A review of Poems by Oliver Wendell Holmes.
IF any of our readers (and at times we fear it is the case with all) need
amusement and the wholesome alterative of a hearty laugh, we commend
them, not to Dr. Holmes the physician, but to Dr. Holmes the scholar, the
wit, and the humorist; not to the scientific medical professor's
barbarous Latin, but to his poetical prescriptions, given in choice old
Saxon. We have tried them, and are ready to give the Doctor certificates
of their efficacy.
Looking at the matter from the point of theory only, we should say that a
physician could not be otherwise than melancholy. A merry doctor! Why,
one might as well talk of a laughing death's-head,--the cachinnation of a
monk's _memento mori_. This life of ours is sorrowful enough at its best
estate; the brightest phase of it is "sicklied o'er with the pale cast"
of the future or the past. But it is the special vocation of the doctor
to look only upon the shadow; to turn away from the house of feasting and
go down to that of mourning; to breathe day after day the atmosphere of
wretchedness; to grow familiar with suffering; to look upon humanity
disrobed of its pride and glory, robbed of all its fictitious ornaments,
--weak, helpless, naked,--and undergoing the last fearful metempsychosis
from its erect and godlike image, the living temple of an enshrined
divinity, to the loathsome clod and the inanimate dust. Of what ghastly
secrets of moral and physical disease is he the depositary! There is woe
before him and behind him; he is hand and glove with misery by
prescription,--the ex officio gauger of the ills that flesh is heir to.
He has no home, unless it be at the bedside of the querulous, the
splenetic, the sick, and the dying. He sits down to carve his turkey,
and is summoned off to a post-mortem examination of another sort. All
the diseases which Milton's imagination embodied in the lazar-house dog
his footsteps and pluck at his doorbell. Hurrying from one place to
another at their beck, he knows nothing of the quiet comfort of the
"sleek-headed men who sleep o' nights." His wife, if he has one, has an
undoubted right to advertise him as a deserter of "bed and board." His
ideas of beauty, the imaginations of his brain, and the affections of his
heart are regulated and modified by the irrepressible associations of his
luckless profession. Woman as well as man is to him of the earth,
earthy. He sees incipient disease where the uninitiated see only
delicacy. A smile reminds him of his dental operations; a blushing cheek
of his hectic patients; pensive melancholy is dyspepsia; sentimentalism,
nervousness. Tell him of lovelorn hearts, of the "worm I' the bud," of
the mental impalement upon Cupid's arrow, like that of a giaour upon the
spear of a janizary, and he can only think of lack of exercise, of
tightlacing, and slippers in winter. Sheridan seems to have understood
all this, if we may judge from the lament of his Doctor, in St.
Patrick's Day, over his deceased helpmate. "Poor dear Dolly," says he.
"I shall never see her like again; such an arm for a bandage! veins that
seemed to invite the lancet! Then her skin,--smooth and white as a
gallipot; her mouth as round and not larger than that of a penny vial;
and her teeth,--none of your sturdy fixtures,--ache as they would, it was
only a small pull, and out they came. I believe I have drawn half a
score of her dear pearls. (Weeps.) But what avails her beauty? She has
gone, and left no little babe to hang like a label on papa's neck!"
So much for speculation and theory. In practice it is not so bad after
all. The grave-digger in Hamlet has his jokes and grim jests. We have
known many a jovial sexton; and we have heard clergymen laugh heartily at
small provocation close on the heel of a cool calculation that the great
majority of their fellow-creatures were certain of going straight to
perdition. Why, then, should not even the doctor have his fun? Nay, is
it not his duty to be merry, by main force if necessary? Solomon, who,
from his great knowledge of herbs, must have been no mean practitioner
for his day, tells us that "a merry heart doeth good like a medicine;"
and universal experience has confirmed the truth of his maxim. Hence it
is, doubtless, that we have so many anecdotes of facetious doctors,
distributing their pills and jokes together, shaking at the same time the
contents of their vials and the sides of their patients. It is merely
professional, a trick of the practice, unquestionably, in most cases; but
sometimes it is a "natural gift," like that of the "bonesetters," and
"scrofula strokers," and "cancer curers," who carry on a sort of guerilla
war with human maladies. Such we know to be the case with Dr. Holmes.
He was born for the "laughter cure," as certainly as Priessnitz was for
the "water cure," and has been quite as successful in his way, while his
prescriptions are infinitely more agreeable.
The volume now before us gives, in addition to the poems and lyrics
contained in the two previous editions, some hundred or more pages of the
later productions of the author, in the sprightly vein, and marked by the
brilliant fancy and felicitous diction for which the former were
noteworthy. His longest and most elaborate poem, _Urania_, is perhaps
the best specimen of his powers. Its general tone is playful and
humorous; but there are passages of great tenderness and pathos. Witness
the following, from a description of the city churchgoers. The whole
compass of our literature has few passages to equal its melody and
beauty.
"Down the chill street, which winds in gloomiest shade,
What marks betray yon solitary maid?
The cheek's red rose, that speaks of balmier air,
The Celtic blackness of her braided hair;
The gilded missal in her kerchief tied;
Poor Nora, exile from Killarney's side!
Sister in toil, though born of colder skies,
That left their azure in her downcast eyes,
See pallid Margaret, Labor's patient child,
Scarce weaned from home, a nursling of the wild,
Where white Katahdin o'er the horizon shines,
And broad Penobscot dashes through the pines;
Still, as she hastes, her careful fingers hold
The unfailing hymn-book in its cambric fold:
Six days at Drudgery's heavy wheel she stands,
The seventh sweet morning folds her weary hands.
Yes, child of suffering, thou mayst well be sure
He who ordained the Sabbath loved the poor."
This is but one of many passages, showing that the author is capable of
moving the heart as well as of tickling the fancy. There is no straining
for effect; simple, natural thoughts are expressed in simple and
perfectly transparent language.
_Terpsichore_, read at an annual dinner of the Phi Beta Kappa Society at
Cambridge, sparkles throughout with keen wit, quaint conceits, and satire
so good-natured that the subjects of it can enjoy it as heartily as their
neighbors. Witness this thrust at our German-English writers:--
"Essays so dark, Champollion might despair
To guess what mummy of a thought was there,
Where our poor English, striped with foreign phrase, Looks like a
zebra in a parson's chaise."