  AFTER a year's study of law, during which time the Muses were constantly tempting him to "pen a stanza when he should engross," young Holmes determined to take up the study of medicine, which was much more congenial to his tastes than the formulas of Coke and Blackstone. Doctor James Jackson and his associates were his instructors for the following two years and a half; and then before taking his degree of M.D., he spent three years in Europe, perfecting his studies in the hospitals and lecture-rooms of Paris and Edinburgh. Of this European tour, we find occasional allusions scattered throughout his writings. Listen, for instance, to this grand description of Salisbury Cathedral: "It was the first cathedral we ever saw, and none has ever so impressed us since. "Lively emotions very commonly do not strike us full in front, but obliquely from the side," he says at another time. "A scene or incident in undress often affects us more than one in full costume." Is this the mighty ocean?—is this all? Says the Princess in Gebir. The rush that should have flooded my soul in the Coliseum did not come. But walking one day in the fields about the city, I stumbled over a fragment of broken masonry, and lo! the World's Mistress in her stone girdle—alta mÆnia RomÆ—rose before me, and whitened my cheek with her pale shadow, as never before or since. "I used very often, when coming home from my morning's work at one of the public institutions of Paris, to stop in at the dear old church of St. Etienne du Mont. The tomb of St. Genevieve, surrounded by burning candles and votive tablets was there; there was a noble organ with carved figures; the pulpit was borne on the oaken shoulders of a stooping Samson; and there was a marvellous staircase, like a coil of lace. These things I mention from memory, but not all of them together impressed me so much as an inscription on a small slab of marble fixed in one of the walls. It told how this Church of St. Stephen was repaired and beautified in the 16**, and how during the celebration of its re-opening, two girls of the parish (filles de la paroisse), "Not the great historical events, but the personal incidents that call up single sharp pictures of some human being in its pang of struggle, reach us most nearly. I remember the platform at Berne, over the parapet of which Theobald WeinzÄpfli's restive horse sprang with him and landed him more than a hundred feet beneath in the lower town, not dead, but sorely broken, and no longer a wild youth, but God's servant from that day forward. I have forgotten the famous bears and all else. I remember the Percy lion on the bridge over the little river at Alnwick—the leaden lion with his tail stretched out straight like a pump-handle—and why? Again he says: "I once ascended the spire of Strasburg Cathedral, which is the highest, I think, in Europe. It is a shaft of stone filigree-work, frightfully open, so that the guide puts his arms behind you to keep you from falling. To climb it is a noonday nightmare, and to think of having climbed it crisps all the fifty-six joints of one's twenty digits. While I was on it, 'pinnacled dim in the intense inane,' a strong wind was blowing, and I felt sure that the spire was rocking. It swayed back and forward like a stalk of rye, or a cat-o'-nine tails (bulrush) with a bobolink on it. I mentioned it to the guide, and he said that the spire did really swing back and forward, I think he said some feet. "Keep any line of knowledge ten years and some other line will intersect it. Long after I was hunting out a paper of Dumeril's in an old journal—the 'Magazin EncyclopÉdique'—for l'an troisÉme (1795), when I stumbled upon a Nor does he forget that dear little child he saw and heard in a French hospital. "Between two and three years old. Fell out of her chair and snapped both thigh-bones. Lying in bed, patient, gentle. Rough students round her, some in white aprons, looking fearfully businesslike; but the child placid, perfectly still. I spoke to her, and the blessed little creature answered me in a voice of such heavenly sweetness, with that reedy thrill in it which you have heard in the thrush's even-song, that I hear it at this moment. 'C'est tout comme unserin,' said the French student at my side." The Birthplace of Oliver Wendell Holmes. 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: "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, "This intersusception of the ideas of inanimate objects, and their faithful storing away among the sentiments, are curiously prefigured 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, 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. 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, 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." |
|
