ABROAD.
After a year's study of law, during which time the Muses were constantly
tempting him to "pen a stanza when he should engross," young Holmes
determined to take up the study of medicine, which was much more
congenial to his tastes than the formulas of Coke and Blackstone. Doctor
James Jackson and his associates were his instructors for the following
two years and a half; and then before taking his degree of M.D., he
spent three years in Europe, perfecting his studies in the hospitals and
lecture-rooms of Paris and Edinburgh.
Of this European tour, we find occasional allusions scattered throughout
his writings. Listen, for instance, to this grand description of
Salisbury Cathedral:
"It was the first cathedral we ever saw, and none has ever so impressed
us since. Vast, simple, awful in dimensions and height, just beginning
to grow tall at the point where our proudest steeples taper out, it
fills the whole soul, pervades the vast landscape over which it reigns,
and, like Niagara and the Alps, abolishes that five or six foot
personality in the beholder which is fostered by keeping company with
the little life of the day in its little dwellings. In the Alps your
voice is as the piping of a cricket. Under the sheet of Niagara the
beating of your heart seems too trivial a movement to take reckoning of.
In the buttressed hollow of one of these paleozoic cathedrals you are
ashamed of your ribs, and blush for the exiguous pillars of bone on
which your breathing structure reposes.... These old cathedrals are
beyond all comparison, what are best worth seeing of man's handiwork in
Europe."
"Lively emotions very commonly do not strike us full in front, but
obliquely from the side," he says at another time. "A scene or incident
in _undress_ often affects us more than one in full costume."
Is this the mighty ocean?--is this all?
Says the Princess in Gebir. The rush that should have flooded my soul in
the Coliseum did not come. But walking one day in the fields about the
city, I stumbled over a fragment of broken masonry, and lo! the World's
Mistress in her stone girdle--_alta maenia Romae_--rose before me, and
whitened my cheek with her pale shadow, as never before or since.
"I used very often, when coming home from my morning's work at one of
the public institutions of Paris, to stop in at the dear old church of
St. Etienne du Mont. The tomb of St. Genevieve, surrounded by burning
candles and votive tablets was there; there was a noble organ with
carved figures; the pulpit was borne on the oaken shoulders of a
stooping Samson; and there was a marvellous staircase, like a coil of
lace. These things I mention from memory, but not all of them together
impressed me so much as an inscription on a small slab of marble fixed
in one of the walls. It told how this Church of St. Stephen was repaired
and beautified in the 16--, and how during the celebration of its
re-opening, two girls of the parish (_filles de la paroisse_), fell
from the gallery, carrying a part of the balustrade with them, to the
pavement, but by miracle escaped uninjured. Two young girls, nameless,
but real presences to my imagination, as much as when they came
fluttering down on the tiles with a cry that outscreamed the sharpest
treble in the _Te Deum_. All the crowd gone but these two _filles de la
paroisse_--gone as utterly as the dresses they wore, as the shoes that
were on their feet, as the bread and meat that were in the market on
that day.
"Not the great historical events, but the personal incidents that call
up single sharp pictures of some human being in its pang of struggle,
reach us most nearly. I remember the platform at Berne, over the parapet
of which Theobald Weinzaepfli's restive horse sprang with him and landed
him more than a hundred feet beneath in the lower town, not dead, but
sorely broken, and no longer a wild youth, but God's servant from that
day forward. I have forgotten the famous bears and all else. I remember
the Percy lion on the bridge over the little river at Alnwick--the
leaden lion with his tail stretched out straight like a pump-handle--and
why? Because of the story of the village boy who must fain bestride the
leaden tail, standing out over the water--which breaking, he dropped
into the stream far below, and was taken out an idiot for the rest of
his life."
Again he says: "I once ascended the spire of Strasburg Cathedral, which
is the highest, I think, in Europe. It is a shaft of stone
filigree-work, frightfully open, so that the guide puts his arms behind
you to keep you from falling. To climb it is a noonday nightmare, and to
think of having climbed it crisps all the fifty-six joints of one's
twenty digits. While I was on it, 'pinnacled dim in the intense inane,'
a strong wind was blowing, and I felt sure that the spire was rocking.
It swayed back and forward like a stalk of rye, or a cat-o'-nine tails
(bulrush) with a bobolink on it. I mentioned it to the guide, and he
said that the spire did really swing back and forward, I think he said
some feet.
"Keep any line of knowledge ten years and some other line will intersect
it. Long after I was hunting out a paper of Dumeril's in an old
journal--the '_Magazin Encyclopedique_'--for _l'an troiseme_ (1795),
when I stumbled upon a brief article on the vibrations of the spire of
Strasburg Cathedral. A man can shake it so the movement shall be shown
in a vessel of water nearly seventy feet below the summit, and higher up
the vibration is like that of an earthquake. I have seen one of those
wretched wooden spires with which we very shabbily finish some of our
stone churches (thinking that the lidless blue eye of heaven cannot tell
the counterfeit we try to pass on it), swinging like a reed in a wind,
but one would hardly think of such a thing happening in a stone spire."
Nor does he forget that dear little child he saw and heard in a French
hospital. "Between two and three years old. Fell out of her chair and
snapped both thigh-bones. Lying in bed, patient, gentle. Rough students
round her, some in white aprons, looking fearfully businesslike; but the
child placid, perfectly still. I spoke to her, and the blessed little
creature answered me in a voice of such heavenly sweetness, with that
reedy thrill in it which you have heard in the thrush's even-song, that
I hear it at this moment. '_C'est tout comme unserin_,' said the French
student at my side."
[Illustration: THE BIRTHPLACE OF OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.]
The ruins of a Roman aqueduct he describes in another place, and now and
then some incident that happened in England or Scotland, may be found
among his writings; but when, after three years' absence, he returns to
Cambridge and delivers his poem before the "Phi Beta Kappa Society," he
begs his classmates to--
Ask no garlands sought beyond the tide,
But take the leaflets gathered at your side.
How affectionately his thoughts turned homeward is strikingly shown in
the very first lines of the poem:
Scenes of my youth! awake its slumbering fire!
Ye winds of memory, sweep the silent lyre!
Ray of the past, if yet thou canst appear,
Break through the clouds of Fancy's waning year;
Chase from her breast the thin autumnal snow,
If leaf or blossom still is fresh below!
Long have I wandered; the returning tide
Brought back an exile to his cradle's side;
And as my bark her time-worn flag unrolled
To greet the land-breeze with its faded fold,
So, in remembrance of my boyhood's time,
I lift these ensigns of neglected rhyme;
O more than blest, that all my wanderings through,
My anchor falls where first my pennons flew!
And read yet again in another place this loving tribute to the home of
his childhood:
"To what small things our memory and our affections attach themselves! I
remember when I was a child that one of the girls planted some Star of
Bethlehem bulbs in the southwest corner of our front yard. Well, I left
the paternal roof and wandered in other lands, and learned to think in
the words of strange people. But after many years, as I looked in the
little front yard again, it occurred to me that there used to be some
Stars of Bethlehem in the southwest corner. The grass was tall there,
and the blade of the plant is very much like grass, only thicker and
glossier.
"Even as Tully parted the briers and brambles when he hunted for the
sphere-containing cylinder that marked the grave of Archimedes, so did I
comb the grass with my fingers for my monumental memorial flower. Nature
had stored my keepsake tenderly in her bosom. The glossy,
faintly-streaked blades were there; they are there still, though they
never flower, darkened as they are by the shade of the elms and rooted
in the matted turf.
"Our hearts are held down to our homes by innumerable fibres, trivial as
that I have just recalled; but Gulliver was fixed to the soil, you
remember, by pinning his head a hair at a time. Even a stone, with a
whitish band crossing it, belonging to the pavement of the back yard,
insisted on becoming one of the talismans of memory.
"This intersusception of the ideas of inanimate objects, and their
faithful storing away among the sentiments, are curiously prefigured in
the material structure of the thinking centre itself. In the very core
of the brain, in the part where Des Cartes placed the soul, is a small
mineral deposit of grape-like masses of crystalline matter.
"But the plants that come up every year in the same place, like the
Stars of Bethlehem, of all the lesser objects, give me the liveliest
home-feeling."
To return to the Phi Beta Kappa poem, modestly termed by the author "A
Metrical Essay," it is interesting to note Lowell's hearty appreciation
of it in his _Fable for Critics_:
There's _Holmes_, who is matchless among you for wit,
A Leyden jar always full-charged, from which flit
The electrical tingles of hit after hit.
In long poems 'tis painful sometimes, and invites
A thought of the way the new telegraph writes,
Which pricks down its little sharp sentences spitefully,
As if you got more than you'd title to rightfully.
And you find yourself hoping its wild father Lightning
Would flame in for a second and give you a fright'ning.
He has perfect sway of what I call a sham metre,
But many admire it, the English pentameter,
And Campbell, I think, wrote most commonly worse.
With less nerve, swing and fire, in the same kind of verse.
Nor e'er achieved aught in 't so worthy of praise
As the tribute of Holmes to the grand _Marseillaise_.
You went crazy last year over Bulwer's _New Simon_;
Why, if B., to the day of his dying should rhyme on,
Heaping verses on verses and tomes upon tomes,
He could ne'er reach the best point and vigor of Holmes!
His are just the fine hands, too, to weave you a lyric
Full of fancy, fun, feeling, or spiced with satyric
In a measure so kindly, you doubt if the toes
That are trodden upon, are your own or your foes.
This tribute of Holmes to the grand Marseillaise is indeed one of the
finest passages in a poem abounding in point and vigor, as well as in
fancy and feeling. Who can read these stirring lines without a
sympathetic thrill for the watching, weeping Rouget de l'Isle, composing
in one night both music and words of the nameless song?
The city slept beneath the moonbeam's glance,
Her white walls gleaming through the vines of France,
And all was hushed save where the footsteps fell
On some high tower, of midnight sentinel.
But one still watched; no self-encircled woes
Chased from his lids the angel of repose;
He watched, he wept, for thoughts of bitter years
Bowed his dark lashes, wet with burning tears;
His country's sufferings and her children's shame
Streamed o'er his memory like a forest's flame,
Each treasured insult, each remembered wrong,
Rolled through his heart and kindled into song;
His taper faded; and the morning gales
Swept through the world the war song of Marseilles!
In this same Phi Beta Kappa poem may be found that beautiful pastoral,
_The Cambridge Churchyard_, and
Since the lyric dress
Relieves the statelier with its sprightliness,
the stirring verses on _Old Ironsides_ are here repeated. Said one who
heard young Holmes deliver this poem in the college church:
"Extremely youthful in his appearance, bubbling over with the mingled
humor and pathos that have always marked his poetry, and sparkling with
the coruscations of his peculiar genius, he delivered the poem with a
clear, ringing enunciation which imparted to the hearers his own
enjoyment of his thoughts and expressions."