No More Learning

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


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OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
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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


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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,


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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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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


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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


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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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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


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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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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. There
was perhaps a little more timidity and hesitancy on my part
than I have commonly shown among our people at the boarding-
house.
In fact, I considered myself the master at the breakfast-
table; but somehow I could not command myself just then so
well as usual. The truth is, I had secured a passage to Liver-
pool in the steamer which was to leave at noon,- with the con-
dition, however, of being released in case circumstances occurred
to detain me. The schoolmistress knew nothing about all this, of
course, as yet.


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7494
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
It was on the Common that we were walking. The mall, or
boulevard of our Common, you know, has various branches lead-
ing from it in different directions. One of these runs down from
opposite Joy Street southward across the whole length of the
Common to Boylston Street. We called it "the long path," and
were fond of it.
I felt very weak indeed (though of a tolerably robust habit)
as we came opposite the head of this path on that morning. I
think I tried to speak twice without making myself distinctly
audible. At last I got out the question, Will you take the long
path with me? -Certainly, said the schoolmistress; with much
pleasure. Think, I said, before you answer: if you take the
long path with me now, I shall interpret it that we are to part
no more! The schoolmistress stepped back with a sudden move-
ment, as if an arrow had struck her.
One of the long granite blocks used as seats was hard by,-
the one you may still see close by the Gingko-tree. — Pray, sit
down, I said. —No, no, she answered softly: I will walk the long
path with you!
-The old gentleman who sits opposite met us walking arm-
in-arm about the middle of the long path, and said very charm-
ingly, "Good-morning, my dears! "
-
THE LARK ON SALISBURY PLAIN
From Our Hundred Days in Europe'
ON
NE incident of our excursion to Stonehenge had a significance
for me which renders it memorable in my personal experi-
ence. As we drove over the barren plain, one of the party
suddenly exclaimed, "Look! Look! See the lark rising! " I
looked up with the rest. There was the bright blue sky, but not
a speck upon it which my eyes could distinguish. Again, one
called out, "Hark! Hark! Hear him singing! " I listened, but
not a sound reached my ear. Was it strange that I felt a moment-
ary pang? Those that look out at the windows are darkened, and
all the daughters of music are brought low. Was I never to see
or hear the soaring songster at heaven's gate, unless,— unless,—
if our mild humanized theology promises truly, I may perhaps
hereafter listen to him singing far down beneath me? For in
whatever world I may find myself, I hope I shall always love
our poor little spheroid, so long my home, which some kind angel


## p. 7495 (#301) ###########################################

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
7495
may point out to me as a gilded globule swimming in the sun-
light far away. After walking the streets of pure gold in the
New Jerusalem, might not one like a short vacation, to visit the
well-remembered green fields and flowery meadows? I had a
very sweet emotion of self-pity, which took the sting out of my
painful discovery that the orchestra of my pleasing life entertain-
ment was unstringing its instruments, and the lights were being
extinguished,—that the show was almost over. All this I kept
to myself, of course, except so far as I whispered it to the unseen
presence which we all feel is in sympathy with us, and which, as
it seemed to my fancy, was looking into my eyes, and through
them into my soul, with the tender, tearful smile of a mother
who for the first time gently presses back the longing lips of her
as yet unweaned infant.
[The foregoing selections from the works of Oliver Wendell Holmes are
copyrighted, and are reprinted by permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. ,
publishers, Boston. ]


## p. 7496 (#302) ###########################################

7496
HERMANN EDUARD VON HOLST
(1841-)
H
ERMANN EDUARD VON HOLST, the historian, was born at Fellin,
Livonia, June 19th, 1841, and was educated at Heidelberg
and Dorpat. While traveling in Germany he published a
pamphlet which was offensive to the Russian authorities, and was
forbidden to return to the land of his birth. Soon afterwards he
came to the United States, where he occupied himself in literary
work for several years. In 1872 he was appointed to a professorship
in the University of Strassburg, and two years later became pro-
fessor of modern history at Freiburg, retain-
ing that chair till 1892, when he was called
to Chicago University. His chief work is
his Constitutional and Political History of
the United States' (1876-85), translated from
the German by J. J. Lalor and A. B. Mason.
Besides this he has written lives of John
C. Calhoun and John Brown, The Constitu-
tional Law of the United States of America'
(1887), and The French Revolution Tested
by Mirabeau's Career' (1894).
་

Von Holst had unusual advantages as a
student of American politics and history.
His foreign birth and education might well
have served to give to his work such a
HERMANN VON HOLST
character of impartiality as it would have been more difficult for the
native historian to secure. The great Civil War which was going on
when he came to the United States appealed powerfully to his sym-
pathies, and determined him to search for its historical causes. Un-
fortunately for his repute as a historian, he saw these causes with
the eye of a partisan of the North, and he traversed the past like a
belated Nemesis dealing out to our departed statesmen the retribu-
tion which he thought their sins deserved. To his mind the slavery
question assumed proportions so enormous that the entire history
of the country was nothing but a record of the struggle between
freedom and the "slavocracy," and the latter's insidious purposes are
discernible everywhere. In spite of this, it is safe to say that no
historian since the war has exerted a wider influence than Von Holst.


## p. 7497 (#303) ###########################################

HERMANN EDUARD VON HOLST
7497
If his conclusions are not wholly accepted, his zeal, his vigor, his
picturesque manner, and his sincerity have stimulated others to good
work. Few recent historical books have been more widely read, and
that despite a certain roughness of style and confusion of metaphor
which make many of his passages hard reading. In the matter of
style, however, the translators of his Constitutional History' are in
part at fault, and his lives of Brown and Calhoun are more concise
and readable. For many years his history was regarded as the stand-
ard American work on the period since the adoption of the Consti-
tution, and was constantly used by teachers, in Northern colleges at
least, as a book of reference. Of late, special treatises on portions
of the period covered have superseded it to a certain extent.
Dr. Von Holst's power of picturesque and dramatic presentation
is seen to good advantage in the volume on the French Revolution
from which the selections are made. The story is centred around its
most striking personality, and after the manner of Carlyle, that per-
sonality is made vital and hence explicable. History writing, even
upon this most fascinating of themes, is seldom made so attractive.
This gift of making his subject-matter interesting also comes out in
Dr. Von Holst as a lecturer: he is a very stimulating man with whom
to come into the relation of auditor or pupil.
MIRABEAU
From The French Revolution Tested by Mirabeau's Career. Copyright 1894,
by Callaghan & Co.
"D
ON'T be frightened! " It is said that on March 9th, 1749,
these ill-omened words announced to Victor Riquetti,
Marquis Mirabeau, that the longed-for son and heir was
born to him. The warning was to prepare him to see a twisted
foot and an over-sized head of uncommon ugliness, rendered the
more impressive by two premature teeth. If a prophet's hand
had lifted for him the curtain concealing the future, he would
have seen that there were other and infinitely graver reasons to
frighten him. With that ill-shaped baby Providence had com-
mitted to his hands a trust of incalculable import to France, and
thereby to the world. He knew it no more than the child knew
that the very first thing it did in life was to cause deep vexation
to its irritable father by its unsightliness. If he had known it,
he might have understood his duty towards the child somewhat
differently, and some of history's most awful pages might possi-
bly have a somewhat different tale to tell.


## p. 7498 (#304) ###########################################

7498
HERMANN EDUARD VON HOLST
In his last years Mirabeau rather prided himself upon his
ugliness. He declared it no mean element in his extraordinary
power over men, and there was in fact a strange fascination
in its forceful impressiveness. The father, however, was proof
against its charm. If I read the character of the eccentric man
correctly, the baby acted most unwisely in furnishing good cause
for that horrified exclamation. Any father's child is to be pitied
that is bid such a welcome upon its entrance into the world; and
if there was a father whose feelings could not with impunity be
trifled with, it was the famous author of the Friend of Men. '
Forsooth a proud title. A brighter diadem than a crown, if it
had been conferred by others. Bestowed by himself it savored
of presumption. Still it was by no means a false, mendacious
pretension. A great and warm heart beat with an uncommonly
strong pulse in the rugged chest. But when this heart set to
reasoning, as it was fearfully prone to do whenever it was hurt,
it always did so with the sledge-hammer's logic. And as to this
baby it at once began to reason, because it was deeply wounded
in a most tender spot by its extravagant ugliness. From the
first dismayed look the father took at his offspring, it was certain
that unless the son proved a paragon of all virtues according
to the father's conceptions, fair weather would be the exception
rather than the rule in their relations. Ere the child is fairly
out of the nursery they begin to take a tragical turn. When
Gabriel Honoré is still a lithe-limbed boy, a veritable tragedy is
well under way.
The beard does not yet sprout on the chin of
the youth, and bitter wrangling degenerates into a fierce feud.
The same blood flows in their veins, but as to each other every
drop of it seems to turn into corrosive poison. No diseased
imagination of a sensational novelist has ever invented a wilder
romance and used more glaring colors in painting characters and
scenes. It is indescribably revolting, but at the same time of
overwhelming, heart-rending pathos; not only because it is life
and not fiction, but principally because both, father and son, are
infinitely more to be pitied than to be blamed, though the guilt of
both is great. As to this there can be no difference of opinion.
But for more than a century it has been a much-controverted
question whether the father or the son was the more culpable.
I shall give no doubtful answer to the question as to what I
think on this head. By far the greater stress, however, I lay on
the assertion that the principal culprit was the ancien régime. If


## p. 7499 (#305) ###########################################

HERMANN EDUARD VON HOLST
7499
this be not made the basal line in examining the case, it is
impossible to do full justice to either of the parties; and in my
opinion all the historians of the portentous family tragedy have
thus far more or less failed to see, or at least to do, this.
Unless Marquis Victor could exempt himself from the law
that causes have effects, his being constantly in hot water in
regard to his family affairs was inevitable. The hot sun of the
Provence tells upon the temperature of the blood, and with the
Mirabeaus it seemed to rise a degree or two with every gen-
eration. In this respect nothing was changed by the fact that
any ordinary man would have died if he had lost half the quan-
tity of blood that flowed in the wars of Louis XIV. from the
wounds of Jean Antoine, Victor's father. He deemed it his
due always to be sent where death was sure to reap the richest
harvest, and he was not possessed of any charm rendering him
steel-and-bullet-proof. Of one of the battles he used to speak
as "the day on which I died. " The soldiers said of him: "He
is a Mirabeau: they are all devils. "
It was an uncommonly ugly baby,-that is all I have thus far
said of him who was to render the name Mirabeau immortal,
and yet I have said already enough to decide the mooted ques-
tion, whether the father or the son was more to blame that the
story of their relations was written with gall and venom, and
the latter's name became a stench in the nostrils of all decent
people. I have said enough to decide this question, unless one
is prepared to contend that not parents have to educate their
children, but children their parents, and to deny that example
is one of the most essential elements in education.
Surely the children of the marquis would have needed a treble
set of guardian angels, to come out of the atmosphere of this
household uncontaminated. As to Honoré, a whole battalion of
them would have been of no avail, for against them father and
son were from the first the closest allies. All that was out of
joint and awry in the father's way of feeling, thinking, and act-
ing, was brought to bear upon the hapless child systematically,
with dogged persistency and the utmost force. Not enough that
he was born so ugly that the most mealy-hearted father, intend-
ing to make his son the head of one of the great families of
France, would have felt justly aggrieved. As if he wanted to
try just how much the father's patience would stand, he became
still more disfigured by small-pox. The bailli was informed that


## p. 7500 (#306) ###########################################

7500
HERMANN EDUARD VON HOLST
his nephew vied in ugliness "with the Devil's nephew. " Starting
from this basis, the marquis soon commenced to discover that
he resembled this disreputable personage in many other respects
also. Small wonder! The precocious child was a most genu-
ine twig of the old tree, and most people judge those defects of
character with the greatest severity which characterize themselves.
Upon the hot-tempered father, afflicted with the infallibility delus-
ion and the duty craze, the faithful reproduction of his own un-
confessed faults in his son necessarily had the effect that a red
cloth has upon the turkey-cock; and the logical consequence was
a pedagogical policy necessarily producing results diametrically
opposed to those it was intended to have. Dismay grew into
chronic anger, baffled anger into provoking passion, thwarted pas-
sion into obdurate rigor and obstinacy, defied rigor into system-
atic injustice and cruelty, breeding revengeful spite and more
and more weakening and wrenching out of shape all the springs
of moral volition.
The brain in the oversized head of the boy worked with
unnatural intensity, and molten iron instead of blood seemed to
flow in his veins. What he needed above all was therefore a
steady hand to guide him. The hand, however, cannot possibly
be steady if the judgment is constantly whirling around like a
weathercock. Now the father sees in him "a lofty heart under
the jacket of a babe, with a strange but noble instinct of pride";
and only four days later he has changed into "a type of unutter-
ably deep baseness, of absolute platitude, and the quality of an
uncouth and dirty caterpillar which will not undergo a trans-
formation. " Then again: "An intelligence, a memory, a capacity,
which overpower, exciting astonishment, nay, fright. " And not
quite four weeks later: "A nothing, embellished with trivialities.
that will throw dust into the eyes of chatterboxes, but never be
anything but a quarter of a man, if peradventure he should ever
be anything at all. "
Unquestionably it was no easy task properly to educate this
boy, for there was a great deal of solid foundation for every one
of the father's contradictory judgments: the boy was like the
father, as "changeable as the sea. " Still, by conforming the
education, with untiring, loving patience, to the strongly pro-
nounced individuality of the child, a good pedagogue would have
been sure to achieve excellent results. The application of any
cut-and-dried system based upon preconceived notions was certain


## p. 7501 (#307) ###########################################

HERMANN EDUARD VON HOLST
7501
to work incalculable mischief. This the marquis failed to see,
and his system was in all its parts as adapted to the intellectual
and moral peculiarities of the boy as a blacksmith's hammer to
the repairing of a chronometer.
Many years later, the Baron von Gleichen wrote to the father:
"I told you often that you would make a great rascal of the
boy, while he was of a stuff to make a great man of him. He
has become both. " So it was; and that he became a rascal was
to a great extent due to the treatment he received at his father's
hands, while he became a great man in spite of it. Appeals
to reason, pride, honor, noble ambition, and above all affection,
always awakened a strong responsive echo in his bosom; the
father, however, whenever he was provoked,- and the high-
spirited unruly boy constantly provoked him,- had only stern-
ness, stinging sarcasm, sharp rebuke, and severe punishment for
him. Instead of educating him by methodically developing his
better qualities, he persists in trying to subdue him by fear,
although he cannot help confessing that the word fear is not to
be found in the boy's vocabulary. Contradicting himself, he
then again proudly asserts that while Honoré is afraid of no one
else, he fears him. That was a delusion. He knew that from
the father he had to expect nothing but punishment, and that
he tried to elude by hook and by crook; having, in spite of his
fearlessness, no more a liking for it than any other boy. The
father accused him, now and ever afterwards, of being by nature
a liar. It was he who had caused the germ of untruthfulness,
which is liable to be pretty strong with most very vivacious
children, to sprout so vigorously and to cast such deep roots, by
systematically watering it every day. From his early childhood
to the day of his death, Mirabeau was possessed of a secret
charm that in spite of everything, opened him the hearts of
almost all people with whom he came into close contact. Even
the father was by no means, as he pretended to be, wholly
proof against it. But as he was extraordinarily skillful in deceiv-
ing himself on this head, he also admirably succeeded in con-
cealing it from the son. The boy learned more and more to
look upon his father as his one natural enemy, whom it was a
matter of course to oppose by all available means, fair and foul.
He did his best to make himself a terror to his son, and he not
only deadened natural affection, but also undermined filial re-
spect. To reimpose the punishments remitted by the teacher, to
make everybody, from the father confessor down to the comrades,


## p. 7502 (#308) ###########################################

7502
HERMANN EDUARD VON HOLST
a spy and informant, purposely and confessedly to exaggerate to
instructors and superiors his moral shortcomings,—that was a
policy to drive an angel to revolt. It would have been nothing
less than a miracle if it had not goaded into viciousness an un-
usually bright and hot-tempered boy, with a superabundance of
human nature in his every fibre. There is no surer way utterly
to ruin a full-blooded colt than madly to tear and jerk the bridle,
while brutally belaboring him with spur and whip.
Honoré was still a child, and the marquis already persuaded
himself that he was in the strict sense of the word a criminal.
He not only said so, but he also treated him as such, though he
admitted that in truth, thus far only boyish pranks could be laid
to his charge. As a last attempt to save him from perdition,
he was at the age of fifteen years intrusted to the Abbé Cho-
quard. The marquis himself applies to the institution the harsh
name "reformatory school. " It was not so bad as that. Among
Honoré's comrades were even some English boys "of family,"
who were not at all suspected of being candidates for the hang-
man's kind attentions. Not by putting him into this institution
did the marquis disgrace his son, but he did brand him by depriv
ing him of his name. As Pierre Buffière he was entered in the
lists. Loménie - facile princeps among Mirabeau's biographers
- makes light of this. He is even strongly inclined to suppose
that as Buffière was the name of a large estate forming part of
the prospective inheritance of his wife, the marquis was largely
induced by the desire to gratify his pride to impose this name
on the son. A strange way of distributing light and shadow in
painting this family tragedy! The marquis states in the plain-
est words that he intends to burn a mark upon the forehead of
the son.
Here again Mirabeau soon gained the vivid affection, not only
of his comrades, but also of his teachers. A touching demonstra-
tion of the former induced his father to refrain from carrying out
the intention of punishing him for the crime of accepting some
money presents from his mother, by taking him out of the school
and casting him adrift on the sea of life in a way which would
have burned an indelible mark on his, the father's, forehead.
In 1767 Pierre Buffière was put into the army. From this time
the feud between father and son rapidly sinks into darker and
darker depths. The son now comes in for a steadily and fast
increasing share of real guilt; but his guilt is always outrun by
his father's unreasonable, unjust, and despotic paternalism.


## p. 7503 (#309) ###########################################

HERMANN EDUARD VON HOLST
7503
Debts, contracted at the gambling-table and in all sorts of
other indulgences of a more or less reprehensible character, and
an indiscreet and impure love affair, caused his father to resume
the idea I just alluded to. He thought of sending the son to the
Dutch colonies, because their mephitic climate would render it
rather more than likely that he would never return from them.
Many a year later Mirabeau wrote from his terrible dungeon in
Vincennes to his father:-"You have confessed to me in one of
your letters, that from the time of my imprisonment on the Isle
of Rhé you have been on the point of sending me to the Dutch
colonies. The word has made a deep impression upon me, and
influenced in a high degree my after life.
What had I
done at the age of eighteen years, that you could conceive such
an idea, which makes me tremble even now, when I am buried
alive?
I had made love. " Why do Loménie and Stern
not quote this letter? It seems to me that it must be quoted, if
one is to judge fairly.
The project was abandoned in favor of a milder means, which
the ancien régime offered to persons of high standing and influ-
ence to rid themselves of people who were in their way, the
so-called lettres de cachet. The person whose name a complacent
minister entered upon the formulary was arrested in the name
of the king, and disappeared without trial or judgment in some
State prison, for as long a time as his persecutor chose to keep
him caged. By this handy means the marquis now began to
drag his son from prison to prison, in his "quality of natural
tribunal," as he said.
.
▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
Loménie lays considerable stress upon the fact that once or
twice Mirabeau seems to have been rather satisfied with thus
being taken care of, because he was thereby protected from his
creditors. The marquis however gains but little by that. As to
his son, he appears in regard to this particular instance in a
better light than before this fact was unearthed, but from the
other side a new shadow falls upon him. Where did this fanatic
of duty find the moral justification to prevent the creditors from
getting their due, by thus putting their debtor "under the hand
of the king," as the phrase ran? It certainly could not be de-
rived from any paragraph in his catechism. It is a most genuine.
piece of the code of the ancien régime.
For a number of years Mirabeau's debts constituted his prin-
cipal wrong.
He was
one of those men who would somehow


## p. 7504 (#310) ###########################################

HERMANN EDUARD VON HOLST
7504
manage to get into debt even on a desert island, and with Robin-
son's lump of gold for a pillow. But he would have had no
opportunity to run up in the briefest time an account of over
200,000 francs, if he had not closely followed the father's bad
example in choosing a wife. Miss Marignane was also an heiress,
but-though bearing no resemblance to the née Miss Vassan —
in almost every other respect pretty much the reverse of what
a sensible man must wish his wife to be. Mirabeau would cer-
tainly never have thought of offering her his hand, if she had
not been an heiress. His main reasons for wooing her seem,
however, to have been the longing to become more independent
of his father, and a freak of petty vanity: he was tickled by the
sensation it would cause, that in spite of his ugliness the much-
coveted prize was carried off by him. He did not even scruple
to force the hand of the girl by gravely compromising her. But
when she was his wife, he was only too gallant a knight.