This letter gives a very good picture of his life to the end. Few
incidents occurred to break the even current of the order he
describes. He still dined out occasionally, and I find a few
reminiscences of his delightful talk which linger with me.
"I've several things bothering me," he confessed one day. "First, I am
anxious to find a suitable inscription for a child's porringer. I
never wrote a poem to a child, I believe. I love children dearly; I
always want to stop them on the street: but I have never written about
them; nor have I ever written much about women. I don't know why, but
I _care_ too much to do the Tom Moore style of thing."
He was eager to frame a letter to President Eliot, and also one to
President Cleveland, in order to advance some one in need of help; but
the grasshopper had become a burden. "I feel such things now when I
have to do them," he said; "nevertheless, when young men and maidens
come skipping in with an air of saying, 'Please give me your
autograph, and be quick about it; there may not be much time left,' I
want to say, 'Take care, young folks; I may be dancing over your
graves yet!'"
There was a clock which stood upon his table, the bequest of Dr. Henry
J. Bigelow. This remembrance from his dying friend was one of his most
valued possessions. He loved to talk of Dr. Bigelow, and in a
published discourse he has said of him: "He read men and women as
great scholars read books. He took life at first hand, and not
filtered through alphabets....He would get what he wanted out of a
book as dexterously as a rodent will get the meat of a nut out of its
shell.... He handled his rapidly acquired knowledge so like an adept
in book-lore that one might have thought he was born in an alcove and
cradled on a book-shelf." Dr. Bigelow was so frequently in Dr.
Holmes's thought in the latter days that one can hardly give a picture
of his later life without rehearsing something of his expression with
regard to him. He says further: "Dr. Bigelow was unquestionably a man
of true genius.... Inexorable determination to have the truth, if
nature could be forced to yield it, characterized his powerful
intelligence."
The doctor would often look up when the little clock was striking
musically on his writing-table, and say, "It always reminds me
tenderly of my dead friend."
When the time came that writing was a burden, and indeed, except for
limited periods, impossible, Dr. Holmes lived more and more in his
affections. Often, as I entered his room on a dull afternoon, he would
say, "Ah, now let's sit up by the fire and talk of all our friends."
Then would begin a series of opinions, witty and tender by turns, and
interspersed with tears and smiles. On one such occasion he said:
"There are very few modern hymns which have the old ring of
saintliness in them. Sometimes when I am disinclined to listen to the
preacher at church, I turn to the hymn-book, and when one strikes my
eye, I cover the name at the bottom, and guess. It is almost
invariably Watts or Wesley; after those, there are very few which are
good for much.
"'Calm on the listening ear of night'
is a fine hymn, but even that lacks the virility of the old saints."
Our minds that day were full of one thought,--the death of Phillips
Brooks,--and when, a moment later, he said:--
"'Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood'--
there is nothing like that," it seemed quite natural that his voice
should break and the tears come as he added, without mentioning the
bishop's name, "How hard it is to think he is gone! I don't like to
feel that I must live without him."
His days grew gradually shorter, as the days of late October dwindle
into golden noons. During the few hours when he was at his best he was
wonderfully active, driving to his publisher's or to make an
occasional visit, besides a daily walk. If to those who saw him
continually the circle of his subjects of conversation began to appear
somewhat circumscribed, upon those who met him only occasionally the
old fascination still exerted itself. He set his door wide open when
he made up his mind to receive and converse with any human being.
There is nothing left to say of him which he did not cheerfully and
truthfully say of himself. "I am intensely interested in my own
personality," he began one day; "but we are all interesting to
ourselves, or ought to be. I _know_ I am, and I see why. We take,
as it were, a mold of our own thought. Now let us compare it with the
mold of another man on the same subject. His mold is either too large
or too small, or the veins and reticulations are altogether different.
No one mold fits another man's thought. It is our own, and as such has
especial interest and value."
It was really amazing to see his intellectual vigor in society even at
this late period. When the conditions were satisfactory, at a small
luncheon for instance, he would soon grow warm with excitement, his
eyes would glow, and he would talk with his accustomed fire. He was
like an old war-horse hearing the trumpet that called to battle. His
activity and versatility of mind could still distance many a clever
man in the prime of life.
He responded in the most generous way to the expectations of strangers
and foreigners who came to visit him as if on pilgrimage. He always
found some entertainment for them. Sometimes he would read them one of
his poems; sometimes he would have a pretty scientific toy for their
amusement; or again he would write his autograph in a volume of his
works for them to carry away in remembrance. Such guests could not
help feeling that they had seen more than the Dr. Holmes of their
imagination. He entered into their curiosity regarding himself with
such charming sympathy that they came away thinking the half-hour they
had passed in his study was one always to be remembered.
As I think of those latest days, I recall what he himself wrote once,
long ago, about old age: "One that remains walking," he says, "while
others have dropped asleep, and keeps a little night-lamp flame of
life burning year after year, if the lamp is not upset and there is
only a careful hand held round it to prevent the puffs of wind from
blowing the flame out. That's what I call an old man."
"Now," said the professor, "you don't mean to tell me that I have got
to that yet? Why, bless you, I am several years short of the time!"
Dr. Holmes left this world, which he had found pleasant and had filled
with pleasantness for others, after an illness that was happily brief.
He passed, in the words of that great physician, Sir Thomas Browne,
"in drowsy approaches of sleep;... believing with those resolved
Christians who, looking on the death of this world but as a nativity
of another, do contentedly submit unto the common necessity, and envy
not Enoch or Elias."