted a cheroot the other day, when a tremendous
conviction all at once came over him that he had done just that
same thing ever so many times before. I looked severely at him,
and his countenance immediately fell--ON THE SIDE TOWARD ME; I
cannot answer for the other, for he can wink and laugh with either
half of his face without the other half's knowing it.

--I have noticed--I went on to say--the following circumstances
connected with these sudden impressions. First, that the condition
which seems to be the duplicate of a former one is often very
trivial,--one that might have presented itself a hundred times.
Secondly, that the impression is very evanescent, and that it is
rarely, if ever, recalled by any voluntary effort, at least after
any time has elapsed. Thirdly, that there is a disinclination to
record the circumstances, and a sense of incapacity to reproduce
the state of mind in words. Fourthly, I have often felt that the
duplicate condition had not only occurred once before, but that it
was familiar and, as it seemed, habitual. Lastly, I have had the
same convictions in my dreams.

How do I account for it?--Why, there are several ways that I can
mention, and you may take your choice. The first is that which the
young lady hinted at;--that these flashes are sudden recollections
of a previous existence. I don't believe that; for I remember a
poor student I used to know told me he had such a conviction one
day when he was blacking his boots, and I can't think he had ever
lived in another world where they use Day and Martin.

Some think that Dr. Wigan's doctrine of the brain's being a double
organ, its hemispheres working together like the two eyes, accounts
for it. One of the hemispheres hangs fire, they suppose, and the
small interval between the perceptions of the nimble and the
sluggish half seems an indefinitely long period, and therefore the
second perception appears to be the copy of another, ever so old.
But even allowing the centre of perception to be double, I can see
no good reason for supposing this indefinite lengthening of the
time, nor any analogy that bears it out. It seems to me most
likely that the coincidence of circumstances is very partial, but
that we take this partial resemblance for identity, as we
occasionally do resemblances of persons. A momentary posture of
circumstances is so far like some preceding one that we accept it
as exactly the same, just as we accost a stranger occasionally,
mistaking him for a friend. The apparent similarity may be owing
perhaps, quite as much to the mental state at the time, as to the
outward circumstances.

--Here is another of these curiously recurring remarks. I have
said it, and heard it many times, and occasionally met with
something like it in books,--somewhere in Bulwer's novels, I think,
and in one of the works of Mr. Olmsted, I know.

MEMORY, IMAGINATION, OLD SENTIMENTS AND ASSOCIATIONS, ARE MORE
READILY REACHED THROUGH THE SENSE OF SMELL THAN BY ALMOST ANY OTHER
CHANNEL.

Of course the particular odors which act upon each person's
susceptibilities differ.--O, yes! I will tell you some of mine.
The smell of PHOSPHORUS is one of them. During a year or two of
adolescence I used to be dabbling in chemistry a good deal, and as
about that time I had my little aspirations and passions like
another, some of these things got mixed up with each other:
orange-colored fumes of nitrous acid, and visions as bright and
transient; reddening litmus-paper, and blushing cheeks;--eheu!


"Soles occidere et redire possunt,"


but there is no reagent that will redden the faded roses of
eighteen hundred and--spare them! But, as I was saying, phosphorus
fires this train of associations in an instant; its luminous vapors
with their penetrating odor throw me into a trance; it comes to me
in a double sense "trailing clouds of glory." Only the confounded
Vienna matches, ohne phosphor-geruch, have worn my sensibilities a
little.

Then there is the MARIGOLD. When I was of smallest dimensions, and
wont to ride impacted between the knees of fond parental pair, we
would sometimes cross the bridge to the next village-town and stop
opposite a low, brown, "gambrel-roofed" cottage. Out of it would
come one Sally, sister of its swarthy tenant, swarthy herself,
shady-lipped, sad-voiced, and, bending over her flower-bed, would
gather a "posy," as she called it, for the little boy. Sally lies
in the churchyard with a slab of blue slate at her head, lichen-
crusted, and leaning a little within the last few years. Cottage,
garden-beds, posies, grenadier-like rows of seedling onions,
--stateliest of vegetables,--all are gone, but the breath of a
marigold brings them all back to me.

Perhaps the herb EVERLASTING, the fragrant immortelle of our autumn
fields, has the most suggestive odor to me of all those that set me
dreaming. I can hardly describe the strange thoughts and emotions
that come to me as I inhale the aroma of its pale, dry, rustling
flowers. A something it has of sepulchral spicery, as if it had
been brought from the core of some great pyramid, where it had lain
on the breast of a mummied Pharaoh. Something, too, of immortality
in the sad, faint sweetness lingering so long in its lifeless
petals. Yet this does not tell why it fills my eyes with tears and
carries me in blissful thought to the banks of asphodel that border
the River of Life.

--I should not have talked so much about these personal
susceptibilities, if I had not a remark to make about them which I
believe is a new one. It is this. There may be a physical reason
for the strange connection between the sense of smell and the mind.
The olfactory nerve--so my friend, the Professor, tells me--is the
only one directly connected with the hemispheres of the brain, the
parts in which, as we have every reason to believe, the
intellectual processes are performed. To speak more truly the
olfactory "nerve" is not a nerve at all, he says, but a part of the
brain, in intimate connection with its anterior lobes. Whether
this anatomical arrangement is at the bottom of the facts I have
mentioned, I will not decide, but it is curious enough to be worth
remembering. Contrast the sense of taste, as a source of
suggestive impressions, with that of smell. Now the Professor
assures me that you will find the nerve of taste has no immediate
connection with the brain proper, but only with the prolongation of
the spinal cord.

[The old gentleman opposite did not pay much attention, I think, to
this hypothesis of mine. But while I was speaking about the sense
of smell he nestled about in his seat, and presently succeeded in
getting out a large red bandanna handkerchief. Then he lurched a
little to the other side, and after much tribulation at last
extricated an ample round snuff-box. I looked as he opened it and
felt for the wonted pugil. Moist rappee, and a Tonka-bean lying
therein. I made the manual sign understood of all mankind that use
the precious dust, and presently my brain, too, responded to the
long unused stimulus--O boys,--that were,--actual papas and
possible grandpapas,--some of you with crowns like billiard-balls,
--some in locks of sable silvered, and some of silver sabled,--do
you remember, as you doze over this, those after-dinners at the
Trois Freres when the Scotch-plaided snuff-box went round, and the
dry Lundy-Foot tickled its way along into our happy sensoria? Then
it was that the Chambertin or the Clos Vougeot came in, slumbering
in its straw cradle. And one among you,--do you remember how he
would have a bit of ice always in his Burgundy, and sit tinkling it
against the sides of the bubble-like glass, saying that he
was hearing the cow-bells as he used to hear them, when the
deep-breathing kine came home at twilight from the huckleberry
pasture, in the old home a thousand leagues towards the sunset?]

Ah me! what strains and strophes of unwritten verse pulsate through
my soul when I open a certain closet in the ancient house where I
was born! On its shelves used to lie bundles of sweet-marjoram and
pennyroyal and lavender and mint and catnip; there apples were
stored until their seeds should grow black, which happy period
there were sharp little milk-teeth always ready to anticipate;
there peaches lay in the dark, thinking of the sunshine they had
lost, until, like the hearts of saints that dream of heaven in
their sorrow, they grew fragrant as the breath of angels. The
odorous echo of a score of dead summers lingers yet in those dim
recesses.

--Do I remember Byron's line about "striking the electric chain"?
--To be sure I do. I sometimes think the less the hint that stirs
the automatic machinery of association, the more easily this moves
us. What can be more trivial than that old story of opening the
folio Shakspeare that used to lie in some ancient English hall and
finding the flakes of Christmas pastry between its leaves, shut up
in them perhaps a hundred years ago? And, lo! as one looks on
these poor relics of a bygone generation, the universe changes in
the twinkling of an eye; old George the Second is back again, and
the elder Pitt is coming into power, and General Wolfe is a fine,
promising young man, and over the Channel they are pulling the
Sieur Damiens to pieces with wild horses, and across the Atlantic
the Indians are tomahawking Hirams and Jonathans and Jonases at
Fort William Henry; all the dead people who have been in the dust
so long--even to the stout-armed cook that made the pastry--are
alive again; the planet unwinds a hundred of its luminous coils,
and the precession of the equinoxes is retraced on the dial of
heaven! And all this for a bit of pie-crust!

--I will thank you for that pie,--said the provoking young fellow
whom I have named repeatedly. He looked at it for a moment, and
put his hands to his eyes as if moved.--I was thinking,--he said
indistinctly--

--How? What is't?--said our landlady.

--I was thinking--said he--who was king of England when this old
pie was baked,--and it made me feel bad to think how long he must
have been dead.

[Our landlady is a decent body, poor, and a widow, of course; cela
va sans dire. She told me her story once; it was as if a grain of
corn that had been ground and bolted had tried to individualize
itself by a special narrative. There was the wooing and the
wedding,--the start in life,--the disappointments,--the children
she had buried,--the struggle against fate,--the dismantling of
life, first of its small luxuries, and then of its comforts,--the
broken spirits,--the altered character of the one on whom she
leaned,--and at last the death that came and drew the black curtain
between her and all her earthly hopes.

I never laughed at my landlady after she had told me her story, but
I often cried,--not those pattering tears that run off the eaves
upon our neighbors' grounds, the stillicidium of self-conscious
sentiment, but those which steal noiselessly through their conduits
until they reach the cisterns lying round about the heart; those
tears that we weep inwardly with unchanging features;--such I did
shed for her often when the imps of the boarding-house Inferno
tugged at her soul with their red-hot pincers.]

Young man,--I said,--the pasty you speak lightly of is not old, but
courtesy to those who labor to serve us, especially if they are of
the weaker sex, is very old, and yet well worth retaining. May I
recommend to you the following caution, as a guide, whenever you
are dealing with a woman, or an artist, or a poet--if you are
handling an editor or politician, it is superfluous advice. I take
it from the back of one of those little French toys which contain
pasteboard figures moved by a small running stream of fine sand;
Benjamin Franklin will translate it for you: "Quoiqu'elle soit
tres solidement montee, il faut ne pas BRUTALISER la machine."--I
will thank you for the pie, if you please.