The Birthplace of Oliver Wendell Holmes. [55]
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: [56]
"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,[57] 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.
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"This intersusception of the ideas of inanimate objects, and their faithful storing away among the sentiments, are curiously prefig-ured 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, [58]
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. [59]
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,
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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."
[60]
CHAPTER VI.
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.
[61]
The Poet at the Breakfast-Table thus describes the delightful old dwelling now used as one of the College buildings: