Authors and Friends Part 10

"James Freeman Clarke was in our cla.s.s. Ever read his history of the 'Ten Great Religions?' Very good book. n.o.body knows how much Clarke is until he reads that book. How he surprises us from time to time. Came out well about 'bolting,' with regard to Butler the other day. Writes good verses, too,--not as good as mine, but good verses." ... Holmes was abstemious and never ceased talking. "Most men write too much. I would rather risk my future fame upon one lyric than upon ten volumes.

But I have said 'Boston is the hub of the Universe;' I will rest upon that."

He spoke also with great feeling of the women who came to him for literary advice and a.s.sistance. ----, he says, is his daughter in letters. He has only seen her once, but he has been a faithful correspondent and a.s.sistant to her.

Sumner said some one had called ---- "an impediment in the path of science." What did he mean? "It means just this," said Holmes: "---- is no longer young, and I was reading the other day in a book on the Sandwich Islands of an old Fejee man who had been carried away among strangers, but who prayed that he might be carried home and his brains beaten out in peace by his son, according to the custom of those lands. It flashed over me then that our sons beat out our brains in the same way. They do not walk in our ruts of thought or begin exactly where we leave off, but they have a new standpoint of their own."

The talk went on for about four hours, when the company broke up.

One evening the doctor came in after the Phi Beta Kappa dinner at Cambridge. "I can't stop," he said. "I only came to read you my verses which I gave at the dinner to-day: they made such a queer impression!

I didn't mean to go, but James Lowell was to preside, and sent me word that I really must be there, so I just wrote these off, and here they are. I don't know that I should have brought them in to read to you, but h.o.a.r declares they are the best I have ever done." After some delay, and in the fading light of sunset reflected from the river, he read the well-known verses "Bill and Joe." He must have been still warm with the excitement of the first reading, for I can never forget the tenderness with which he recited the lines. They are still pleasant on the printed page, but to those who heard him they are divested of the pa.s.sion of affection with which they were written and read.

Late in life he said to a friend who was speaking of the warm friends.h.i.+ps embalmed in his poetry, and which would help to make it endure: "I don't know how that may be; but the writing of these poems has been a pa.s.sionate joy."

The following amusing note gives a picture of Dr. Holmes in his most natural and social mood:--

296 BEACON STREET, February 11, 1872.

My dear Mr. Fields,--On Friday evening last I white-cravated myself, took a carriage, and found myself at your door at 8 of the clock P. M.

A cautious female responded to my ring, and opened the chained portal about as far as a clam opens his sh.e.l.l to see what is going on in Cambridge Street, where he is waiting for a customer.

Her first glance impressed her with the conviction that I was a burglar. The mild address with which I accosted her removed that impression, and I rose in the moral scale to the comparatively elevated position of what the unfeeling world calls a "sneak-thief."

By dint, however, of soft words, and that look of ingenuous simplicity by which I am so well known to you and all my friends, I coaxed her into the belief that I was nothing worse than a rejected contributor, an autograph collector, an author with a volume of poems to dispose of, or other disagreeable but not dangerous character.

She unfastened the chain, and I stood before her.

"I calmed her fears, and she was calm And told"

me how you and Mrs. F. had gone to New York, and how she knew nothing of any literary debauch that was to come off under your roof, but would go and call another unprotected female who knew the past, present, and future, and could tell me why this was thus, that I had been lured from my fireside by the ignis fatuus of a deceptive invitation.

It was my turn to be afraid, alone in the house with two of the stronger s.e.x; and I retired.

On reaching home, I read my note and found it was Friday the 16th, not the 9th, I was invited for....

Dear Mr. Fields, I shall be very happy to come to your home on Friday evening, the 16th February, at 8 o'clock, to meet yourself and Mrs.

Fields and hear Mr. James read his paper on Emerson. Always truly yours,

O. W. HOLMES.

On occasions of social dignity few men have ever surpa.s.sed Dr. Holmes in grace of compliment and perfection of easy ceremony. It was an acquired gift; perhaps it always must be. But as soon as human nature was given a chance to show itself, he was always eager, bringing an unsated store of intellectual curiosity to bear upon every new person or condition. He was generous to a fault in showing his own hand, moving with "infinite jest" over the current of his experiences until he could tempt his interlocutor out upon the same dangerous waters. If others were slow to embark, he nevertheless interested them in the history of his own voyage of life.

Dr. Holmes had never known any very difficult hand to hand struggle with life, but he was quite satisfied with its lesser difficulties. He could laugh at his own want of courage, as he called a certain lack of love for adventure, and he could admire the daring of others. He was happy in the circle of his home affections, and never cared to stray faraway. He had a golden sense of comfort in his home life, an entire satisfaction, which made his rare absences a penance. Added to this was his tendency to asthma, from which he suffered often very severely. In a letter written in 1867 from Montreal, whither he had gone to obtain a copyright of one of his books, we can see how his domestic habits, as well as his asthma, made any long absence intolerable to him.

MONTREAL, October 23, 1867.

Dear Mr. Fields:... I am as comfortable here as I can be, but I have earned my money, for I have had a full share of my old trouble.

Last night was better, and to-day I am going about the town. Miss Frothingham sent me a basket of black Hamburg grapes to-day, which were very grateful after the hotel tea and coffee and other 'pothecary's stuff.

Don't talk to me about taverns! There is just one genuine, clean, decent, palatable thing occasionally to be had in them,--namely, a boiled egg. The soups _taste_ pretty good sometimes, but their sources are involved in a darker mystery than that of the Nile.

Omelettes taste as if they had been carried in the waiter's hat, or fried in an old boot. I ordered scrambled eggs one day. It must be that they had been scrambled for by _somebody_, but who--who in the possession of a sound reason _could_ have scrambled for what I had set before me under that name? b.u.t.ter! I am thinking just now of those exquisite little pellets I have so often seen at your table, and wondering why the taverns _always_ keep it until it is old. Fool that I am! As if the taverns did not know that if it was good it would be eaten, which is not what they want. Then the waiters, with their napkins,--what don't they do with those napkins! Mention any one thing of which you think you can say with truth, "_That_ they do not do."...

I have a really fine parlor, but every time I enter it I perceive that

"Still, sad 'odor' of humanity"

which clings to it from my predecessor. Mr. Hogan got home yesterday, I believe. I saw him for the first time to-day. He was civil--they all are civil. I have no fault to find except with taverns here and pretty much everywhere.

Every six months a tavern should burn to the ground, with all its traps, its "properties," its beds and pots and kettles, and start afresh from its ashes like John Phoenix-Squibob.

No; give me home, or a home like mine, where all is clean and sweet, where coffee has preexisted in the berry, and tea has still faint recollections of the pigtails that dangled about the plant from which it was picked, where b.u.t.ter has not the prevailing character which Pope a.s.signed to Denham, where soup could look you in the face if it had "eyes" (which it has not), and where the comely Anne or the gracious Margaret takes the place of these napkin-bearing animals.

Enough! But I have been forlorn and ailing and fastidious--but I am feeling a little better, and can talk about it. I had some ugly nights tell you; but I am writing in good spirits, as you see. I have written once before to Low, as I think I told you, and on the 25th mean to go to a notary with Mr. Dawson, as he tells me it is the right thing to do.

Yours always, O. W. H.

P. S. Made a pretty good dinner, after all; but better a hash at home than a roast with strangers.

With much the same experience of asthma as a result, he visited Princeton three or four years later, and wrote after his return:--

296 BEACON STREET, August 24, 1871.

My dear Fields:... I only sat up one whole night, it is true, which was a great improvement on Montreal; but I do not feel right yet, and it is quite uncertain whether I shall be in a condition to enjoy the club by Sat.u.r.day. So if I come, all the better for me; and if I don't come, you can say that you have in your realm at Parker's not "five hundred as good as he," but a score or so that will serve your turn.

I cut the first leaves I wanted to meddle with in the last "Atlantic"

for No. IX. of the "Whispering Gallery," and took it all down like an oyster in the height of the season. It is captivating, like all the rest. Why don't you make a book as big as Allibone's out of your store of unparalleled personal recollections? It seems too bad to keep them for posterity. When I think of your bequeathing them for the sole benefit of people that are unborn, I want to cry out with Horace:--

"Eheu--_Postume, Postume!_"

Always yours, O. W. HOLMES.

Again, three years later, he writes: "I hope you are reasonably careful of yourself during this cold weather. Look out! A hot lecture- room, a cold ride, the best-chamber sheets like slices of cuc.u.mber, and one gives one's friends the trouble of writing an obituary, when he might just as well have lived and written theirs. We had a grand club last Sat.u.r.day. Longfellow, Emerson, Lowell, Adams, Tom Appleton (just home a few weeks ago), and Norton (who has been sick a good while) were there, and lots of others, and Lord Hought on as a guest.

You ought to have been there; it was the best club for a long time."

The following note, written in 1873, shows how closely Dr. Holmes kept the growth of the club in mind, and his eagerness to bring into it the distinguished intellectual life of Boston.

296 BEACON STREET, February 21, 1873.

My dear Mr. Fields,--I doubt whether I shall feel well enough to go to the club to-morrow, as I am somewhat feverish and sore-throaty to-day, though I must crawl out to my lecture. Mr. Parkman and Professor Wolcott Gibbs are to be voted for, you know.

President Eliot, who nominated Professor Gibbs, will, I suppose, urge his claims if he thinks it necessary, or see that some one does it.

As for Mr. Francis Parkman, proposed by myself, I suppose his reputation is too solidly fixed as a scholar and a writer to need any words from me or others of his friends who may be present.

He has been a great sufferer from infirmities which do not prevent him from being very good company, and which I have thought the good company he would find at the Sat.u.r.day Club would perhaps enable him to forget for a while more readily. It has seemed to me so clear that he ought to belong to the club, if he were inclined to join it, that I should have nominated him long ago had I not labored under the impression that he must have been previously proposed....

Yours very truly, O. W. HOLMES.