CHANGE IN THE HOME.
In 1836, Oliver Wendell Holmes took his degree of M.D. The following
year was made sadly memorable to the happy family at the parsonage by
the death of the beloved father. He had reached his threescore years and
ten, but still seemed so vigorous in mind and body that neither his
family nor the parish were prepared for the sad event. Mary and Ann, the
two eldest daughters, were already married; the one to Usher Parson,
M.D., the other to Honorable Charles Wentworth Upham. Sarah, the
youngest, had died in early childhood, and only Oliver Wendell and his
brother John remained of the once large family at the parsonage. Mrs.
Holmes still continued to reside with her two sons in the old
gambrel-roofed house which her father, Judge Oliver Wendell, had bought
for her at the time of her marriage.
The _Poet at the Breakfast-Table_ thus describes the delightful old
dwelling now used as one of the College buildings:
"The worst of a modern stylish mansion is, that it has no place for
ghosts.... Now the old house had wainscots behind which the mice were
always scampering, and squeaking, and rattling down the plaster, and
enacting family scenes and parlor theatricals. It had a cellar where the
cold slug clung to the walls and the misanthropic spider withdrew from
the garish day; where the green mould loved to grow, and the long,
white, potato-shoots went feeling along the floor if happily they might
find the daylight; it had great brick pillars, always in a cold sweat
with holding up the burden they had been aching under day and night for
a century and more; it had sepulchral arches closed by rough doors that
hung on hinges rotten with rust, behind which doors, if there was not a
heap of bones connected with a mysterious disappearance of long ago,
there well might have been, for it was just the place to look for them.
"Let us look at the garret as I can reproduce it from memory. It has a
flooring of lath, with ridges of mortar squeezed up between them, which
if you tread on you will go to--the Lord have mercy on you! where will
you go to?--the same being crossed by narrow bridges of boards, on which
you may put your feet, but with fear and trembling.
"Above you and around you are beams and joists, on some of which you may
see, when the light is let in, the marks of the conchoidal clippings of
the broadaxes, showing the rude way in which the timber was shaped, as
it came, full of sap, from the neighboring forest. It is a realm of
darkness and thick dust, and shroudlike cobwebs and dead things they
wrap in their gray folds. For a garret is like a seashore, where wrecks
are thrown up and slowly go to pieces. There is the cradle which the old
man you just remember was rocked in; there is the ruin of the bedstead
he died on; that ugly slanting contrivance used to be put under his
pillow in the days when his breath came hard; there is his old chair
with both arms gone, symbol of the desolate time when he had nothing
earthly left to lean on; there is the large wooden reel which the
blear-eyed old deacon sent the minister's lady, who thanked him
graciously, and twirled it smilingly, and in fitting season bowed it
out decently to the limbo of troublesome conveniences. And there are old
leather portmanteaus, like stranded porpoises, their mouths gaping in
gaunt hunger for the food with which they used to be gorged to bulging
repletion; and the empty churn with its idle dasher which the Nancys and
Phebes, who have left their comfortable places to the Bridgets and
Norahs, used to handle to good purpose; and the brown, shaky old
spinningwheel, which was running, it may be, in the days when they were
hanging the Salem witches.
"Under the dark and haunted garret were attic chambers which themselves
had histories.... The rooms of the second story, the chambers of birth
and death, are sacred to silent memories.
"Let us go down to the ground floor. I retain my doubts about those
dents on the floor of the right-hand room, the study of successive
occupants, said to have been made by the butts of the Continental
militia's firelocks, but this was the cause the story told me in
childhood, laid them to. That military consultations were held in that
room when the house was General Ward's headquarters, that the Provincial
generals and colonels and other men of war there planned the movement
which ended in the fortifying of Bunker's Hill, that Warren slept in the
house the night before the battle, that President Langdon went forth
from the western door and prayed for God's blessing on the men just
setting forth on their bloody expedition--all these things have been
told, and perhaps none of them need be doubted....
"In the days of my earliest remembrance, a row of tall Lombardy poplars
mounted guard on the western side of the old mansion. Whether like the
cypress, these trees suggest the idea of the funeral torch or the
monumental spire, whether their tremulous leaves make us afraid by
sympathy with their nervous thrills, whether the faint balsamic smell of
their leaves and their closely swathed limbs have in them vague hints of
dead Pharaohs stiffened in their cerements, I will not guess; but they
always seemed to me to give an air of sepulchral sadness to the house
before which they stood sentries.
"Not so with the row of elms you may see leading up towards the western
entrance. I think the patriarch of them all went over in the great gale
of 1815; I know I used to shake the youngest of them with my hands,
stout as it is now, with a trunk that would defy the bully of Crotona,
or the strong man whose _liaison_ with the Lady Delilah proved so
disastrous.
"The College plain would be nothing without its elms. As the long hair
of a woman is a glory to her, so are these green tresses that bank
themselves against the sky in thick clustered masses, the ornament and
the pride of the classic green....
"There is a row of elms just in front of the old house on the south.
When I was a child the one at the southwest corner was struck by
lightning, and one of its limbs and a long ribbon of bark torn away. The
tree never fully recovered its symmetry and vigor, and forty years and
more afterwards a second thunderbolt crashed upon it and set its heart
on fire, like those of the lost souls in the Hall of Eblis. Heaven had
twice blasted it, and the axe finished what the lightning had begun."
"Ah me!" he exclaims at another time, "what strains of unwritten verse
pulsate through my soul when I open a certain closet in the ancient
house where I was born! On its shelves used to lie bundles of sweet
marjoram and pennyroyal and lavender and mint and catnip; there apples
were stored until their seeds should grow black, which happy period
there were sharp little milk teeth always ready to anticipate; there
peaches lay in the dark, thinking of the sunshine they had lost, until,
like the hearts of saints that dream of heaven in their sorrow, they
grew fragrant as the breath of angels. The odorous echo of a score of
dead summers lingers yet in those dim recesses."