No More Learning

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OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
7472
They talk like fellows in their teens!
Mad, poor old boys! That's what it means,"
And shake their heads: they little know
The throbbing hearts of Bill and Joe! —
How Bill forgets his hour of pride,
While Joe sits smiling at his side;
How Joe, in spite of time's disguise,
Finds the old schoolmate in his eyes,-
Those calm, stern eyes that melt and fill
As Joe looks fondly up at Bill.
Ah, pensive scholar, what is fame?
A fitful tongue of leaping flame;
A giddy whirlwind's fickle gust,
That lifts a pinch of mortal dust:
A few swift years, and who can show
Which dust was Bill and which was Joe?
The weary idol takes his stand,
Holds out his bruised and aching hand,
While gaping thousands come and go,-
How vain it seems, this empty show!
Till all at once his pulses thrill;—
'Tis poor old Joe's "God bless you, Bill! »
-
And shall we breathe in happier spheres
The names that pleased our mortal ears,—
In some sweet lull of harp and song
For earth-born spirits none too long,
Just whispering of the world below
Where this was Bill and that was Joe?
No matter while our home is here
No sounding name is half so dear;
When fades at length our lingering day,
Who cares what pompous tombstones say?
Read on the hearts that love us still,
Hic jacet Joe. Hic jacet Bill.


## p. 7473 (#279) ###########################################

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
XIII-468
DOROTHY Q.
A FAMILY PORTRAIT
G
RANDMOTHER'S mother: her age, I guess,
Thirteen summers, or something less;
Girlish bust, but womanly air;
Smooth, square forehead with uprolled hair;
Lips that lover has never kissed;
Taper fingers and slender wrist;
Hanging sleeves of stiff brocade:
So they painted the little maid.
On her hand a parrot green
Sits unmoving and broods serene.
Hold up the canvas full in view,-
Look! there's a rent the light shines through,
Dark with a century's fringe of dust,—
That was a Redcoat's rapier-thrust!
Such is the tale the lady old,
Dorothy's daughter's daughter, told.
Who the painter was none may tell,-
One whose best was not over well;
Hard and dry, it must be confessed,
Flat as a rose that has long been pressed:
Yet in her cheek the hues are bright,
Dainty colors of red and white,
And in her slender shape are seen
Hint and promise of stately mien.
―――――
Look not on her with eyes of scorn,-
Dorothy Q. was a lady born!
Ay! since the galloping Normans came,
England's annals have known her name;
And still to the three-hilled rebel town
Dear is that ancient name's renown,-
For many a civic wreath they won,
The youthful sire and the gray-haired son.
――――
O Damsel Dorothy! Dorothy Q. !
Strange is the gift that I owe to you;
Such a gift as never a king
Save to daughter or son might bring,-
All my tenure of heart and hand,
All my title to house and land;
7473


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OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
Mother and sister and child and wife
And joy and sorrow and death and life!
What if a hundred years ago
Those close-shut lips had answered No,
When forth the tremulous question came
That cost the maiden her Norman name,
And under the folds that look so still
The bodice swelled with the bosom's thrill?
Should I be I, or would it be
One-tenth another, to nine-tenths me?
Soft is the breath of a maiden's Yes;
Not the light gossamer stirs with less:
But never a cable that holds so fast
Through all the battles of wave and blast,
And never an echo of speech or song
That lives in the babbling air so long!
There were tones in the voice that whispered then
You may hear to-day in a hundred men.
O lady and lover, how faint and far
Your images hover,- and here we are,
Solid and stirring in flesh and bone,
Edward's and Dorothy's, all their own,-
A goodly record for Time to show
Of a syllable spoken so long ago! -
Shall I bless you, Dorothy, or forgive
For the tender whisper that bade me live?
-
It shall be a blessing, my little maid!
I will heal the stab of the Redcoat's blade,
And freshen the gold of the tarnished frame,
And gild with a rhyme your household name;
So you shall smile on us brave and bright
As first you greeted the morning's light,
And live untroubled by woes and fears
Through a second youth of a hundred years.


## p. 7475 (#281) ###########################################

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
7475
WHA
AT is your general estimate of doctors, lawyers, and min-
isters? said I.
-
THE THREE PROFESSIONS
From The Poet at the Breakfast-Table'
―――――――
-Wait a minute, till I have got through with your
first question, said the Master. One thing at a time. -You asked
me about the young doctors, and about our young doctor. They
come home très bien chaussés, as a Frenchman would say, mighty
well shod with professional knowledge. But when they begin
walking round among their poor patients,- they don't commonly
start with millionaires, they find that their new shoes of scien-
tific acquirements have got to be broken in just like a pair of
boots or brogans. I don't know that I have put it quite strong
enough. Let me try again. You've seen those fellows at the
circus that get up on horseback, so big that you wonder how
they could climb into the saddle. But pretty soon they throw off
their outside coat, and the next minute another one, and then
the one under that, and so they keep peeling off one garment
after another till people begin to look queer and think they are
going too far for strict propriety. Well, that is the way a fellow
with a real practical turn serves a good many of his scientific
wrappers, flings 'em off for other people to pick up, and goes
right at the work of curing stomach-aches and all the other little
mean unscientific complaints that make up the larger part of
every doctor's business. I think our Dr. Benjamin is a worthy
young man, and if you are in need of a doctor at any time I
hope you will go to him; and if you come off without harm,
I will recommend some other friend to try him.
-I thought he was going to say he would try him in his
own person; but the Master is not fond of committing himself.
Now I will answer your other question, he said. The law-
yers are the cleverest men, the ministers are the most learned,
and the doctors are the most sensible.
―
The lawyers are a picked lot, "first scholars" and the like,
but their business is as unsympathetic as Jack Ketch's. There is
nothing humanizing in their relations with their fellow-creatures.
They go for the side that retains them. They defend the man
they know to be a rogue, and not very rarely throw suspicion on
the man they know to be innocent. Mind you, I am not finding
fault with them,—every side of a case has a right to the best


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7476
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
statement admits of; but I say it does not tend to make them
sympathetic. Suppose in a case of Fever vs. Patient, the doctor
should side with either party according to whether the old miser
or his expectant heir was his employer. Suppose the minister
should side with the Lord or the Devil, according to the salary
offered, and other incidental advantages, where the soul of a
sinner was in question. You can see what a piece of work it
would make of their sympathies. But the lawyers are quicker
witted than either of the other professions, and abler men gener-
ally. They are good-natured, or if they quarrel, their quarrels
are above-board. I don't think they are as accomplished as the
ministers; but they have a way of cramming with special knowl
edge for a case, which leaves a certain shallow sediment of intel-
ligence in their memories about a good many things. They are
apt to talk law in mixed company; and they have a way of look-
ing round when they make a point, as if they were addressing a
jury, that is mighty aggravating,—as I once had occasion to see
when one of 'em, and a pretty famous one, put me on the wit-
ness stand at a dinner party once.
The ministers come next in point of talent. They are far
more curious and widely interested outside of their own calling
than either of the other professions. I like to talk with 'em.
They are interesting men: full of good feelings, hard workers,
always foremost in good deeds, and on the whole the most effi-
cient civilizing class-working downwards from knowledge to
ignorance, that is; not so much upwards, perhaps that we have.
The trouble is, that so many of 'em work in harness, and it is
pretty sure to chafe somewhere. They feed us on canned meats
mostly. They cripple our instincts and reason, and give us a
crutch of doctrine. I have talked with a great many of 'em, of
all sorts of belief; and I don't think they are quite so easy in
their minds, the greater number of them, nor so clear in their
convictions, as one would think to hear 'em lay down the law
in the pulpit. They used to lead the intelligence of their par
ishes; now they do pretty well if they keep up with it, and
they are very apt to lag behind it. Then they must have a col-
league. The old minister thinks he can hold to his old course,
sailing right into the wind's eye of human nature, as straight as
that famous old skipper John Bunyan; the young minister falls
off three or four points, and catches the breeze that left the old
man's sails all shivering. By-and-by the congregation will get
ahead of him, and then it must have another new skipper. The


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OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
7477
priest holds his own pretty well; the minister is coming down.
every generation nearer and nearer to the common level of the
useful citizen,- no oracle at all, but a man of more than aver-
age moral instincts, who, if he knows anything, knows how little
he knows. The ministers are good talkers, only the struggle
between nature and grace makes some of 'em a little awkward
occasionally. The women do their best to spoil 'em, as they do
the poets.
You find it very pleasant to be spoiled, no doubt;
so do they. Now and then one of 'em goes over the dam; no
wonder, they're always in the rapids.
By this time our three ladies had their faces all turned toward
the speaker, like the weathercocks in a northeaster, and I thought
it best to switch off the talk on to another rail.
-
How about the doctors? I said.
- Theirs is the least learned of the professions, in this coun-
try at least. They have not half the general culture of the
lawyers, nor a quarter of that of the ministers. I rather think,
though, they are more agreeable to the common run of people
than the men with black coats or the men with green bags.
People can swear before 'em if they want to, and they can't very
well before ministers. I don't care whether they want to swear
or not, they don't want to be on their good behavior. Besides,
the minister has a little smack of the sexton about him; he comes
when people are in extremis, but they don't send for him every
time they make a slight moral slip,- tell a lie, for instance, or
smuggle a silk dress through the custom-house: but they call in
the doctor when the child is cutting a tooth or gets a splinter in
its finger. So it doesn't mean much to send for him, only a
pleasant chat about the news of the day; for putting the baby to
rights doesn't take long. Besides, everybody doesn't like to talk
about the next world; people are modest in their desires, and
find this world as good as they deserve: but everybody loves to
talk physic. Everybody loves to hear of strange cases; people
are eager to tell the doctor of the wonderful cures they have
heard of; they want to know what is the matter with somebody
or other who is said to be suffering from "a complication of
diseases," and above all to get a hard name, Greek or Latin,
for some complaint which sounds altogether too commonplace
in plain English. If you will only call a headache a Cephalalgia,
it acquires dignity at once, and a patient becomes rather proud
of it. So I think doctors are generally welcome in most com-
panies.


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OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
In old times, when people were more afraid of the Devil
and of witches than they are now, they liked to have a priest
or a minister somewhere near to scare 'em off: but nowadays, if
you could find an old woman that would ride round the room
on a broomstick, Barnum would build an amphitheatre to exhibit
her in; and if he could come across a young imp, with hoofs,
tail, and budding horns,—a lineal descendant of one of those
"dæmons" which the good people of Gloucester fired at and were
fired at by "for the best part of a month together," in the year
1692, the great showman would have him at any cost for his
museum or menagerie. Men are cowards, sir, and are driven by
fear as the sovereign motive. Men are idolaters, and want some-
thing to look at and kiss and hug, or throw themselves down
before; they always did, they always will: and if you don't make
it of wood, you must make it of words, which are just as much
used for idols as promissory notes are used for values. The
ministers have a hard time of it without bell and book and holy
water; they are dismounted men in armor since Luther cut their
saddle-girths, and you can see they are quietly taking off one
piece of iron after another until some of the best of 'em are
fighting the devil (not the zoological Devil with the big D) with
the sword of the Spirit, and precious little else in the way of
weapons of offense or defense. But we couldn't get on without
the spiritual brotherhood, whatever became of our special creeds.
There is a genius for religion, just as there is for painting or
sculpture. It is half-sister to the genius for music, and has some
of the features which remind us of earthly love. But it lifts
us all by its mere presence. To see a good man and hear his
voice once a week would be reason enough for building churches
and pulpits. - The Master stopped all at once, and after about
half a minute laughed his pleasant laugh.
What is it? I asked him.
I was thinking of the great coach and team that is carrying
us fast enough, I don't know but too fast, somewhere or other.
The D. D. s used to be the leaders, but now they are the wheel-
horses. It's pretty hard to tell how much they pull, but we
know they can hold back like the-
-When we're going down hill,-I said, as neatly as if I had
been a High Church curate trained to snap at the last word of
the response, so that you couldn't wedge in the tail of a comma
between the end of the congregation's closing syllable and the
beginning of the next petition.


## p. 7479 (#285) ###########################################

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
ELSIE AT THE SPROWLE "PARTY »
―
From Elsie Venner'
7479
THE
HE conversation rose into one of its gusty paroxysms just
then.
All at once it grew silent just round the door,
where it had been loudest,- and the silence spread itself
like a stain, till it hushed everything but a few corner duets. A
dark, sad-looking, middle-aged gentleman entered the parlor, with
a young lady on his arm,-his daughter, as it seemed, for she
was not wholly unlike him in feature, and of the same dark com-
plexion.
"Dudley Venner," exclaimed a dozen people, in startled but
half-suppressed tones.
"What can have brought Dudley out to-night? " said Jeffer-
son Buck, a young fellow who had been interrupted in one of the
corner duets which he was executing in concert with Miss Susy
Pettingill.
"How do I know, Jeff? " was Miss Susy's answer. Then, after
«Elsie made him come, I
a pause,
Go ask Dr. Kit-
guess.
tredge: he knows all about 'em both, they say. "
Jefferson Buck was not bold enough to confront the doctor
with Miss Susy's question, for he did not look as if he were in
the mood to answer queries put by curious young people. His
eyes were fixed steadily on the dark girl, every movement of
whom he seemed to follow.
She was indeed an apparition of wild beauty, so unlike the
girls about her that it seemed nothing more than natural that
when she moved, the groups should part to let her pass through
them, and that she should carry the centre of all looks and
thoughts with her. She was dressed to please her own fancy,
evidently, with small regard to the modes declared correct by the
Rockland milliners and mantua-makers. Her heavy black hair
lay in a braided coil, with a long gold pin shot through it like a
javelin. Round her neck was a golden torque, a round, cord-like
chain, such as the Gauls used to wear; the Dying Gladiator has
it. Her dress was a grayish watered silk; her collar was pinned
with a flashing diamond brooch, the stones looking as fresh as
morning dew-drops, but the silver setting of the past generation;
her arms were bare, round, but slender rather than large, in
keeping with her lithe round figure. On her wrists she wore


## p. 7480 (#286) ###########################################

7480
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
bracelets: one was a circlet of enameled scales, the other looked
as if it might have been Cleopatra's asp, with its body turned
to gold and its eyes to emeralds.
Her father for Dudley Venner was her father-looked like
a man of culture and breeding, but melancholy and with a dis-
tracted air, as one whose life had met some fatal cross or blight.
He saluted hardly anybody except his entertainers and the doc-
tor. One would have said, to look at him, that he was not at
the party by choice; and it was natural enough to think, with
Susy Pettingill, that it must have been a freak of the dark girl's
which brought him there, for he had the air of a shy and sad-
hearted recluse.
It was hard to say what could have brought Elsie Venner to
the party. Hardly anybody seemed to know her, and she seemed
not at all disposed to make acquaintances. Here and there was
one of the older girls from the Institute, but she appeared to have
nothing in common with them. Even in the school-room, it may
be remembered, she sat apart by her own choice, and now in the
midst of the crowd she made a circle of isolation round herself.
Drawing her arm out of her father's, she stood against the wall,
and looked, with a strange cold glitter in her eyes, at the crowd
which moved and babbled before her.
The old doctor came up to her by-and-by.
"Well, Elsie, I am quite surprised to find you here. Do tell
me how you happened to do such a good-natured thing as to let
us see you at such a great party. "
"It's been dull at the mansion-house," she said, "and I wanted
It's too lonely there, there's nobody to hate
to get out of it.
since Dick's gone. "
The doctor laughed good-naturedly, as if this were an amusing
bit of pleasantry; but he lifted his head and dropped his eyes
a little, so as to see her through his spectacles. She narrowed
her lids slightly, as one often sees a sleepy cat narrow hers,—
somewhat as you may remember our famous Margaret used to,
if you remember her at all,—so that her eyes looked very small
but bright as the diamonds on her breast. The old doctor felt
very oddly as she looked at him; he did not like the feeling, so
he dropped his head and lifted his eyes and looked at her over
his spectacles again.
"And how have you all been at the mansion-house?
the doctor.
-
said


## p. 7481 (#287) ###########################################

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
7481
"Oh, well enough.
But Dick's gone, and there's nobody left
but Dudley and I and the people. I'm tired of it. What kills
anybody quickest, doctor? " Then, in a whisper, "I ran away
again the other day, you know. "
"Where did you go? " The doctor spoke in a low, serious
tone.
"Oh, to the old place. Here, I brought this for you. "
The doctor started as she handed him a flower of the Atra-
gene Americana; for he knew that there was only one spot where
it grew, and that not one where any rash foot, least of all a thin-
shod woman's foot, should venture.
"How long were you gone? " said the doctor.
"Only one night. You should have heard the horns blowing
and the guns firing. Dudley was frightened out of his wits.
Old Sophy told him she'd had a dream, and that I should be
found in Dead Man's Hollow, with a great rock lying on me.
They hunted all over it, but they didn't find me,-I was farther
up. »
Dr. Kittredge looked cloudy and worried while she was speak-
ing, but forced a pleasant professional smile as he said cheerily,
and as if wishing to change the subject:-
"Have a good dance this evening, Elsie. The fiddlers are
tuning up.
Where's the young master? has he come yet? or is
he going to be late, with the other great folks? "
The girl turned away without answering, and looked toward
the door.
-
The "great folks," meaning the mansion-house gentry, were
just beginning to come; Dudley Venner and his daughter had
been the first of them.
Mr. Bernard came in later than any of them: he had been
busy with his new duties. He looked well, and that is saying
a good deal; for nothing but a gentleman is endurable in full
dress. Hair that masses well, a head set on with an air, a
neckerchief tied cleverly by an easy, practiced hand, close-fitting
gloves, feet well shaped and well covered, these advantages can
make us forgive the odious sable broadcloth suit, which appears
to have been adopted by society on the same principle that
condemned all the Venetian gondolas to perpetual and uniform
blackness. Mr. Bernard, introduced by Mr. Geordie, made his
bow to the colonel and his lady, and to Miss Matilda, from
whom he got a particularly gracious curtsy, and then began looking
―


## p. 7482 (#288) ###########################################

7482
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
-
about him for acquaintances. He found two or three faces he
knew, many more strangers. There was Silas Peckham - there
was no mistaking him; there was the inelastic amplitude of Mrs.
Peckham; few of the Apollinean girls, of course, they not being
recognized members of society,- but there is one with the flame
in her cheeks and the fire in her eyes, the girl of vigorous tints
and emphatic outlines, whom we saw entering the school-room
the other day. Old Judge Thornton has his eyes on her, and
the colonel steals a look every now and then at the red brooch
which lifts itself so superbly into the light, as if he thought
it a wonderfully becoming ornament. Mr. Bernard himself
was not displeased with the general effect of the rich-blooded
schoolgirl, as she stood under the bright lamps fanning herself
in the warm, languid air, fixed in a kind of passionate surprise
at the new life which seemed to be flowering out in her con-
sciousness. Perhaps he looked at her somewhat steadily, as some
others had done; at any rate, she seemed to feel that she was
looked at, as people often do, and turning her eyes suddenly on
him, caught his own on her face, gave him a half-bashful smile,
and threw in a blush involuntarily which made it more charm-
ing.
"What can I do better," he said to himself, "than have a
dance with Rosa Milburn? » So he carried his handsome pupil
into the next room and took his place with her in a cotillon.
Whether the breath of the Goddess of Love could intoxicate
like the cup of Circe,- whether a woman is ever phosphorescent
with the luminous vapor of life that she exhales, - these and
other questions which relate to occult influences exercised by
certain women we will not now discuss. It is enough that Mr.
Bernard was sensible of a strange fascination, not wholly new
to him, nor unprecedented in the history of human experience,
but always a revelation when it comes over us for the first or
the hundredth time, so pale is the most recent memory by the
side of the passing moment with the flush of any new-born passion
on its cheek. Remember that Nature makes every man love all
women, and trusts the trivial matter of special choice to the com-
monest accident.
If Mr. Bernard had had nothing to distract his attention, he
might have thought too much about his handsome partner, and
then gone home and dreamed about her, which is always danger-
ous, and waked up thinking of her still, and then begun to be


## p. 7483 (#289) ###########################################

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
7483
deeply interested in her studies, and so on through the whole
syllogism which ends in Nature's supreme quod erat demonstran-
dum. What was there to distract him or disturb him? He did
not know, but there was something. This sumptuous creature,
this Eve just within the gate of an untried Paradise, untutored in
the ways of the world but on tiptoe to reach the fruit of the tree
of knowledge,-alive to the moist vitality of that warm atmosphere
palpitating with voices and music, as the flower of some diœcious
plant which has grown in a lone corner, and suddenly unfold-
ing its corolla on some hot-breathing June evening, feels that the
air is perfumed with strange odors and loaded with golden dust
wafted from those other blossoms with which its double life is
shared, this almost over-womanized woman might well have
bewitched him, but that he had a vague sense of a counter-
charm. It was perhaps only the same consciousness that some
one was looking at him which he himself had just given occasion
to in his partner. Presently, in one of the turns of the dance,
he felt his eyes drawn to a figure he had not distinctly recog-
nized though he had dimly felt its presence, and saw that Elsie
Venner was looking at him as if she saw nothing else but him.
He was not a nervous person, like the poor lady teacher; yet the
glitter of the diamond eyes affected him strangely. It seemed
to disenchant the air, so full a moment before of strange attrac-
tions. He became silent and dreamy.
-
ON RATTLESNAKE LEDGE
From Elsie Venner'
THE
more he saw her, the more the sadness of her beauty
wrought upon him. She looked as if she might hate, but
could not love. She hardly smiled at anything, spoke
rarely, but seemed to feel that her natural power of expression
lay all in her bright eyes, the force of which so many had felt,
but none perhaps had tried to explain to themselves.
A person
accustomed to watch the faces of those who were ailing in body
or mind, and to search in every line and tint for some underlying
source of disorder, could hardly help analyzing the impression
such a face produced upon him. The light of those beautiful
eyes was like the lustre of ice; in all her features there was
nothing of that human warmth which shows that sympathy has


## p. 7484 (#290) ###########################################

7484
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
reached the soul beneath the mask of flesh it wears. The look
was that of remoteness, of utter isolation. There was in its
stony apathy, it seemed to him, the pathos which we find in the
blind who show no film or speck over the organs of sight; for
Nature had meant her to be lovely, and left out nothing but love.
And yet the master could not help feeling that some instinct was
working in this girl which was in some way leading her to seek
his presence.
She did not lift her glittering eyes upon him as
at first. It seemed strange that she did not, for they were surely
her natural weapons of conquest. Her color did not come and
go like that of young girls under excitement. She had a clear
brunette complexion, a little sun-touched, it may be,- for the
master noticed once, when her necklace was slightly displaced,
that a faint ring or band of a little lighter shade than the rest
of the surface encircled her neck. What was the slight peculiar-
ity of her enunciation when she read? Not a lisp, certainly, but
the least possible imperfection in articulating some of the lingual
sounds,-just enough to be noticed at first, and quite forgotten
after being a few times heard.
Not a word about the flower on either side. It was not
uncommon for the schoolgirls to leave a rose or pink or wild
flower on the teacher's desk. Finding it in the Virgil was noth-
ing, after all: it was a little delicate flower, which looked as if
it were made to press, and it was probably shut in by accident
at the particular place where he found it. He took it into his
head to examine it in a botanical point of view. He found it
was not common,- that it grew only in certain localities,- and
that one of these was among the rocks of the eastern spur of
The Mountain.
It happened to come into his head how the Swiss youth climb
the sides of the Alps to find the flower called the Edelweiss for
the maidens whom they wish to please. It is a pretty fancy,
that of scaling some dangerous height before the dawn so as
to gather the flower in its freshness, that the favored maiden
may wear it to church on Sunday morning, a proof at once of
her lover's devotion and his courage. Mr. Bernard determined
to explore the region where this flower was said to grow, that
he might see where the wild girl sought the blossoms of which
Nature was so jealous.
It was on a warm, fair Saturday afternoon that he undertook
his land voyage of discovery. He had more curiosity, it may be,


## p. 7485 (#291) ###########################################

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
7485
than he would have owned; for he had heard of the girl's wan-
dering habits, and the guesses about her sylvan haunts, and was
thinking what the chances were that he should meet her in some
strange place, or come upon traces of her which would tell
secrets she would not care to have known.
The woods are all alive to one who walks through them with
his mind in an excited state, and his eyes and ears wide open.
The trees are always talking; not merely whispering with their
leaves (for every tree talks to itself in that way, even when it
stands alone in the middle of a pasture), but grating their boughs
against each other as old horn-handed farmers press their dry,
rustling palms together, dropping a nut or a leaf or a twig, click-
ing to the tap of a woodpecker, or rustling as a squirrel flashes
along a branch. It was now the season of singing birds, and the
woods were haunted with mysterious tender music. The voices
of the birds which love the deeper shades of the forest are sad-
der than those of the open fields: these are the nuns who have
taken the veil, the hermits that have hidden themselves away
from the world and tell their griefs to the infinite listening
Silences of the wilderness,- for the one deep inner silence that
Nature breaks with her fitful superficial sounds becomes multiplied
as the image of a star in ruffled waters. Strange! The woods at
first convey the impression of profound repose, and yet, if you
watch their ways with open ear, you find the life which is in
them is restless and nervous as that of a woman: the little twigs
are crossing and twining and separating like slender fingers that
cannot be still; the stray leaf is to be flattened into its place like
a truant curl; the limbs sway and twist, impatient of their con-
strained attitude; and the rounded masses of foliage swell upward
and subside from time to time with long soft sighs, and it may
be the falling of a few rain-drops which had lain hidden among
the deeper shadows. I pray you, notice, in the sweet summer
days which will soon see you among the mountains, this inward
tranquillity that belongs to the heart of the woodland, with this
nervousness (for I do not know what else to call it) of outer
movement. One would say that Nature, like untrained persons,
could not sit still without nestling about or doing something
with her limbs or features; and that high breeding was only to
be looked for in trim gardens, where the soul of the trees is ill
at ease perhaps, but their manners are unexceptionable, and a
rustling branch or leaf falling out of season is an indecorum.


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7486
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
The real forest is hardly still except in the Indian summer; then
there is death in the house, and they are waiting for the sharp
shrunken months to come with white raiment for the summer's
burial.
In
There were many hemlocks in this neighborhood, the grandest
and most solemn of all the forest trees in the mountain regions.
Up to a certain period of growth they are eminently beautiful,
their boughs disposed in the most graceful pagoda-like series of
close terraces, thick and dark with green crystalline leaflets.
spring the tender shoots come out of a paler green, finger-like,
as if they were pointing to the violets at their feet. But when
the trees have grown old, and their rough boles measure a yard
and more through their diameter, they are no longer beautiful,
but they have a sad solemnity all their own, too full of meaning
to require the heart's comment to be framed in words. Below,
all their earthward-looking branches are sapless and shattered,
splintered by the weight of many winters' snows; above, they
are still green and full of life, but their summits overtop all the
deciduous trees around them, and in their companionship with
heaven they are alone. On these the lightning loves to fall. One
such Mr. Bernard saw- or rather what had been one such; for
the bolt had torn the tree like an explosion from within, and the
ground was strewed all around the broken stump with flakes of
rough bark and strips and chips of shivered wood, into which
the old tree had been rent by the bursting rocket from the
thunder-cloud.
-
- The master had struck up The Mountain obliquely from
the western side of the Dudley mansion-house. In this way he
ascended until he reached a point many hundred feet above the
level of the plain, and commanding all the country beneath and
around. Almost at his feet he saw the mansion-house, the chimney
standing out of the middle of the roof, or rather like a black
square hole in it, the trees almost directly over their stems, the
fences as lines, the whole nearly as an architect would draw a
ground plan of the house and the inclosures round it. It fright-
ened him to see how the huge masses of rock and old forest
growths hung over the home below. As he descended a little
and drew near the ledge of evil name, he was struck with the
appearance of a long narrow fissure that ran parallel with it and
above it for many rods, not seemingly of very old standing, -
for there were many fibres of roots which had evidently been
--


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OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
7487
snapped asunder when the rent took place, and some of which
were still succulent in both separated portions.
Mr. Bernard had made up his mind, when he set forth, not
to come back before he had examined the dreaded ledge. He
had half persuaded himself that it was scientific curiosity: he
wished to examine the rocks, to see what flowers grew there,
and perhaps to pick up an adventure in the zoological line; for
he had on a pair of high, stout boots, and he carried a stick in
his hand which was forked at one extremity, so as to be very
convenient to hold down a crotalus with, if he should happen
to encounter one. He knew the aspect of the ledge from a dis-
tance; for its bald and leprous-looking declivities stood out in
their nakedness from the wooded sides of The Mountain, when
this was viewed from certain points of the village. But the
nearer aspect of the blasted region had something frightful in
it. The cliffs were water-worn, as if they had been gnawed for
thousands of years by hungry waves. In some places they over-
hung their base, so as to look like leaning towers which might
topple over at any minute. In other parts they were scooped
into niches or caverns. Here and there they were cracked in
deep fissures, some of them of such width that one might enter
them, if he cared to run the risk of meeting the regular tenants,
who might treat him as an intruder.
Parts of the ledge were cloven perpendicularly, with nothing
but cracks or slightly projecting edges in which or on which a
foot could find hold. High up on one of these precipitous walls
of rock he saw some tufts of flowers, and knew them at once
for the same that he had found between the leaves of his Virgil.
Not there, surely! no woman would have clung against that
steep, rough parapet to gather an idle blossom. And yet the
master looked round everywhere, and even up the side of that
rock, to see if there were no signs of a woman's footstep. He
peered about curiously, as if his eye might fall on some of those
fragments of dress which women leave after them whenever
they run against each other or against anything else,-in crowded
ball-rooms, in the brushwood after picnics, on the fences after
rambles, scattered round over every place which has witnessed
an act of violence, where rude hands have been laid upon them.
Nothing. Stop, though, one moment. That stone is smooth and
polished, as if it had been somewhat worn by the pressure of
human feet. There is one twig broken among the stems of that


## p. 7488 (#294) ###########################################

7488
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
clump of shrubs. He put his foot upon the stone and took hold
of the close-clinging shrub. In this way he turned a sharp
angle of the rock and found himself on a natural platform, which
lay in front of one of the wider fissures,-whether the mouth of
a cavern or not he could not yet tell. A flat stone made an
easy seat, upon which he sat down, as he was very glad to do,
and looked mechanically about him. A small fragment splintered
from the rock was at his feet. He took it and threw it down
the declivity a little below where he sat. He looked about for a
stem or a straw of some kind to bite upon, a country instinct,
relic no doubt of the old vegetable-feeding habits of Eden. Is
that a stem or a straw? He picked it up. It was a hair-pin.
To say that Mr. Langdon had a strange sort of thrill shoot
through him at the sight of this harmless little implement would
be a statement not at variance with the fact of the case. That
smooth stone had been often trodden, and by what foot he could
not doubt. He rose up from his seat to look round for other
signs of a woman's visits. What if there is a cavern here, where
she has a retreat, fitted up perhaps as anchorites fitted their cells,
nay, it may be, carpeted and mirrored, and with one of those
tiger-skins for a couch, such as they say the girl loves to lie on?
Let us look, at any rate.
-
Mr. Bernard walked to the mouth of the cavern or fissure and
looked into it. His look was met by the glitter of two diamond
eyes,- small, sharp, cold, shining out of the darkness, but gliding
with a smooth, steady motion towards the light and himself. He
stood fixed, struck dumb, staring back into them with dilating
pupils and sudden numbness of fear that cannot move, as in the
terror of dreams. The two sparks of light came forward until
they grew to circles of flame, and all at once lifted themselves
up as if in angry surprise. Then for the first time thrilled in
Mr. Bernard's ears the dreadful sound that nothing which breathes,
be it man or brute, can hear unmoved, the long, loud, stinging
whirr, as the huge, thick-bodied reptile shook his many-jointed
rattle and adjusted his loops for the fatal stroke. His eyes were
drawn as with magnets toward the circles of flame.
His ears
rung as in the overture to the swooning dream of chloroform.
Nature was before man with her anæsthetics: the cat's first shake
stupefies the mouse; the lion's first shake deadens the man's
fear and feeling; and the crotalus paralyzes before he strikes.
He waited as in a trance,- waited as one that longs to have the


## p. 7489 (#295) ###########################################

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
7489
blow fall, and all over, as the man who shall be in two pieces
in a second waits for the axe to drop. But while he looked
straight into the flaming eyes, it seemed to him that they were
losing their light and terror, that they were growing tame and
dull; the charm was dissolving, the numbness was passing away,
he could move once more. He heard a light breathing close
to his ear, and half turning saw the face of Elsie Venner, looking
motionless into the reptile's eyes, which had shrunk and faded
under the stronger enchantment of her own.
MY LAST WALK WITH THE SCHOOLMISTRESS
From The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table>
(A Parenthesis)
I
CAN'T say just how many walks she and I had taken together
before this one. I found th effect of going out every morn-
ing was decidedly favorable on her health. Two pleasing
dimples, the places for which were just marked when she came,
played, shadowy, in her freshening cheeks when she smiled and
nodded good-morning to me from the schoolhouse steps.
I am afraid I did the greater part of the talking. At any
rate, if I should try to report all that I said during the first
half-dozen walks we took together, I fear that I might receive
a gentle hint from my friends the publishers that a separate vol-
ume, at my own risk and expense, would be the proper method
of bringing them before the public.
-I would have a woman as true as Death. At the first real
lie which works from the heart outward, she should be tenderly
chloroformed into a better world, where she can have an angel
for a governess, and feed on strange fruits which will make her
all over again, even to her bones and marrow. Whether gifted
with the accident of beauty or not, she should have been molded
in the rose-red clay of Love before the breath of life made a
moving mortal of her. Love capacity is a congenital endow-
ment; and I think after a while one gets to know the warm-hued
natures it belongs to from the pretty pipe-clay counterfeits of
them. - Proud she may be, in the sense of respecting herself;
but pride in the sense of contemning others less gifted than her-
self deserves the two lowest circles of a vulgar woman's Inferno,
where the punishments are Smallpox and Bankruptcy. - She who
XIII-469
―――――


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7490
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
nips off the end of a brittle courtesy, one breaks the tip of an
icicle, to bestow upon those whom she ought cordially and kindly
to recognize, proclaims the fact that she comes not merely of low
blood, but of bad blood. Consciousness of unquestioned position
makes people gracious in proper measure to all; but if a woman
put on airs with her real equals, she has something about herself
or her family she is ashamed of, or ought to be. Middle and more
than middle aged people, who know family histories, generally
see through it. An official of standing was rude to me once.
"Oh, that is the maternal grandfather," said a wise old friend
to me: "he was a boor. "- Better too few words from the
woman we love than too many: while she is silent, Nature is
working for her; while she talks, she is working for herself. —
Love is sparingly soluble in the words of men, therefore they
speak much of it; but one syllable of woman's speech can dis-
solve more of it than a man's heart can hold.
—
- Whether I said any or all of these things to the school-
mistress, or not, whether I stole them out of Lord Bacon,-
whether I cribbed them from Balzac,- whether I dipped them
from the ocean of Tupperian wisdom,- or whether I have just
found them in my head, laid there by that solemn fowl Experi-
ence (who, according to my observation, cackles oftener than she
drops real live eggs),-I cannot say. Wise men have said
more foolish things-and foolish men, I don't doubt, have said
as wise things. Anyhow, the schoolmistress and I had pleasant
walks and long talks, all of which I do not feel bound to report.
-You are
a stranger to me, ma'am. I don't doubt you
would like to know all I said to the schoolmistress. I shan't do
it; I had rather get the publishers to return the money you
have invested in these pages. Besides, I have forgotten a good
deal of it. I shall tell only what I like of what I remember.
――――――
__
-My idea was, in the first place, to search out the picturesque
spots which the city affords a sight of to those who have eyes.
I know a good many, and it was a pleasure to look at them in
company with my young friend. There were the shrubs and
flowers in the Franklin Place front yards or borders: Commerce
is just putting his granite foot upon them. Then there are cer-
tain small seraglio gardens, into which one can get a peep through
the crevices of high fences: one in Myrtle Street, or at the back
of it; here and there one at the North and South Ends. Then
the great elms in Essex Street. Then the stately horse-chestnuts


## p. 7491 (#297) ###########################################

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
7491
in that vacant lot in Chambers Street, which hold their outspread
hands over your head (as I said in my poem the other day), and
look as if they were whispering, "May grace, mercy, and peace
be with you! "—and the rest of that benediction. Nay, there are
certain patches of ground, which, having lain neglected for a
time, Nature, who always has her pockets full of seeds, and holes
in all her pockets, has covered with hungry plebeian growths,
which fight for life with each other until some of them get broad.
leaved and succulent, and you have a coarse vegetable tapestry
which Raphael would not have disdained to spread over the fore-
ground of his masterpiece. The Professor pretends that he found
such a one in Charles Street, which, in its dare-devil impudence.
of rough-and-tumble vegetation, beat the pretty-behaved flower-
beds of the Public Garden as ignominiously as a group of young
tatterdemalions playing pitch-and-toss beats a row of Sunday-
school boys with their teacher at their head.
But then the Professor has one of his burrows in that region,
and puts everything in high colors relating to it. That is his
way about everything. —I hold any man cheap, he said, of whom
nothing stronger can be uttered than that all his geese are swans.
How is that, Professor? said I: I should have set you down for
one of that sort. Sir, said he, I am proud to say that Nature
has so far enriched me, that I cannot own so much as a duck
without seeing in it as pretty a swan as ever swam the basin
in the garden of the Luxembourg. And the Professor showed
the whites of his eyes devoutly, like one returning thanks after a
dinner of many courses.
I don't know anything sweeter than this leaking in of Nature
through all the cracks in the walls and floors of cities. You heap
up a million tons of hewn rocks on a square mile or two of earth
which was green once. The trees look down from the hillsides
and ask each other, as they stand on tiptoe, "What are these
people about? " And the small herbs at their feet look up and
whisper back, "We will go and see. " So the small herbs pack
themselves up in the least possible bundles, and wait until the
wind steals to them at night and whispers, "Come with me. "
Then they go softly with it into the great city,-one to a cleft in
the pavement, one to a spout on the roof, one to a seam in the
marbles over a rich gentleman's bones, and one to the grave
without a stone where nothing but a man is buried,—and there
they grow, looking down on the generations of men from moldy.


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7492
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
roofs, looking up from between the less-trodden pavements, look-
ing out through iron cemetery railings. Listen to them, when
there is only a light breath stirring, and you will hear them say-
ing to each other, "Wait awhile! " The words run along the
telegraph of those narrow green lines that border the roads
leading from the city, until they reach the slope of the hills, and
the trees repeat in low murmurs to each other, "Wait awhile! "
By-and-by the flow of life in the streets ebbs, and the old leafy
inhabitants—the smaller tribes always in front-saunter in,
one by one, very careless seemingly, but very tenacious, until they
swarm so that the great stones gape from each other with the
crowding of their roots, and the feldspar begins to be picked out
of the granite to find them food. At last the trees take up their
solemn line of march, and never rest until they have encamped
in the market-place. Wait long enough and you will find an old
doting oak hugging a huge worn block in its yellow underground
arms; that was the corner-stone of the State House. Oh, so
patient she is, this imperturbable Nature!
-Let us cry! —
―――――――
But all this has nothing to do with my walks and talks with
the schoolmistress. I did not say that I would not tell you some-
thing about them. Let me alone, and I shall talk to you more
than I ought to, probably. We never tell our secrets to people
that pump for them.
Books we talked about, and education. It was her duty to
know something of these, and of course she did. Perhaps I was
somewhat more learned than she, but I found that the difference
between her reading and mine was like that of a man's and a
woman's dusting a library. The man flaps about with a bunch
of feathers; the woman goes to work softly with a cloth. She
does not raise half the dust, nor fill her own eyes and mouth
with it, but she goes into all the corners and attends to the
leaves as much as to the covers. - Books are the negative pict-
ures of thought, and the more sensitive the mind that receives
their images, the more nicely the finest lines are reproduced. A
woman (of the right kind), reading after a man, follows him as
Ruth followed the reapers of Boaz, and her gleanings are often
the finest of the wheat.
But it was in talking of life that we came most nearly to-
gether. I thought I knew something about that,- that I could
speak or write about it somewhat to the purpose.


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OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
7493
To take up this fluid earthly being of ours as a sponge sucks
up water,- to be steeped and soaked in its realities as a hide
fills its pores lying seven years in a tan-pit,- to have winnowed
every wave of it as a mill-wheel works up the stream that runs
through the flume upon its float boards, to have curled up in
the keenest spasms and flattened out in the laxest languors of
this breathing-sickness, which keeps certain parcels of matter un-
easy for three or four score years,- to have fought all the devils
and clasped all the angels of its delirium,- and then, just at the
point when the white-hot passions have cooled down to cherry-red,
plunge our experience into the ice-cold stream of some human
language or other, one might think would end in a rhapsody with
something of spring and temper in it. All this I thought my
power and province.
―――
―――――
The schoolmistress had tried life too. Once in a while one
meets with a single soul greater than all the living pageant which
passes before it.
As the pale astronomer sits in his study with
sunken eyes and thin fingers, and weighs Uranus or Neptune as
in a balance, so there are meek, slight women who have weighed
all which this planetary life can offer, and hold it like a bauble
in the palm of their slender hands. This was one of them. For-
tune had left her, sorrow had baptized her; the routine of labor
and the loneliness of almost friendless city life were before her.
Yet as I looked upon her tranquil face, gradually regaining a
cheerfulness which was often sprightly, as she became interested
in the various matters we talked about and places we visited, I
saw that eye and lip and every shifting lineament were made for
love,― unconscious of their sweet office as yet, and meeting the
cold aspect of Duty with the natural graces which were meant
for the reward of nothing less than the Great Passion.
I never addressed one word of love to the schoolmistress in
the course of these pleasant walks. It seemed to me that we
talked of everything but love on that particular morning.