end were to be annihilation-better annihilation, than compromise with wrong. Stirring reading as The Inevitable Trial forms now, when the war-scars are a generation old, and to persons knowing of the great struggle but by hearsay and history, it must have sounded in the ears of the orator's fellow-townsmen, in the mid-period of the greatly significant war, with the ringing notes of a buglecall to action. It forms by no means an oration of only temporary value and interest, which ceased immediately upon the triumph of the cause in which it was spoken, but it is a piece of sterling, virile literature. In 1866, Holmes collected several of his miscellaneous writings and published them as Soundings from the Atlantic. Some of the papers in this volume are included in Pages from an Old Volume of Life, but some of them have not been reprinted, and among these there is a very amusing supposed interview between a Reporter and the Autocrat's landlady, and A Visit to the Asylum for Decayed Punsters which is far from being in Holmes's happiest vein. The first named of these two papers, however, is a piece of characteristic writing, giving the landlady's views of the Autocrat and the "Schoolma'am." “This gentleman" (the landlady is made to say) "warn't no great of a gentleman to look at. Being of a very moderate dimension-five foot five, he said, but five foot four more likely, and I've heerd him say he didn't weigh much over a hundred and twenty pound. He was light complected rather than darksome, and was one of them smooth-faced people that keep their baird and wiskers cut close, jest as if they'd be very troublesome if they let 'em grow,— instead of layin' out their face in grass, as my poor husband that's dead and gone used to say. He was a well-behaved gentleman at table, only talked a good deal, and pretty loud sometimes, and had a way of turnin' up his nose when he didn't like what folks said, that one of my boarders, who is a very smart young man, said he couldn't stand, no how, and used to make faces and poke fun at him, whenever he see him do it. . . . Many's the time I've seen that gentleman keepin' two or three of 'em sittin' round the breakfast-table after the rest had swallowed their meal and the things was cleared off and Bridget was a-waitin' to get the cloth away,-and there that little man would set with a tumbler of sugar and water,—what he used to call O Sukray,-a-talkin' and a-talkin',— and sometimes he would laugh, and sometimes the tears would come into his eyes,-which was a kind of grayish blue eyes,-and there he'd set and set, and my boy Benjamin Franklin hangin' round and gettin' late for school and wantin' an excuse, and an old gentleman that's one of my boarders, a-listenin' as if he wa'n't no older than my ... Ben Franklin, and that schoolmistress settin' jest as if she'd been bewitched, and you might stick pins into her without her hollerin'. He was a master hand to talk when he got a-goin'. One of my boarders used to say that he always said exactly what he was a mind to, and stuck his idees out jest like them that sells pears outside their shop-winders, some is three cents, some is two cents, and some is only one cent, and if you don't like, you needn't buy, but them's the articles and them's the prices, and if you want 'em, take 'em, and if you don't, go about your business, and don't stand mellerin' of 'em with your thumbs all day till you've sp'ilt 'em for other folks." 1 This humorous description of himself is delightful, as is the whole paper from which it is quoted. It seems a pity that the Autocrat has not seen fit to include it in the collected edition of his works, for it would form a most appropriate foreword or afterword to the Breakfast-Table Series. As a pendant to this description of himself as seen through his landlady's eyes we may notice the following passage, which describes him as he appeared to a Scotchman who heard him as medical lecturer during the sixties. "Holmes is a plain, little dapper man, his short hair brushed down like a boy's, but turning grey now; a trifle of 1 Soundings from the Atlantic: Boston, 1866, p. 334, et seq. furzy hair under his ears; a powerful jaw, and a thick, strong underlip that gives decision to his look, with a dash of pertness. In conversation, he is animated and cordial-sharp, too, taking the word out of one's mouth."1 In 1867 The Guardian Angel, which had run through the Atlantic Monthly in serial form, was published. At the close of the same year, under the part editorship of Holmes, was issued The Atlantic Almanac, which is especially interesting as being the medium through which the quadruple essay of The Seasons 2 was first published. This essay, or set of essays, not only gives us exquisite bits of prose descriptive of nature in New England, but is also valuable and attractive on account of the gems of reminiscence included in it -some particularly beautiful passages descriptive of the old garden of the gambrel-roofed house, and of the" September gale of 1815." 3 "I embalmed some of my fresher recollections of it in a copy of verses which some of my readers may have seen. I am afraid there is something of what we may call, indulgently, negative veracity in that youthful effusion." And of the celebration of "commencement" at Cambridge in the writer's boyhood,— "In the last week of August used to fall Com 1 David Macrae, The Americans at Home, ii., p. 243. 3 See also Poems, i., p. 29. mencement day at Cambridge. I remember that week well, for something happened to me once at that time, namely, I was born." 1 In June 1870 Dr. Holmes delivered a thoughtful and valuable address on the subject of Mechanism in Thought and Morals 2 before the members of the Phi Beta Kappa Society; to this paper we shall refer more fully in a later section. In the following year the breakfast-table speaker tried a dangerous experiment-an experiment which success alone could justify. It was over ten years since the Professor had kissed an unseen farewell to his breakfast-table companions after occupying for twelve months the chair from which his friend the Autocrat had delightfully dogmatised; yet Holmes placed the Poet at the Atlantic "breakfasttable," and completed what have since come to be looked upon as an inseparable trinity,—the "three starveling volumes bound in one of his own Epilogue. In 1878 Holmes performed a painful task, although a labour of love, in writing the biography of a fellow-collegian and lifelong friend who had earned a world-wide reputation as historian. This friend was J. L. Motley, and the volume which tells the story of his life is interesting alike from its subject and its author. It must however be 1 Pages from an Old Volume of Life, p. 158. |