My dear Mr. Fields,--I doubt whether I shall feel well enough to go to
the club to-morrow, as I am somewhat feverish and sore-throaty to-day,
though I must crawl out to my lecture. Mr. Parkman and Professor
Wolcott Gibbs are to be voted for, you know.
President Eliot, who nominated Professor Gibbs, will, I suppose, urge
his claims if he thinks it necessary, or see that some one does it.
As for Mr. Francis Parkman, proposed by myself, I suppose his
reputation is too solidly fixed as a scholar and a writer to need any
words from me or others of his friends who may be present.
He has been a great sufferer from infirmities which do not prevent him
from being very good company, and which I have thought the good
company he would find at the Saturday Club would perhaps enable him to
forget for a while more readily. It has seemed to me so clear that he
ought to belong to the club, if he were inclined to join it, that I
should have nominated him long ago had I not labored under the
impression that he must have been previously proposed....
Yours very truly, O. W. HOLMES.
For many years it seemed that time stood still with the Autocrat. His
happy home and his cheerful temper appeared to stay the hand of the
destroyer. At last a long illness fell upon his wife; and after her
death, when his only daughter, who had gone to keep her father's
house, was suddenly taken from his side, the shadows of age gathered
about him; then we learned that he was indeed an old man.
For the few years that remained to him before his summons came he
accepted the lot of age with extraordinary good cheer. His hearing
became very imperfect. "I remind myself sometimes," he said, "of those
verses I wrote some years ago. I wonder if you would remember them! I
called the poem 'The Archbishop and Gil Bias: A Modernized Version.'"
He then repeated with great humor and pathos a few of the lines:--
"_Can you read as once you used to?_ Well, the printing is so
bad,
No young folks' eyes can read it like the books that once we had.
_Are you quite as quick of hearing?_ Please to say that once
again.
_Don't I use plain words, your Reverence?_ Yes, I often use a
cane."
"As to my sight," he continued, "I have known for some years that I
have cataracts slowly coming over my eyes; but they increase so very
slowly that I often wonder which will win the race first--the
cataracts or death."
He was most carefully watched over during the succeeding years of
disability by his distinguished son and his daughter-in-law, of whose
talent he was sincerely proud. Nevertheless, he suffered of necessity
many lonely hours, in spite of all that devotion could do for him.
Such a wife and such a loving daughter could not pass from his side
and find their places filled. But he did not "mope," as he wrote me
one day, "I am too busy for that;" or, he might have said truthfully,
too well sustained. His habit of carrying himself with an air of
kindliness toward all, and of enjoyment in the opportunities still
left him, was very beautiful and unusual. "If the Lord thinks it best
for me to stay until I tumble to pieces, I'm willing--I'm willing," he
said. He was always capable of amusing his friends on the subject, as
in the former days when Old Age came and offered him "a cane, an
eyeglass, a tippet, and a pair of overshoes. 'No; much obliged to
you,' said I.... So I dressed myself up in a jaunty way, and walked
out alone; got a fall, caught a cold, was laid up with lumbago, and
had time to think over the whole matter."
Who that heard him can ever forget the exquisite reading of "The Last
Leaf" at the Longfellow memorial meeting. The pathos of it was then
understood for the first time. The poem had become an expression of
his later self, and it was given with a personal significance which
touched the hearts of all his hearers.
His wit has left the world sparkling with the shafts it has let fly on
every side. They are taken up continually and sent out again both by
those who heard him utter them and by those who repeat them, unmindful
of their origin.
His attention was turned on some occasion to a young aspirant for
artistic fame. He referred to the youthful person later as "one who
performed a little on the lead pencil." He said to me one day, "I've
sometimes made new words. In 'Elsie Venner' I made the word
'chrysocracy,' thinking it would take its place; but it didn't:
'plutocracy,' meaning the same thing, was adopted instead. Oddly
enough, I had a letter from a man to-day, asking if I did not make the
word 'anaesthesia,' which I certainly did."
In the sick-room he was always a welcome guest. A careful maid once
asked if he minded climbing two flights of stairs to see his friend.
"I laughed when she asked me," he said; "for I shall have to climb a
good many more than that before I see the angels."
"I gave two dinners to two parties of old gentlemen just before I left
town," he said, the year before his death; and then added, "our baby
was seventy-three!"
His letters in the later years were full of feeling. He says in one of
them, written on a Christmas day, speaking of an old friend: "How many
delightful hours the photographs bring back to me!... Under his roof I
have met more visitors to be remembered than under any other. But for
his hospitality I should never have had the privilege of personal
acquaintance with famous writers and artists whom I can now recall as
I saw them, talked with them, heard them, in that pleasant library,
that most lively and agreeable dining-room. How could it be otherwise,
with such guests as he entertained, and with his own unflagging
vivacity and his admirable social gifts? Let me live in happy
recollections to-day."
Only two years before Dr. Holmes's death he said in a letter received
by me in Italy: "But for this troublesome cold, which has so much
better come out than I feared, I have been doing well enough--kept
busy with letters and dictation of my uneventful history. It is
strange how forgotten events and persons start out of the blank
oblivion in which they seem to have been engulfed, as I fix my memory
steadily on the past. I find it very easy, even fascinating, to call
up the incidents, trivial oftentimes, but having for me a significance
of their own, which lie in my past track like the broken toys of
childhood. It seems as if the past was for each of us a great
collection of negatives laid away, from which we can take positive
pictures when we will--from many of them, that is; for only the
Recording Angel can reproduce the pictures of every instant of our
lives from these same negatives, of which he must have an infinite
collection, with which sooner or later we are liable to be
confronted."
In another letter from Beverly Farms, when he was eighty-three, he
says:--
Where this will find you, in a geographical point of view, I do not
know; but I know your heart will be in its right place, and accept
kindly the few barren words this sheet holds for you. Yes; barren of
incident, of news of all sorts, but yet having a certain flavor of
Boston, of Cape Ann, and, above all, of dear old remembrances, the
suggestion of any one of which is as good as a page of any common
letter. So, whatever I write will carry the fragrance of home with it,
and pay you for the three minutes it costs you to read it.... I find
great delight in talking over cathedrals and pictures and English
scenery, and all the sights my traveling friends have been looking at,
with Mrs. Bell. It seems to me that she knew them all beforehand, so
that she was journeying all the time among reminiscences which were
hardly distinguishable from realities.
My recollections are to those of other people around me who call
themselves old,--the sexagenarians, for instance,--something like what
a cellar is to the ground-floor of a house. The young people in the
upper stories (American spelling, _story_) go down to the
basement in their inquiries, and think they have got to the bottom;
but I go down another flight of steps, and find myself below the
surface of the earth, as are the bodies of most of my contemporaries.
As to health, I am doing tolerably well. I have just come in from a
moderate walk in which I acquitted myself creditably. I take two-hour
drives in the afternoon, in the open or close carriage, according to
the weather; but I do not pretend to do much visiting, and I avoid all
excursions when people go to have what they call a "good time."
I am reading right and left--whatever turns up, but especially re-
reading old books. Two new volumes of Dr. Johnson's letters have
furnished me part of my reading. As for writing, when my secretary--
Miss Gaudelet--comes back, I shall resume my dictation. No literary
work ever seemed to me easier or more agreeable than living over my
past life, and putting it on record as well as I could. If anybody
should ever care to write a sketch or memoir of my life, these notes
would help him mightily. My friends too might enjoy them--if I do not
have the misfortune to outlive them all. With affectionate regards and
all sweet messages to Miss Jewett.
Always your friend,