OTHER REMINISCENCES.
In his vacations the inquiring mind of the young student had made
"strange acquaintances" in a certain book infirmary up in the attic of
the gambrel-roofed house.
"_The Negro Plot at New York_," he says, "helped to implant a feeling in
me which it took Mr. Garrison a good many years to root out. _Thinks I
to myself_, an old novel which has been attributed to a famous
statesman, introduced me to a world of fiction which was not represented
on the shelves of the library proper, unless perhaps by _Caelebs in
search of a Wife_, or allegories of the bitter tonic class."
Then there was an old, old Latin alchemy book, with the manuscript
annotations of some ancient Rosicrucian, "In the pages of which," he
says, "I had a vague notion that I might find the mighty secret of the
_Lapis Philosophorum_, otherwise called Chaos, the Dragon, the Green
Lion, the _Quinta Essentia_, the Soap of Sages, the vinegar of Heavenly
Grace, the Egg, the Old Man, the Sun, the Moon, and by all manner of odd
_aliases_, as I am assured by the plethoric little book before me, in
parchment covers browned like a meerschaum with the smoke of furnaces,
and the thumbing of dead gold-seekers, and the fingering of bony-handed
book-misers, and the long intervals of dusty slumber on the shelves of
the _bonquiniste_."
"I have never lost my taste for alchemy," he adds, "since I first got
hold of the _Palladium Spagyricum_ of Peter John Faber, and sought--in
vain, it is true--through its pages for a clear, intelligible, and
practical statement of how I could turn my lead sinkers and the weights
of the tall kitchen clock into good yellow gold specific gravity, 19.2,
and exchangeable for whatever I then wanted, and for many more things
than I was then aware of.
"One of the greatest pleasures of childhood is found in the mysteries
which it hides from the scepticism of the elders, and works up into
small mythologies of its own. I have seen all this played over again in
adult life, the same delightful bewilderment of semi-emotional belief
in listening to the gaseous promises of this or that fantastic system,
that I found in the pleasing mirages conjured up for me by the ragged
old volume I used to pore over in the southeast attic chamber."
There are other reminiscences of these days that show us not only the
outward surroundings, but the inner workings of the boy's mind.
"The great Destroyer," he says, "had come near me, but never so as to be
distinctly seen and remembered during my tender years. There flits dimly
before me the image of a little girl whose name even I have forgotten, a
schoolmate whom we missed one day, and were told that she had died. But
what death was I never had any very distinct idea until one day I
climbed the low stone-wall of the old burial ground and mingled with a
group that were looking into a very deep, long, narrow hole, dug down
through the green sod, down through the brown loam, down through the
yellow gravel, and there at the bottom was an oblong red box, and a
still, sharp, white face of a young man seen through an opening at one
end of it.
"When the lid was closed, and the gravel and stones rattled down
pell-mell, and the woman in black who was crying and wringing her hands
went off with the other mourners, and left him, then I felt that I had
seen Death, and should never forget him."
There were certain sounds too, he tells us, that had "a mysterious
suggestiveness" to him. One was the "creaking of the woodsleds, bringing
their loads of oak and walnut from the country, as the slow-swinging
oxen trailed them along over the complaining snow in the cold, brown
light of early morning. Lying in bed and listening to their dreary music
had a pleasure in it akin to the Lucretian luxury, or that which Byron
speaks of as to be enjoyed in looking on at a battle by one 'who hath no
friend, no brother there.'
"Yes, and there was still another sound which mingled its solemn
cadences with the waking and sleeping dreams of my boyhood. It was heard
only at times, a deep, muffled roar, which rose and fell, not loud, but
vast; a whistling boy would have drowned it for his next neighbor, but
it must have been heard over the space of a hundred square miles. I used
to wonder what this might be. Could it be the roar of the thousand
wheels and the ten thousand footsteps jarring and trampling along the
stones of the neighboring city? That would be continuous; but this, as I
have said, rose and fell in regular rhythm. I remember being told, and I
suppose this to have been the true solution, that it was the sound of
the waves after a high wind breaking on the long beaches many miles
distant."
After a year's study at Andover, he was fully prepared to enter Harvard
University.
In the Charlestown Navy Yard, at this time, was the old frigate
_Constitution_, which the government purposed to break up as unfit for
service, thoughtless of the desecration:
There was an hour when patriots dared profane
The mast that Britain strove to bow in vain,
And one, who listened to the tale of shame,
Whose heart still answered to that sacred name,
Whose eye still followed o'er his country's tides
Thy glorious flag, our brave _Old Ironsides!_
From yon lone attic, on a summer's morn,
Thus mocked the spoilers with his schoolboy scorn:
Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
That banner in the sky;
Beneath it rung the battle shout,
And burst the cannon's roar;
The meteor of the ocean air
Shall sweep the clouds no more!
Her deck, once red with heroes' blood,
Where knelt the vanquished foe,
When winds were hurrying o'er the flood,
And waves were white below,
No more shall feel the victor's tread,
Or know the conquered knee;
The harpies of the shore shall pluck
The eagle of the sea.
Oh, better that her shattered hulk
Should sink beneath the wave;
Her thunders shook the mighty deep,
And there should be her grave;
Nail to the mast her holy flag,
Set every thread-bare sail,
And give her to the god of storms
The lightning and the gale!
This stirring poem--the first to make him known--was written by Oliver
Wendell Holmes in 1830, "with a pencil in the White Chamber _Stans pede
in uno_, pretty nearly," and was published in the Boston _Advertiser_.
From these columns it was extensively copied by other newspapers
throughout the country, and handbills containing the verses were
circulated in Washington. The eloquent, patriotic outburst not only
brought instant fame to the young poet, but so thoroughly aroused the
heart of the people that the grand old vessel was saved from
destruction.
The "schoolboy" had already entered Harvard College, and among his
classmates in that famous class of 1829, were Benjamin R. Curtis,
afterwards Judge of the Supreme Court, James Freeman Clarke, Chandler
Robbins, Samuel F. Smith (the author of "My country, 'tis of thee"),
G.T. Bigelow (Judge of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts), G.T. Davis,
and Benjamin Pierce.
In the class just below him (1830) was Charles Sumner; and his cousin,
Wendell Phillips, with John Lothrop Motley, entered Harvard during his
Junior year. George Ticknor was one of his instructors, and Josiah
Quincy became president of the college before he graduated.
Throughout his whole college course Oliver Wendell Holmes maintained an
excellent rank in scholarship. He was a frequent contributor to the
college periodicals, and delivered several poems upon a variety of
subjects. One of these was given before the "Hasty Pudding Club," and
another entitled "Forgotten Days," at an "Exhibition." He was the class
poet; was called upon to write the poem at Commencement, and was one of
the sixteen chosen into the Phi Beta Kappa Society.[6]
After his graduation, he studied law one year in the Dane Law School of
Harvard College. It was at this time that _The Collegian_, a periodical
published by a number of the Harvard under-graduates, was started at
Cambridge. To this paper the young law student sent numerous anonymous
contributions, among them "Evening, by a Tailor," "The Height of the
Ridiculous," "The Meeting of the Dryads," and "The Spectre Pig." A
brilliant little journal it must have been with Holmes' inimitable
outbursts of wit, "Lochfast's" (William H. Simmons) translations from
Schiller, and the numerous pen thrusts from John O. Sargent, Robert
Habersham and Theodore William Snow, who wrote under the respective
signatures of "Charles Sherry," "Mr. Airy" and "Geoffery La Touche."
Young Motley, too, was an occasional contributor to _The Collegian_, and
his brother-in-law, Park Benjamin, joined Holmes and Epes Sargent, in
1833, in writing a gift book called "The Harbinger," the profits of
which were given to Dr. Howe's Asylum for the blind.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] From notes furnished by Dr. Holmes.