The township of Pontoosuc, now Pittsfield, including some twenty-four thousand acres, was bought by Doctor Holmes' great-grandfather, Jacob[70] Wendell, about the year 1734. It was on a small part of this large possession that "Canoe Place," the pleasant summer home of Doctor Holmes, was built.
Hawthorne was then living at Lenox, which is only a few miles from Pittsfield, and in his contribution to Lowell's magazine, The Pioneer, in 1843, he describes in his Hall of Fantasy, the poets he saw "talking in groups, with a liveliness of expression, or ready smile, and a light, intellectual laughter which showed how rapidly the shafts of wit were glancing to and fro among them. In the most vivacious of these," he adds, "I recognized Holmes."
Beside Hawthorne, there was Herman Melville, Miss Sedgwick and Fanny Kemble near by on those "maple-shadowed plains of Berkshire," while Bryant and Ellery Channing not unfrequently joined the brilliant circle in their summer trips to the Stockbridge hills.
In the Boston home of Doctor Holmes, John Lothrop Motley was a welcome visitor--a man whose "generous sympathies with popular liberty no homage paid to his genius by the class whose admiring welcome is most seductive to scholars could ever spoil." Both young men were mem[71]bers of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and after the death of Motley, Holmes became his biographer.
Charles Sumner formed another of this pleasant literary coterie, and is described by Doctor Holmes, after a short acquaintance, as "an amiable, blameless young man; pleasant, affable and cheerful." Years after, when Sumner was assaulted in the Senate, Doctor Holmes, at a public dinner in Boston, denounced in strong language, the shameful outrage as an assault not only upon the man, but upon the Union.
At the Berkshire festivals, the poet was often called upon to furnish a song, and brimful of wit and wisdom they always were, though often composed upon the spur of the moment. Here is a part of one of them:
Come back to your mother, ye children, for shame, Who have wandered like truants, for riches or fame! With a smile on her face, and a sprig in her cap,
She calls you to feast from her bountiful lap.
Come out from your alleys, your courts, and your lanes, And breathe, like young eagles, the air of our plains, Take a whiff from our fields, and your excellent wives Will declare it's all nonsense insuring your lives.
[72]
Come you of the law, who can talk, if you please, Till the Man in the Moon will declare it's a cheese, And leave 'the old lady that never tell lies,'
To sleep with her handkerchief over her eyes. Ye healers of men, for a moment decline Your feats in the rhubarb and ipecac line;
While you shut up your turnpike, your neighbors can go
The old roundabout road, to the regions below. You clerk, on whose ears are a couple of pens, And whose head is an anthill of units and tens, Though Plato denies you, we welcome you still As a featherless biped, in spite of your quill. Poor drudge of the city! how happy he feels
With the burrs on his legs and the grass at his heels! No dodger behind, his bandannas to share,
No constable grumbling "You mustn't walk there!"
17
In yonder green meadow, to memory dear, He slaps a mosquito and brushes a tear;
The dewdrops hang round him on blossoms and shoots, He breathes but one sigh for his youth and his boots. There stands the old schoolhouse, hard by the old church That tree at its side had the flavor of birch;
O sweet were the days of his juvenile tricks,
Though the prairie of youth had so many "big licks."
By the side of yon river he weeps and he slumps, The boots fill with water as if they were pumps; Till, sated with rapture, he steals to his bed,
With a glow in his heart, and a cold in his head. [73]
At the annual dinner of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, in 1843, Doctor Holmes read the fine poem entitled Terpsichore.
Three years later he delivered Urania, A Rhyme Lesson before the Boston Mercantile Library Association. "To save a question that is sometimes put," remarks the poet, "it is proper to say that in naming these two poems after two of the Muses, nothing more was intended than a suggestion of their general character and aim."
[74]
CHAPTER VIII. THE LECTURER.
WHEN Doctor Warren gave up the Parkman professorship at Harvard, in 1847, Doctor Holmes was appointed to take his place
as Professor of Anatomy and Physiology. For eight months of the year, four lectures are delivered each week in this department of the college, and yet Doctor Holmes still found time "between whiles," to attend to his Boston practice, and to write many charming poems and essays. He also entered the lyceum arena, "an original American contrivance," as Theodore Parker describes it in 1857, "for educating the people. The world has nothing like it. In it are combined the best things of the Church: i.e., the preaching; and
of the College: i.e., the informing thought, with some of the fun of the theatre. Besides, it gives the rural districts a chance to see
the men they read about--to see the lions--for the lecturer is[75] also a show to the eyes. For ten years past six or eight of the most
progressive minds in America have been lecturing fifty or a hundred times a year."
Among the many subjects that Doctor Holmes touched upon in these lyceum lectures was a fine, witty, and remarkably just criticism
on the English Poets of the Nineteenth Century. What a pity that Oscar Wilde and his brother poets of this later day could not have the benefit of just such a clear, microscopic analysis! What the Autocrat himself thought of these lecturing tours through the country we have in his own words:
"I have played the part of 'Poor Gentleman' before many audiences," he says; "more, I trust, than I shall ever face again. I did not wear a stage costume, nor a wig, nor mustaches of burnt cork; but I was placarded and announced as a public performer, and at the proper hour I came forward with the ballet-dancer's smile upon my countenance, and made my bow and acted my part. I have seen my name stuck up in letters so big that I was ashamed to show myself in the place by daylight. I have gone to a town with a sober literary essay in my[76] pocket, and seen myself everywhere announced as the most desperate of buffos. I have been through as many hardships as Ulysses in the exercise of my histrionic vocation. I have sometimes felt as if I were a wandering spirit, and this great, unchanging multivertebrate which I faced night after night was one ever-listening animal, which writhed along after me wherever I fled, and coiled at my feet every evening turning up to me the same sleepless eyes which I thought I had closed with my last drowsy incantation."
Of his audiences he writes again as follows:
"Two lyceum assemblies, of five hundred each, are so nearly alike, that they are absolutely undistinguishable in many cases by any definite mark, and there is nothing but the place and time by which one can tell the 'remarkably intelligent audience' of a town in New York or Ohio from one in any New England town of similar size. Of course, if any principle of selection has come in, as in those special associations of young men which are common in cities, it deranges the uniformity of the assemblage. But let there be no such interfering circumstances, and one knows pretty well even[77] the look the audience will have, before he goes in. Front seats, a few old folks--shiny-headed--slant up best ear toward the speaker--drop off asleep after a while, when the air begins to get a
little narcotic with carbonic acid. Bright women's faces, young and middle-aged, a little behind these, but toward the front--(pick out
18
the best, and lecture mainly to that). Here and there a countenance, sharp and scholarlike, and a dozen pretty female ones sprinkled about. An indefinite number of pairs of young people--happy, but not always very attentive. Boys in the background more or less quiet. Dull faces here, there--in how