EARLY RECOLLECTIONS.
Of the boyhood of Doctor Holmes we have many delightful glimpses.
"Like other boys in the country," he tells us, "I had my patch of ground
to which in the springtime I intrusted the seeds furnished me with a
confident trust in their resurrection and glorification in the better
world of summer. But I soon found that my lines had fallen in a place
where a vegetable growth had to run the gauntlet of as many foes and
trials as a Christian pilgrim. Flowers would not blow; daffodils
perished like criminals in their condemned caps, without their petals
ever seeing daylight; roses were disfigured with monstrous protrusions
through their very centres, something that looked like a second bud
pushing through the middle of the corolla; lettuces and cabbages would
not head; radishes knotted themselves until they looked like
centenarians' fringes; and on every stem, on every leaf, and both sides
of it, and at the root of everything that grew, was a professional
specialist in the shape of grub, caterpillar, aphis, or other expert,
whose business it was to devour that particular part, and help murder
the whole attempt at vegetation.... Yet Nature is never wholly unkind.
Economical as she was in my unparadised Eden, hard as it was to make
some of my floral houris unveil, still the damask roses sweetened
the June breezes, the bladed and plumed flower-de-luces unfolded
their close-wrapped cones, and larkspurs, and lupins, lady's
delights--plebeian manifestations of the pansy--self-sowing marigolds,
hollyhocks; the forest flowers of two seasons, and the perennial lilacs
and syringas, all whispered to the winds blowing over them that some
caressing presence was around me.
"Beyond the garden was the field, a vast domain of four acres or
thereabouts by the measurement of after years, bordered to the north by
a fathomless chasm--the ditch the base-ball players of the present era
jump over; on the east by unexplored territory; on the south by a
barren enclosure, where the red sorrel proclaimed liberty and equality
under its _drapeau rouge_, and succeeded in establishing a vegetable
commune where all were alike, poor, mean, sour, and uninteresting; and
on the west by the Common, not then disgraced by jealous enclosures
which make it look like a cattle-market.
"Beyond, as I looked round, were the colleges, the meeting-house, the
little square market-house, long vanished, the burial ground where the
dead presidents stretched their weary bones under epitaphs stretched out
at as full length as their subjects; the pretty church where the gouty
Tories used to kneel on their hassocks, the district schoolhouse, and
hard by it Ma'am Hancock's cottage, never so called in those days, but
rather 'ten-footer'; then houses scattered near and far, open spaces,
the shadowy elms, round hilltops in the distance, and over all the great
bowl of the sky. Mind you, this was the WORLD, as I first knew it;
_terra veteribus cognita_, as Mr. Arrowsmith would have called it, if he
had mapped the universe of my infancy."
"When I was of smallest dimensions," he says at another time, "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-bed, posies, grenadier-like rows of
seeding-onions--stateliest of vegetables--all are gone, but the breath
of a marigold brings them all back to me."
Of Cambridge at this time, James Russell Lowell, in his _Fireside
Travels_, tells us: "It was still a country village with its own habits
and traditions, not yet feeling too strongly the force of suburban
gravitation. Approaching it from the west, by what was then called the
New Road, you would pause on the brow of Symond's Hill to enjoy a view
singularly soothing and placid. In front of you lay the town, tufted
with elms, lindens, and horse-chestnuts, which had seen Massachusetts a
colony, and were fortunately unable to emigrate with the Tories by
whom, or by whose fathers they were planted. Over it rose the noisy
belfry of the College, the square, brown tower of the Episcopal Church,
and the slim yellow spire of the parish meeting-house. On your right the
Charles slipped smoothly through green and purple salt meadows, darkened
here and there with the blossoming black grass as with a stranded
cloud-shadow. To your left upon the Old Road you saw some half-dozen
dignified old houses of the colonial time, all comfortably fronting
southward.... We called it 'the Village' then, and it was essentially an
English village--quiet, unspeculative, without enterprise, sufficing to
itself, and only showing such differences from the original type as the
public school and the system of town government might superinduce. A few
houses, chiefly old, stood around the bare common, with ample
elbow-room, and old women, capped and spectacled, still peered through
the same windows from which they had watched Lord Percy's artillery
rumble by to Lexington, or caught a glimpse of the handsome Virginia
general who had come to wield our homespun Saxon chivalry. The hooks
were to be seen from which had swung the hammocks of Burgoyne's captive
red-coats. If memory does not deceive me, women still washed clothes in
the town spring, clear as that of Bandusia. One coach sufficed for all
the travel to the metropolis. Commencement had not ceased to be the
great holiday of the Boston commonwealth, and a fitting one it was. The
students (scholars they were called then) wore their sober uniform, not
ostentatiously distinctive, or capable of rousing democratic envy; and
the old lines of caste were blurred rather than rubbed out, as servitor
was softened into beneficiary. Was it possible for us in those days to
conceive of a greater potentate than the president of the University, in
his square doctor's cap, that still filially recalled Oxford and
Cambridge?"
The father of Oliver Wendell Holmes was a Calvanist, not indeed of the
severest cast, but still strictly "orthodox" in all his religious views,
and when Oliver, his elder son, was fifteen years of age, he sent him to
the Phillips Academy in Andover, thinking that the religious atmosphere
there was less heretical than at Phillips Academy, Exeter, where
Arminian tendencies were just beginning to show themselves.
"I have some recollections of Andover, pleasant and other," says Doctor
Holmes. "I wonder if the old Seminary clock strikes as slowly as it used
to. My room-mate thought, when he first came, it was the bell tolling
deaths, and people's ages, as they do in the country. He swore
(ministers' sons get so familiar with good words that they are apt to
handle them carelessly), that the children were dying by the dozen of
all ages, from one to twelve, and ran off next day in recess when it
began to strike eleven, but was caught before the clock got through
striking. At the foot of the hill, down in town, is, or was, a tidy old
elm, which was said to have been hooped with iron to protect it from
Indian tomahawks (_Credab Hahnucmannus_), and to have grown round its
hoops and buried them in its wood."
The extreme conscientiousness of the boy is strikingly depicted in the
following revelation:
"The first unequivocal act of wrong that has left its trace in my memory
was this: refusing a small favor asked of me--nothing more than telling
what had happened at school one morning. No matter who asked it; but
there were circumstances which saddened and awed me. I had no heart to
speak; I faltered some miserable, perhaps petulant excuse, stole away,
and the first battle of life was lost.
"What remorse followed I need not tell. Then and there to the best of my
knowledge, I first consciously took Sin by the hand and turned my back
on Duty. Time has led me to look upon my offence more leniently; I do
not believe it or any other childish wrong is infinite, as some have
pretended, but infinitely finite. Yet, if I had but won that first
battle!"
And what a charming picture he gives us of the peaceful, hallowing
influences about him in that quiet old parsonage!
"The Puritan 'Sabbath,' as everybody knows, began at 'sundown' on
Saturday evening. To such observances of it I was born and bred. As the
large, round disk of day declined, a stillness, a solemnity, a somewhat
melancholy hush came over us all. It was time for work to cease, and for
playthings to be put away. The world of active life passed into the
shadow of an eclipse, not to emerge until the sun should sink again
beneath the horizon.
"It was in the stillness of the world without and of the soul within
that the pulsating lullaby of the evening crickets used to make itself
most distinctly heard--so that I well remember I used to think that the
purring of these little creatures, which mingled with the batrachian
hymns from the neighboring swamps, _was peculiar to Saturday evenings_.
I don't know that anything could give a clearer idea of the quieting and
subduing effect of the old habit of observance of what was considered
holy time, than this strange, childish fancy."
Had all the clergymen who visited the parsonage been as true to their
profession as his own dear father, the thoughtful, impressible boy
might, very possibly, have devoted his brilliant talents to the
ministry. "It was a real delight," he says, "to have one of those good,
hearty, happy, benignant old clergymen pass the Sunday with us, and I
can remember one whose advent made the day feel almost like
'Thanksgiving.' But now and then would come along a clerical visitor
with a sad face and a wailing voice, which sounded exactly as if
somebody must be lying dead up-stairs, who took no interest in us
children, except a painful one, as being in a bad way with our cheery
looks, and did more to unchristianize us with his woebegone ways than
all his sermons were like to accomplish in the other direction. I
remember one in particular who twitted me so with my blessings as a
Christian child, and whined so to me about the naked black children,
that he did more in that one day to make me a heathen than he had ever
done in a month to make a Christian out of an infant Hottentot. I might
have been a minister myself for aught I know, if this clergyman had not
looked and talked so like an undertaker."
An exercise written while at Andover, shows at what an early age he
attempted versification. It is a translation from the first book of
Virgil's AEneid, and reads as smoothly as any lines of Pope. The
following extract shows the angry god giving his orders to Zephyrus and
Eurus:
Is this your glory in a noble line,
To leave your confines and to ravage mine?
Whom I--but let these troubled waves subside--
Another tempest and I'll quell your pride!
Go bear our message to your master's ear,
That wide as ocean I am despot here;
Let him sit monarch in his barren caves!
I wield the trident and control the waves.