"Out of all these inevitable elements the audience is generated--a great compound vertebrate, as much like fifty others you have seen as any two mammals of the same species are like each other."
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"Pretty nigh killed himself," says the good landlady, "goin' about lecterin' two or three winters, talking in cold country lyceums--as
he used to say--goin' home to cold parlors and bein' treated to cold apples and cold water, and then goin' up into a cold bed in a
cold chamber, and comin' home next mornin' with a cold in his head as bad as the horse distemper. Then he'd look kind of sorry for havin' said it, and tell how kind some of the good women was to him; how one spread an eiderdown comforter for him, and another fixed up somethin' hot for him after the lectur, and another one said, 'There now, you smoke that cigar of yours after the lectur,
jest as if you was at home,' and if they'd all been like that, he'd have gone on lecturing forever, but, as it was, he had got pooty nigh enough of it, and preferred a nateral death to puttin' himself out of the world by such violent means as lecturin'."
To these graphic pictures of the "lyceum lecturer" we would add one more which was given by Mr. J.W. Harper, at the Holmes
Breakfast.
"I well remember," he said, "the first time[79] I saw Doctor Holmes. It was long ago; not as our Autocrat expresses it, 'in the year eighteen hundred and ever so few;' nor, as Thackeray has it, 'when the present century was in its teens.' It was just after the close of the last half century, and on a cold winter's afternoon, when the sun was fast setting behind the then ungilded dome of the State House, and it was in old Bromfield street. It was not in the Bromfield Street Methodist Church, nor in the contiguous Methodist inn, known as the Bromfield House, which, for many years, might have been the convenient resort of good Methodist elders, and of the peripatetic presiding elders, who were called by the genial Bishop Wainwright, the 'bob-tailed bishops' of their flocks and districts....
I was in the large stable adjoining the Bromfield House, endeavoring to secure a sleigh, when there entered a gentleman apparently of my own age. He came in quickly, and with impatience demanded the immediate production of a team and sleigh, which, though ordered for him, had somehow been forgotten. The new-comer, it was evident, was not to be trifled with. There was no nonsense about him, and I was not surprised,[80] when, a few years later, I learned that he had become an Autocrat.
"On that particular night he had a long drive before him, for he was to lecture at Newburyport, or Nantasket, or Nantucket, or some other then unannexed suburb of Boston. I doubt if the horse survived the drive, and I am quite sure he is not now living. But the driver lives, and the young New Yorker who then admired him, and would fain have driven with him on that cold winter night, has since, in common with thousands of other New Yorkers, been filled with grateful admiration for what that driver has done for literature, and for the happiness and improvement of the world."
In 1838 Doctor Holmes wrote the Boylston Prize Dissertation, and in 1842, Homoeopothy and its kindred Delusions. The Boylston prizes were established in 1803, by Ward Nicholas Boylston. Doctor Holmes gained three of these prizes, and the Dissertations, one of which was upon Intermittent Fever, were published together in book form in 1838.
When, in February of the same year (1842), the young men of Boston gave a dinner to Charles Dickens, Doctor Holmes welcomed
the[81] distinguished visitor in the following beautiful song:
The stars their early vigils keep, The silent hours are near,
When drooping eyes forget to weep-- Yet still we linger here;
And what--the passing churl may ask-- Can claim such wondrous power,
That Toil forgets his wonted task, And Love his promised hour?
The Irish harp no longer thrills, Or breathes a fainter tone;
The clarion blast from Scotland's hills
Alas! no more is blown.
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And Passion's burning lip bewails
Her Harold's wasted fire,
Still lingering o'er the dust that veils
The Lord of England's lyre.
But grieve not o'er its broken strings, Nor think its soul hath died,
While yet the lark at heaven's gate sings, As once o'er Avon's side;--
While gentle summer sheds her bloom, And dewy blossoms wave,
Alike o'er Juliet's storied tomb And Nelly's nameless grave. Thou glorious island of the sea! Though wide the wasting flood
That parts our distant land from thee, We claim thy generous blood.
Nor o'er thy far horizon springs
One hallowed star of fame.
But kindles, like an angel's wings,
Our western skies in flame!
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CHAPTER IX.
NAMING THE NEW MAGAZINE.
IN the year 1857, Mr. Phillips, of the firm of Phillips & Sampson, undertook the publication in Boston, of a new literary magazine. They were fortunate in securing James Russell Lowell as editor, and one condition he made upon accepting the office was, that his friend, Doctor Holmes, should be one of the chief contributors.
It was the latter, also, who was called upon to name the new magazine. Thus was the Atlantic Monthly launched upon the great sea
of literature--a periodical that has never lost its first high prestige.
When Doctor Holmes sat down to write his first article for the new magazine, he remembered that some twenty-five years before, he had begun a series of papers for a certain New England Magazine, published in Boston, by J. T. & E. Buckingham, with the title of Autocrat[84] of the Breakfast-Table. Curious, as he says, to try the experiment of shaking the same bough again and finding out if
the ripe fruit were better or worse than the early wind-falls, he took the same title for his new articles.
"The man is father to the boy that was," he adds, "and I am my own son, as it seems to me, in those papers of the New England
Magazine."
To show the reader some family traits of this "young autocrat," we quote from these earlier articles the following fine extracts:
"When I feel inclined to read poetry, I take down my dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. The author may arrange the gems effectively, but their shape and lustre have been given by the attrition of ages. Bring me the finest simile from the whole range of imaginative writing, and I will show you a single word which conveys a more profound, a more accurate,
and a more eloquent analogy.
"Once on a time, a notion was started that if all the people in the world would shout at once, it might be heard in the moon. So the projectors agreed it should be done in just ten[85] years. Some thousand shiploads of chronometers were distributed to the select-men and other great folks of all the different nations. For a year beforehand, nothing else was talked about but the awful noise that was to be made on the great occasion. When the time came everybody had their ears so wide open to hear the universal ejaculation of boo--the word agreed upon--that nobody spoke except a deaf man in one of the Fejee Islands, and a woman in Pekin, so that the world was never so still since the creation."
At the close of the year when the twelve numbers of The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table were completed in the Atlantic Monthly and published in book form, the British Review wrote of the illustrious author as follows:
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"Oliver Wendell Holmes has been long known in this country as the author of