After we went to live in Cambridge, my life and the delight in it were so
wholly there that in ten years I had hardly been in as many Boston
houses. As I have said, I met Doctor Holmes at the Fieldses’, and at
Longfellow’s, when he came out to a Dante supper, which was not often,
and somewhat later at the Saturday Club dinners. One parlous time at the
publisher’s I have already recalled, when Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe and
the Autocrat clashed upon homeopathy, and it required all the tact of the
host to lure them away from the dangerous theme. As it was, a battle
waged in the courteous forms of Fontenoy, went on pretty well through the
dinner, and it was only over the coffee that a truce was called. I need
not say which was heterodox, or that each had a deep and strenuous
conscience in the matter. I have always felt it a proof of his extreme
leniency to me, unworthy, that the doctor was able to tolerate my own
defection from the elder faith in medicine; and I could not feel his
kindness less caressing because I knew it a concession to an infirmity.
He said something like, After all a good physician was the great matter;
and I eagerly turned his clemency to praise of our family doctor.
He was very constant at the Saturday Club, as long as his strength
permitted, and few of its members missed fewer of its meetings. He
continued to sit at its table until the ghosts of Hawthorne, of Agassiz,
of Emerson, of Longfellow, of Lowell, out of others less famous, bore him
company there among the younger men in the flesh. It must have been very
melancholy, but nothing could deeply cloud his most cheerful spirit. His
strenuous interest in life kept him alive to all the things of it, after
so many of his friends were dead. The questions which he was wont to
deal with so fondly, so wisely, the great problems of the soul, were all
the more vital, perhaps, because the personal concern in them was
increased by the translation to some other being of the men who had so
often tried with him to fathom them here. The last time I was at that
table he sat alone there among those great memories; but he was as gay as
ever I saw him; his wit sparkled, his humor gleamed; the poetic touch was
deft and firm as of old; the serious curiosity, the instant sympathy
remained. To the witness he was pathetic, but to himself he could only
have been interesting, as the figure of a man surviving, in an alien but
not unfriendly present, the past which held so vast a part of all that
had constituted him. If he had thought of himself in this way, it would
have been without one emotion of self-pity, such as more maudlin souls
indulge, but with a love of knowledge and wisdom as keenly alert as in
his prime.
For three privileged years I lived all but next-door neighbor of Doctor
Holmes in that part of Beacon Street whither he removed after he left his
old home in Charles Street, and during these years I saw him rather
often. We were both on the water side, which means so much more than the
words say, and our library windows commanded the same general view of the
Charles rippling out into the Cambridge marshes and the sunsets, and
curving eastward under Long Bridge, through shipping that increased
onward to the sea. He said that you could count fourteen towns and
villages in the compass of that view, with the three conspicuous
monuments accenting the different attractions of it: the tower of
Memorial Hall at Harvard; the obelisk on Bunker Hill; and in the centre
of the picture that bulk of Tufts College which he said he expected to
greet his eyes the first thing when he opened them in the other world.
But the prospect, though generally the same, had certain precious
differences for each of us, which I have no doubt he valued himself as
much upon as I did. I have a notion that he fancied these were to be
enjoyed best in his library through two oval panes let into the bay there
apart from the windows, for he was apt to make you come and look out of
them if you got to talking of the view before you left. In this pleasant
study he lived among the books, which seemed to multiply from case to
case and shelf to shelf, and climb from floor to ceiling. Everything was
in exquisite order, and the desk where he wrote was as scrupulously neat
as if the sloven disarray of most authors’ desks were impossible to him.
He had a number of ingenious little contrivances for helping his work,
which he liked to show you; for a time a revolving book-case at the
corner of his desk seemed to be his pet; and after that came his
fountain-pen, which he used with due observance of its fountain
principle, though he was tolerant of me when I said I always dipped mine
in the inkstand; it was a merit in his eyes to use a fountain pen in
anywise. After you had gone over these objects with him, and perhaps
taken a peep at something he was examining through his microscope, he sat
down at one corner of his hearth, and invited you to an easy chair at the
other. His talk was always considerate of your wish to be heard, but the
person who wished to talk when he could listen to Doctor Holmes was his
own victim, and always the loser. If you were well advised you kept
yourself to the question and response which manifested your interest in
what he was saying, and let him talk on, with his sweet smile, and that
husky laugh he broke softly into at times. Perhaps he was not very well
when you came in upon him; then he would name his trouble, with a
scientific zest and accuracy, and pass quickly to other matters. As I
have noted, he was interested in himself only on the universal side; and
he liked to find his peculiarity in you better than to keep it his own;
he suffered a visible disappointment if he could not make you think or
say you were so and so too. The querulous note was not in his most
cheerful register; he would not dwell upon a specialized grief; though
sometimes I have known him touch very lightly and currently upon a slight
annoyance, or disrelish for this or that. As he grew older, he must have
had, of course, an old man’s disposition to speak of his infirmities; but
it was fine to see him catch himself up in this, when he became conscious
of it, and stop short with an abrupt turn to something else. With a real
interest, which he gave humorous excess, he would celebrate some little
ingenious thing that had fallen in his way, and I have heard him
expatiate with childlike delight upon the merits of a new razor he had
got: a sort of mower, which he could sweep recklessly over cheek and chin
without the least danger of cutting himself. The last time I saw him he
asked me if he had ever shown me that miraculous razor; and I doubt if he
quite liked my saying I had seen one of the same kind.
It seemed to me that he enjoyed sitting at his chimney-corner rather as
the type of a person having a good time than as such a person; he would
rather be up and about something, taking down a book, making a note,
going again to his little windows, and asking you if you had seen the
crows yet that sometimes alighted on the shoals left bare by the ebb-tide
behind the house. The reader will recall his lovely poem, “My Aviary,”
which deals with the winged life of that pleasant prospect. I shared
with him in the flock of wild-ducks which used to come into our neighbor
waters in spring, when the ice broke up, and stayed as long as the
smallest space of brine remained unfrozen in the fall. He was graciously
willing I should share in them, and in the cloud of gulls which drifted
about in the currents of the sea and sky there, almost the whole year
round. I did not pretend an original right to them, coming so late as I
did to the place, and I think my deference pleased him.