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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Oliver Wendell Holmes, by William Dean Howells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Oliver Wendell Holmes
+       From "Literary Friends And Acquaintances"
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: October 22, 2004 [EBook #3395]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--Oliver Wendell Holmes
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
+
+Elsewhere we literary folk are apt to be such a common lot, with
+tendencies here and there to be a shabby lot; we arrive from all sorts of
+unexpected holes and corners of the earth, remote, obscure; and at the
+best we do so often come up out of the ground; but at Boston we were of
+ascertained and noted origin, and good part of us dropped from the skies.
+Instead of holding horses before the doors of theatres; or capping verses
+at the plough-tail; or tramping over Europe with nothing but a flute in
+the pocket; or walking up to the metropolis with no luggage but the MS.
+of a tragedy; or sleeping in doorways or under the arches of bridges; or
+serving as apothecaries' 'prentices--we were good society from the
+beginning. I think this was none the worse for us, and it was vastly the
+better for good society.
+
+Literature in Boston, indeed, was so respectable, and often of so high a
+lineage, that to be a poet was not only to be good society, but almost to
+be good family. If one names over the men who gave Boston her supremacy
+in literature during that Unitarian harvest-time of the old Puritanic
+seed-time which was her Augustan age, one names the people who were and
+who had been socially first in the city ever since the self-exile of the
+Tories at the time of the Revolution. To say Prescott, Motley, Parkman,
+Lowell, Norton, Higginson, Dana, Emerson, Channing, was to say patrician,
+in the truest and often the best sense, if not the largest. Boston was
+small, but these were of her first citizens, and their primacy, in its
+way, was of the same quality as that, say, of the chief families of
+Venice. But these names can never have the effect for the stranger that
+they had for one to the manner born. I say had, for I doubt whether in
+Boston they still mean all that they once meant, and that their
+equivalents meant in science, in law, in politics. The most famous, if
+not the greatest of all the literary men of Boston, I have not mentioned
+with them, for Longfellow was not of the place, though by his sympathies
+and relations he became of it; and I have not mentioned Oliver Wendell
+Holmes, because I think his name would come first into the reader's
+thought with the suggestion of social quality in the humanities.
+
+Holmes was of the Brahminical caste which his humorous recognition
+invited from its subjectivity in the New England consciousness into the
+light where all could know it and own it, and like Longfellow he was
+allied to the patriciate of Boston by the most intimate ties of life. For
+a long time, for the whole first period of his work, he stood for that
+alone, its tastes, its prejudices, its foibles even, and when he came to
+stand in his 'second period, for vastly, for infinitely more, and to make
+friends with the whole race, as few men have ever done, it was always, I
+think, with a secret shiver of doubt, a backward look of longing, and an
+eye askance. He was himself perfectly aware of this at times, and would
+mark his several misgivings with a humorous sense of the situation. He
+was essentially too kind to be of a narrow world, too human to be finally
+of less than humanity, too gentle to be of the finest gentility. But
+such limitations as he had were in the direction I have hinted, or
+perhaps more than hinted; and I am by no means ready to make a mock of
+them, as it would be so easy to do for some reasons that he has himself
+suggested. To value aright the affection which the old Bostonian had for
+Boston one must conceive of something like the patriotism of men in the
+times when a man's city was a man's country, something Athenian,
+something Florentine. The war that nationalized us liberated this love
+to the whole country, but its first tenderness remained still for Boston,
+and I suppose a Bostonian still thinks of himself first as a Bostonian
+and then as an American, in a way that no New-Yorker could deal with
+himself. The rich historical background dignifies and ennobles the
+intense public spirit of the place, and gives it a kind of personality.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+In literature Doctor Holmes survived all the Bostonians who had given the
+city her primacy in letters, but when I first knew him there was no
+apparent ground for questioning it. I do not mean now the time when I
+visited New England, but when I came to live near Boston, and to begin
+the many happy years which I spent in her fine, intellectual air. I found
+time to run in upon him, while I was there arranging to take my place on
+the Atlantic Monthly, and I remember that in this brief moment with him
+he brought me to book about some vaunting paragraph in the 'Nation'
+claiming the literary primacy for New York. He asked me if I knew who
+wrote it, and I was obliged to own that I had written it myself, when
+with the kindness he always showed me he protested against my position.
+To tell the truth, I do not think now I had any very good reasons for it,
+and I certainly could urge none that would stand against his. I could
+only fall back upon the saving clause that this primacy was claimed
+mainly if not wholly for New York in the future. He was willing to leave
+me the connotations of prophecy, but I think he did even this out of
+politeness rather than conviction, and I believe he had always a
+sensitiveness where Boston was concerned, which could not seem ungenerous
+to any generous mind. Whatever lingering doubt of me he may have had,
+with reference to Boston, seemed to satisfy itself when several years
+afterwards he happened to speak of a certain character in an early novel
+of mine, who was not quite the kind of Bostonian one could wish to be.
+The thing came up in talk with another person, who had referred to my
+Bostonian, and the doctor had apparently made his acquaintance in the
+book, and not liked him. "I understood, of course," he said, "that he
+was a Bostonian, not the Bostonian," and I could truthfully answer that
+this was by all means my own understanding too.
+
+His fondness for his city, which no one could appreciate better than
+myself, I hope, often found expression in a burlesque excess in his
+writings, and in his talk perhaps oftener still. Hard upon my return
+from Venice I had a half-hour with him in his old study on Charles
+Street, where he still lived in 1865, and while I was there a young man
+came in for the doctor's help as a physician, though he looked so very
+well, and was so lively and cheerful, that I have since had my doubts
+whether he had not made a pretext for a glimpse of him as the Autocrat.
+The doctor took him upon his word, however, and said he had been so long
+out of practice that he could not do anything for him, but he gave him
+the address of another physician, somewhere near Washington Street. "And
+if you don't know where Washington Street is," he said, with a gay burst
+at a certain vagueness which had come into the young man's face, "you
+don't know anything."
+
+We had been talking of Venice, and what life was like there, and he made
+me tell him in some detail. He was especially interested in what I had
+to say of the minute subdivision and distribution of the necessaries, the
+small coins, and the small values adapted to their purchase, the
+intensely retail character, in fact, of household provisioning; and I
+could see how he pleased himself in formulating the theory that the
+higher a civilization the finer the apportionment of the demands and
+supplies. The ideal, he said, was a civilization in which you could buy
+two cents' worth of beef, and a divergence from this standard was towards
+barbarism.
+
+The secret of the man who is universally interesting is that he is
+universally interested, and this was, above all, the secret of the charm
+that Doctor Holmes had for every one. No doubt he knew it, for what that
+most alert intelligence did not know of itself was scarcely worth
+knowing. This knowledge was one of his chief pleasures, I fancy; he
+rejoiced in the consciousness which is one of the highest attributes of
+the highly organized man, and he did not care for the consequences in
+your mind, if you were so stupid as not to take him aright. I remember
+the delight Henry James, the father of the novelist, had in reporting to
+me the frankness of the doctor, when he had said to him, "Holmes, you are
+intellectually the most alive man I ever knew." "I am, I am," said the
+doctor. "From the crown of my head to the sole of my foot, I'm alive,
+I'm alive!" Any one who ever saw him will imagine the vivid relish he
+had in recognizing the fact. He could not be with you a moment without
+shedding upon you the light of his flashing wit, his radiant humor, and
+he shone equally upon the rich and poor in mind. His gaiety of heart
+could not withhold itself from any chance of response, but he did wish
+always to be fully understood, and to be liked by those he liked. He
+gave his liking cautiously, though, for the affluence of his sympathies
+left him without the reserves of colder natures, and he had to make up
+for these with careful circumspection. He wished to know the character
+of the person who made overtures to his acquaintance, for he was aware
+that his friendship lay close to it; he wanted to be sure that he was a
+nice person, and though I think he preferred social quality in his
+fellow-man, he did not refuse himself to those who had merely a sweet and
+wholesome humanity. He did not like anything that tasted or smelt of
+Bohemianism in the personnel of literature, but he did not mind the scent
+of the new-ploughed earth, or even of the barn-yard. I recall his
+telling me once that after two younger brothers-in-letters had called
+upon him in the odor of an habitual beeriness and smokiness, he opened
+the window; and the very last time I saw him he remembered at eighty-five
+the offence he had found on his first visit to New York, when a
+metropolitan poet had asked him to lunch in a basement restaurant.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+He seemed not to mind, however, climbing to the little apartment we had
+in Boston when we came there in 1866, and he made this call upon us in
+due form, bringing Mrs. Holmes with him as if to accent the recognition
+socially. We were then incredibly young, much younger than I find people
+ever are nowadays, and in the consciousness of our youth we felt, to the
+last exquisite value of the fact, what it was to have the Autocrat come
+to see us; and I believe he was not displeased to perceive this; he liked
+to know that you felt his quality in every way. That first winter,
+however, I did not see him often, and in the spring we went to live in
+Cambridge, and thereafter I met him chiefly at Longfellow's, or when I
+came in to dine at the Fieldses', in Boston. It was at certain meetings
+of the Dante Club, when Longfellow read aloud his translation for
+criticism, and there was supper later, that one saw the doctor; and his
+voice was heard at the supper rather than at the criticism, for he was no
+Italianate. He always seemed to like a certain turn of the talk toward
+the mystical, but with space for the feet on a firm ground of fact this
+side of the shadows; when it came to going over among them, and laying
+hold of them with the band of faith, as if they were substance, he was
+not of the excursion. It is well known how fervent, I cannot say devout,
+a spiritualist Longfellow's brother-in-law, Appleton, was; and when he
+was at the table too, it took all the poet's delicate skill to keep him
+and the Autocrat from involving themselves in a cataclysmal controversy
+upon the matter of manifestations. With Doctor Holmes the inquiry was
+inquiry, to the last, I believe, and the burden of proof was left to the
+ghosts and their friends. His attitude was strictly scientific; he
+denied nothing, but he expected the supernatural to be at least as
+convincing as the natural.
+
+There was a time in his history when the popular ignorance classed him
+with those who were once rudely called infidels; but the world has since
+gone so fast and so far that the mind he was of concerning religious
+belief would now be thought religious by a good half of the religious
+world. It is true that he had and always kept a grudge against the
+ancestral Calvinism which afflicted his youth; and he was through all
+rises and lapses of opinion essentially Unitarian; but of the honest
+belief of any one, I am sure he never felt or spoke otherwise than most
+tolerantly, most tenderly. As often as he spoke of religion, and his
+talk tended to it very often, I never heard an irreligious word from him,
+far less a scoff or sneer at religion; and I am certain that this was not
+merely because he would have thought it bad taste, though undoubtedly he
+would have thought it bad taste; I think it annoyed, it hurt him, to be
+counted among the iconoclasts, and he would have been profoundly grieved
+if he could have known how widely this false notion of him once
+prevailed. It can do no harm at this late day to impart from the secrets
+of the publishing house the fact that a supposed infidelity in the tone
+of his story The Guardian Angel cost the Atlantic Monthly many
+subscribers. Now the tone of that story would not be thought even mildly
+agnostic, I fancy; and long before his death the author had outlived the
+error concerning him.
+
+It was not the best of his stories, by any means, and it would not be too
+harsh to say that it was the poorest. His novels all belonged to an
+order of romance which was as distinctly his own as the form of
+dramatized essay which he invented in the Autocrat. If he did not think
+poorly of them, he certainly did not think too proudly, and I heard him
+quote with relish the phrase of a lady who had spoken of them to him as
+his "medicated novels." That, indeed, was perhaps what they were; a
+faint, faint odor of the pharmacopoeia clung to their pages; their magic
+was scientific. He knew this better than any one else, of course, and if
+any one had said it in his turn he would hardly have minded it. But what
+he did mind was the persistent misinterpretation of his intention in
+certain quarters where he thought he had the right to respectful
+criticism in stead of the succession of sneers that greeted the
+successive numbers of his story; and it was no secret that he felt the
+persecution keenly. Perhaps he thought that he had already reached that
+time in his literary life when he was a fact rather than a question, and
+when reasons and not feelings must have to do with his acceptance or
+rejection. But he had to live many years yet before he reached this
+state. When he did reach it, happily a good while before his death, I do
+not believe any man ever enjoyed the like condition more. He loved to
+feel himself out of the fight, with much work before him still, but with
+nothing that could provoke ill-will in his activities. He loved at all
+times to take himself objectively, if I may so express my sense of a
+mental attitude that misled many. As I have said before, he was
+universally interested, and he studied the universe from himself. I do
+not know how one is to study it otherwise; the impersonal has really no
+existence; but with all his subtlety and depth he was of a make so
+simple, of a spirit so naive, that he could not practise the feints some
+use to conceal that interest in self which, after all, every one knows is
+only concealed. He frankly and joyously made himself the starting-point
+in all his inquest of the hearts and minds of other men, but so far from
+singling himself out in this, and standing apart in it, there never was
+any one who was more eagerly and gladly your fellow-being in the things
+of the soul.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+In the things of the world, he had fences, and looked at some people
+through palings and even over the broken bottles on the tops of walls;
+and I think he was the loser by this, as well as they. But then I think
+all fences are bad, and that God has made enough differences between men;
+we need not trouble ourselves to multiply them. Even behind his fences,
+however, Holmes had a heart kind for the outsiders, and I do not believe
+any one came into personal relations with him who did not experience this
+kindness. In that long and delightful talk I had with him on my return
+from Venice (I can praise the talk because it was mainly his), we spoke
+of the status of domestics in the Old World, and how fraternal the
+relation of high and low was in Italy, while in England, between master
+and man, it seemed without acknowledgment of their common humanity.
+"Yes," he said, "I always felt as if English servants expected to be
+trampled on; but I can't do that. If they want to be trampled on, they
+must get some one else." He thought that our American way was infinitely
+better; and I believe that in spite of the fences there was always an
+instinctive impulse with him to get upon common ground with his
+fellow-man. I used to notice in the neighborhood cabman who served our
+block on Beacon Street a sort of affectionate reverence for the Autocrat,
+which could have come from nothing but the kindly terms between them; if
+you went to him when he was engaged to Doctor Holmes, he told you so with
+a sort of implication in his manner that the thought of anything else for
+the time was profanation. The good fellow who took him his drives about
+the Beverly and Manchester shores seemed to be quite in the joke of the
+doctor's humor, and within the bounds of his personal modesty and his
+functional dignity permitted himself a smile at the doctor's sallies,
+when you stood talking with him, or listening to him at the
+carriage-side.
+
+The civic and social circumstance that a man values himself on is
+commonly no part of his value, and certainly no part of his greatness.
+Rather, it is the very thing that limits him, and I think that Doctor
+Holmes appeared in the full measure of his generous personality to those
+who did not and could not appreciate his circumstance, and not to those
+who formed it, and who from life-long association were so dear and
+comfortable to him. Those who best knew how great a man he was were
+those who came from far to pay him their duty, or to thank him for some
+help they had got from his books, or to ask his counsel or seek his
+sympathy. With all such he was most winningly tender, most intelligently
+patient. I suppose no great author was ever more visited by letter and
+in person than he, or kept a faithfuler conscience for his guests. With
+those who appeared to him in the flesh he used a miraculous tact, and I
+fancy in his treatment of all the physician native in him bore a
+characteristic part. No one seemed to be denied access to him, but it
+was after a moment of preparation that one was admitted, and any one who
+was at all sensitive must have felt from the first moment in his presence
+that there could be no trespassing in point of time. If now and then
+some insensitive began to trespass, there was a sliding-scale of
+dismissal that never failed of its work, and that really saved the author
+from the effect of intrusion. He was not bored because he would not be.
+
+I transfer at random the impressions of many years to my page, and I
+shall not try to observe a chronological order in these memories. Vivid
+among them is that of a visit which I paid him with Osgood the publisher,
+then newly the owner of the Atlantic Monthly, when I had newly become the
+sole editor. We wished to signalize our accession to the control of the
+magazine by a stroke that should tell most in the public eye, and we
+thought of asking Doctor Holmes to do something again in the manner of
+the Autocrat and the Professor at the Breakfast Table. Some letters had
+passed between him and the management concerning our wish, and then
+Osgood thought that it would be right and fit for us to go to him in
+person. He proposed the visit, and Doctor Holmes received us with a mind
+in which he had evidently formulated all his thoughts upon the matter.
+His main question was whether at his age of sixty years a man was
+justified in seeking to recall a public of the past, or to create a new
+public in the present. He seemed to have looked the ground over not only
+with a personal interest in the question, but with a keen scientific zest
+for it as something which it was delightful to consider in its generic
+relations; and I fancy that the pleasure of this inquiry more than
+consoled him for such pangs of misgiving as he must have had in the
+personal question. As commonly happens in the solution of such problems,
+it was not solved; he was very willing to take our minds upon it, and to
+incur the risk, if we thought it well and were willing to share it.
+
+We came away rejoicing, and the new series began with the new year
+following. It was by no means the popular success that we had hoped; not
+because the author had not a thousand new things to say, or failed to say
+them with the gust and freshness of his immortal youth, but because it
+was not well to disturb a form associated in the public mind with an
+achievement which had become classic. It is of the Autocrat of the
+Breakfast Table that people think, when they think of the peculiar
+species of dramatic essay which the author invented, and they think also
+of the Professor at the Breakfast Table, because he followed so soon; but
+the Poet at the Breakfast Table came so long after that his advent
+alienated rather than conciliated liking. Very likely, if the Poet had
+come first he would have had no second place in the affections of his
+readers, for his talk was full of delightful matter; and at least one of
+the poems which graced each instalment was one of the finest and greatest
+that Doctor Holmes ever wrote. I mean "Homesick in Heaven," which seems
+to me not only what I have said, but one of the most important, the most
+profoundly pathetic in the language. Indeed, I do not know any other
+that in the same direction goes so far with suggestion so penetrating.
+The other poems were mainly of a cast which did not win; the metaphysics
+in them were too much for the human interest, and again there rose a
+foolish clamor of the creeds against him on account of them. The great
+talent, the beautiful and graceful fancy, the eager imagination of the
+Autocrat could not avail in this third attempt, and I suppose the Poet at
+the Breakfast Table must be confessed as near a failure as Doctor Holmes
+could come. It certainly was so in the magazine which the brilliant
+success of the first had availed to establish in the high place the
+periodical must always hold in the history of American literature. Lowell
+was never tired of saying, when he recurred to the first days of his
+editorship, that the magazine could never have gone at all without the
+Autocrat papers. He was proud of having insisted upon Holmes's doing
+something for the new venture, and he was fond of recalling the author's
+misgivings concerning his contributions, which later repeated themselves
+with too much reason, though not with the reason that was in his own
+mind.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+He lived twenty-five years after that self-question at sixty, and after
+eighty he continued to prove that threescore was not the limit of a man's
+intellectual activity or literary charm. During all that time the work
+he did in mere quantity was the work that a man in the prime of life
+might well have been vain of doing, and it was of a quality not less
+surprising. If I asked him with any sort of fair notice I could rely
+upon him always for something for the January number, and throughout the
+year I could count upon him for those occasional pieces in which he so
+easily excelled all former writers of occasional verse, and which he
+liked to keep from the newspapers for the magazine. He had a pride in
+his promptness with copy, and you could always trust his promise. The
+printer's toe never galled the author's kibe in his case; he wished to
+have an early proof, which he corrected fastidiously, but not overmuch,
+and he did not keep it long. He had really done all his work in the
+manuscript, which came print-perfect and beautifully clear from his pen,
+in that flowing, graceful hand which to the last kept a suggestion of the
+pleasure he must have had in it. Like all wise contributors, he was not
+only patient, but very glad of all the queries and challenges that
+proof-reader and editor could accumulate on the margin of his proofs, and
+when they were both altogether wrong he was still grateful. In one of
+his poems there was some Latin-Quarter French, which our collective
+purism questioned, and I remember how tender of us he was in maintaining
+that in his Parisian time, at least, some ladies beyond the Seine said
+"Eh, b'en," instead of "Eh, bien." He knew that we must be always on the
+lookout for such little matters, and he would not wound our ignorance. I
+do not think any one enjoyed praise more than he. Of course he would not
+provoke it, but if it came of itself, he would not deny himself the
+pleasure, as long as a relish of it remained. He used humorously to
+recognize his delight in it, and to say of the lecture audiences which in
+earlier times hesitated applause, "Why don't they give me three times
+three? I can stand it!" He himself gave in the generous fulness he
+desired. He did not praise foolishly or dishonestly, though he would
+spare an open dislike; but when a thing pleased him he knew how to say so
+cordially and skilfully, so that it might help as well as delight. I
+suppose no great author has tried more sincerely and faithfully to
+befriend the beginner than he; and from time to time he would commend
+something to me that he thought worth looking at, but never insistently.
+In certain cases, where he had simply to ease a burden, from his own to
+the editorial shoulders, he would ask that the aspirant might be
+delicately treated. There might be personal reasons for this, but
+usually his kindness of heart moved him. His tastes had their
+geographical limit, but his sympathies were boundless, and the hopeless
+creature for whom he interceded was oftener remote from Boston and New
+England than otherwise.
+
+It seems to me that he had a nature singularly affectionate, and that it
+was this which was at fault if he gave somewhat too much of himself to
+the celebration of the Class of '29, and all the multitude of Boston
+occasions, large and little, embalmed in the clear amber of his verse,
+somewhat to the disadvantage of the amber. If he were asked he could not
+deny the many friendships and fellowships which united in the asking; the
+immediate reclame from these things was sweet to him; but he loved to
+comply as much as he loved to be praised. In the pleasure he got he
+could feel himself a prophet in his own country, but the country which
+owned him prophet began perhaps to feel rather too much as if it owned
+him, and did not prize his vaticinations at all their worth. Some polite
+Bostonians knew him chiefly on this side, and judged him to their own
+detriment from it.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+After we went to live in Cambridge, my life and the delight in it were so
+wholly there that in ten years I had hardly been in as many Boston
+houses. As I have said, I met Doctor Holmes at the Fieldses', and at
+Longfellow's, when he came out to a Dante supper, which was not often,
+and somewhat later at the Saturday Club dinners. One parlous time at the
+publisher's I have already recalled, when Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe and
+the Autocrat clashed upon homeopathy, and it required all the tact of the
+host to lure them away from the dangerous theme. As it was, a battle
+waged in the courteous forms of Fontenoy, went on pretty well through the
+dinner, and it was only over the coffee that a truce was called. I need
+not say which was heterodox, or that each had a deep and strenuous
+conscience in the matter. I have always felt it a proof of his extreme
+leniency to me, unworthy, that the doctor was able to tolerate my own
+defection from the elder faith in medicine; and I could not feel his
+kindness less caressing because I knew it a concession to an infirmity.
+He said something like, After all a good physician was the great matter;
+and I eagerly turned his clemency to praise of our family doctor.
+
+He was very constant at the Saturday Club, as long as his strength
+permitted, and few of its members missed fewer of its meetings. He
+continued to sit at its table until the ghosts of Hawthorne, of Agassiz,
+of Emerson, of Longfellow, of Lowell, out of others less famous, bore him
+company there among the younger men in the flesh. It must have been very
+melancholy, but nothing could deeply cloud his most cheerful spirit. His
+strenuous interest in life kept him alive to all the things of it, after
+so many of his friends were dead. The questions which he was wont to
+deal with so fondly, so wisely, the great problems of the soul, were all
+the more vital, perhaps, because the personal concern in them was
+increased by the translation to some other being of the men who had so
+often tried with him to fathom them here. The last time I was at that
+table he sat alone there among those great memories; but he was as gay as
+ever I saw him; his wit sparkled, his humor gleamed; the poetic touch was
+deft and firm as of old; the serious curiosity, the instant sympathy
+remained. To the witness he was pathetic, but to himself he could only
+have been interesting, as the figure of a man surviving, in an alien but
+not unfriendly present, the past which held so vast a part of all that
+had constituted him. If he had thought of himself in this way, it would
+have been without one emotion of self-pity, such as more maudlin souls
+indulge, but with a love of knowledge and wisdom as keenly alert as in
+his prime.
+
+For three privileged years I lived all but next-door neighbor of Doctor
+Holmes in that part of Beacon Street whither he removed after he left his
+old home in Charles Street, and during these years I saw him rather
+often. We were both on the water side, which means so much more than the
+words say, and our library windows commanded the same general view of the
+Charles rippling out into the Cambridge marshes and the sunsets, and
+curving eastward under Long Bridge, through shipping that increased
+onward to the sea. He said that you could count fourteen towns and
+villages in the compass of that view, with the three conspicuous
+monuments accenting the different attractions of it: the tower of
+Memorial Hall at Harvard; the obelisk on Bunker Hill; and in the centre
+of the picture that bulk of Tufts College which he said he expected to
+greet his eyes the first thing when he opened them in the other world.
+But the prospect, though generally the same, had certain precious
+differences for each of us, which I have no doubt he valued himself as
+much upon as I did. I have a notion that he fancied these were to be
+enjoyed best in his library through two oval panes let into the bay there
+apart from the windows, for he was apt to make you come and look out of
+them if you got to talking of the view before you left. In this pleasant
+study he lived among the books, which seemed to multiply from case to
+case and shelf to shelf, and climb from floor to ceiling. Everything was
+in exquisite order, and the desk where he wrote was as scrupulously neat
+as if the sloven disarray of most authors' desks were impossible to him.
+He had a number of ingenious little contrivances for helping his work,
+which he liked to show you; for a time a revolving book-case at the
+corner of his desk seemed to be his pet; and after that came his
+fountain-pen, which he used with due observance of its fountain
+principle, though he was tolerant of me when I said I always dipped mine
+in the inkstand; it was a merit in his eyes to use a fountain pen in
+anywise. After you had gone over these objects with him, and perhaps
+taken a peep at something he was examining through his microscope, he sat
+down at one corner of his hearth, and invited you to an easy chair at the
+other. His talk was always considerate of your wish to be heard, but the
+person who wished to talk when he could listen to Doctor Holmes was his
+own victim, and always the loser. If you were well advised you kept
+yourself to the question and response which manifested your interest in
+what he was saying, and let him talk on, with his sweet smile, and that
+husky laugh he broke softly into at times. Perhaps he was not very well
+when you came in upon him; then he would name his trouble, with a
+scientific zest and accuracy, and pass quickly to other matters. As I
+have noted, he was interested in himself only on the universal side; and
+he liked to find his peculiarity in you better than to keep it his own;
+he suffered a visible disappointment if he could not make you think or
+say you were so and so too. The querulous note was not in his most
+cheerful register; he would not dwell upon a specialized grief; though
+sometimes I have known him touch very lightly and currently upon a slight
+annoyance, or disrelish for this or that. As he grew older, he must have
+had, of course, an old man's disposition to speak of his infirmities; but
+it was fine to see him catch himself up in this, when he became conscious
+of it, and stop short with an abrupt turn to something else. With a real
+interest, which he gave humorous excess, he would celebrate some little
+ingenious thing that had fallen in his way, and I have heard him
+expatiate with childlike delight upon the merits of a new razor he had
+got: a sort of mower, which he could sweep recklessly over cheek and chin
+without the least danger of cutting himself. The last time I saw him he
+asked me if he had ever shown me that miraculous razor; and I doubt if he
+quite liked my saying I had seen one of the same kind.
+
+It seemed to me that he enjoyed sitting at his chimney-corner rather as
+the type of a person having a good time than as such a person; he would
+rather be up and about something, taking down a book, making a note,
+going again to his little windows, and asking you if you had seen the
+crows yet that sometimes alighted on the shoals left bare by the ebb-tide
+behind the house. The reader will recall his lovely poem, "My Aviary,"
+which deals with the winged life of that pleasant prospect. I shared
+with him in the flock of wild-ducks which used to come into our neighbor
+waters in spring, when the ice broke up, and stayed as long as the
+smallest space of brine remained unfrozen in the fall. He was graciously
+willing I should share in them, and in the cloud of gulls which drifted
+about in the currents of the sea and sky there, almost the whole year
+round. I did not pretend an original right to them, coming so late as I
+did to the place, and I think my deference pleased him.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+As I have said, he liked his fences, or at least liked you to respect
+them, or to be sensible of them. As often as I went to see him I was
+made to wait in the little reception-room below, and never shown at once
+to his study. My name would be carried up, and I would hear him
+verifying my presence from the maid through the opened door; then there
+came a cheery cry of wellcome: "Is that you? Come up, come up!" and I
+found him sometimes half-way down the stairs to meet me. He would make
+an excuse for having kept me below a moment, and say something about the
+rule he had to observe in all cases, as if he would not have me feel his
+fence a personal thing. I was aware how thoroughly his gentle spirit
+pervaded the whole house; the Irish maid who opened the door had the
+effect of being a neighbor too, and of being in the joke of the little
+formality; she apologized in her turn for the reception-room; there was
+certainly nothing trampled upon in her manner, but affection and
+reverence for him whose gate she guarded, with something like the
+sentiment she would have cherished for a dignitary of the Church, but
+nicely differenced and adjusted to the Autocrat's peculiar merits.
+
+The last time I was in that place, a visitant who had lately knocked at
+my own door was about to enter. I met the master of the house on the
+landing of the stairs outside his study, and he led me in for the few
+moments we could spend together. He spoke of the shadow so near, and
+said he supposed there could be no hope, but he did not refuse the cheer
+I offered him from my ignorance against his knowledge, and at something
+that was thought or said he smiled, with even a breath of laughter, so
+potent is the wont of a lifetime, though his eyes were full of tears, and
+his voice broke with his words. Those who have sorrowed deepest will
+understand this best.
+
+It was during the few years of our Beacon Street neighborhood that he
+spent those hundred days abroad in his last visit to England and France.
+He was full of their delight when he came back, and my propinquity gave
+me the advantage of hearing him speak of them at first hand. He
+whimsically pleased himself most with his Derby-day experiences, and
+enjoyed contrasting the crowd and occasion with that of forty or fifty
+years earlier, when he had seen some famous race of the Derby won;
+nothing else in England seemed to have moved him so much, though all that
+royalties, dignities, and celebrities could well do for him had been
+done. Of certain things that happened to him, characteristic of the
+English, and interesting to him in their relation to himself through his
+character of universally interested man, he spoke freely; but he has said
+what he chose to the public about them, and I have no right to say more.
+The thing that most vexed him during his sojourn apparently was to have
+been described in one of the London papers as quite deaf; and I could
+truly say to him that I had never imagined him at all deaf, or heard him
+accused of it before. "Oh, yes," he said, "I am a little hard of hearing
+on one side. But it isn't deafness."
+
+He had, indeed, few or none of the infirmities of age that make
+themselves painfully or inconveniently evident. He carried his slight
+figure erect, and until his latest years his step was quick and sure.
+Once he spoke of the lessened height of old people, apropos of something
+that was said, and "They will shrink, you know," he added, as if he were
+not at all concerned in the fact himself. If you met him in the street,
+you encountered a spare, carefully dressed old gentleman, with a
+clean-shaven face and a friendly smile, qualified by the involuntary
+frown of his thick, senile brows; well coated, lustrously shod, well
+gloved, in a silk hat, latterly wound with a mourning-weed. Sometimes he
+did not know you when he knew you quite well, and at such times I think
+it was kind to spare his years the fatigue of recalling your identity; at
+any rate, I am glad of the times when I did so. In society he had the
+same vagueness, the same dimness; but after the moment he needed to make
+sure of you, he was as vivid as ever in his life. He made me think of a
+bed of embers on which the ashes have thinly gathered, and which, when
+these are breathed away, sparkles and tinkles keenly up with all the
+freshness of a newly kindled fire. He did not mind talking about his
+age, and I fancied rather enjoyed doing so. Its approaches interested
+him; if he was going, he liked to know just how and when he was going.
+Once he spoke of his lasting strength in terms of imaginative humor: he
+was still so intensely interested in nature, the universe, that it seemed
+to him he was not like an old man so much as a lusty infant which
+struggles against having the breast snatched from it. He laughed at the
+notion of this, with that impersonal relish which seemed to me singularly
+characteristic of the self-consciousness so marked in him. I never heard
+one lugubrious word from him in regard to his years. He liked your
+sympathy on all grounds where he could have it self-respectfully, but he
+was a most manly spirit, and he would not have had it even as a type of
+the universal decay. Possibly he would have been interested to have you
+share in that analysis of himself which he was always making, if such a
+thing could have been.
+
+He had not much patience with the unmanly craving for sympathy in others,
+and chiefly in our literary craft, which is somewhat ignobly given to it,
+though he was patient, after all. He used to say, and I believe he has
+said it in print,--[Holmes said it in print many times, in his three
+novels and scattered through the "Breakfast Table" series. D.W.]--that
+unless a man could show a good reason for writing verse, it was rather
+against him, and a proof of weakness. I suppose this severe conclusion
+was something he had reached after dealing with innumerable small poets
+who sought the light in him with verses that no editor would admit to
+print. Yet of morbidness he was often very tender; he knew it to be
+disease, something that must be scientifically rather than ethically
+treated. He was in the same degree kind to any sensitiveness, for he was
+himself as sensitive as he was manly, and he was most delicately
+sensitive to any rightful social claim upon him. I was once at a dinner
+with him, where he was in some sort my host, in a company of people whom
+he had not seen me with before, and he made a point of acquainting me
+with each of them. It did not matter that I knew most of them already;
+the proof of his thoughtfulness was precious, and I was sorry when I had
+to disappoint it by confessing a previous knowledge.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+I had three memorable meetings with him not very long before he died: one
+a year before, and the other two within a few months of the end. The
+first of these was at luncheon in the summer-house of a friend whose
+hospitality made it summer the year round, and we all went out to meet
+him, when he drove up in his open carriage, with the little sunshade in
+his hand, which he took with him for protection against the heat, and
+also, a little, I think, for the whim of it. He sat a moment after he
+arrived, as if to orient himself in respect to each of us. Beside the
+gifted hostess, there was the most charming of all the American
+essayists, and the Autocrat seemed at once to find himself singularly at
+home with the people who greeted him. There was no interval needed for
+fanning away the ashes; he tinkled up before he entered the house, and at
+the table he was as vivid and scintillant as I ever saw him, if indeed I
+ever saw him as much so. The talk began at once, and we had made him
+believe that there was nothing egotistic in his taking the word, or
+turning it in illustration from himself upon universal matters. I spoke
+among other things of some humble ruins on the road to Gloucester, which
+gave the way-side a very aged look; the tumbled foundation-stones of poor
+bits of houses, and "Ah," he said, "the cellar and the well?" He added,
+to the company generally, "Do you know what I think are the two lines of
+mine that go as deep as any others, in a certain direction?" and he began
+to repeat stragglingly certain verses from one of his earlier poems,
+until he came to the closing couplet. But I will give them in full,
+because in going to look them up I have found them so lovely, and because
+I can hear his voice again in every fondly accented syllable:
+
+     "Who sees unmoved, a ruin at his feet,
+     The lowliest home where human hearts have beat?
+     Its hearth-stone, shaded with the bistre stain,
+     A century's showery torrents wash in vain;
+     Its starving orchard where the thistle blows,
+     And mossy trunks still mark the broken rows;
+     Its chimney-loving poplar, oftenest seen
+     Next an old roof, or where a roof has been;
+     Its knot-grass, plantain,--all the social weeds,
+     Man's mute companions following where he leads;
+     Its dwarfed pale flowers, that show their straggling heads,
+     Sown by the wind from grass-choked garden-beds;
+     Its woodbine creeping where it used to climb;
+     Its roses breathing of the olden time;
+     All the poor shows the curious idler sees,
+     As life's thin shadows waste by slow degrees,
+     Till naught remains, the saddening tale to tell,
+     Save home's last wrecks--the CELLAR AND THE WELL!"
+
+The poet's chanting voice rose with a triumphant swell in the climax, and
+"There," he said, "isn't it so? The cellar and the well--they can't be
+thrown down or burnt up; they are the human monuments that last longest
+and defy decay." He rejoiced openly in the sympathy that recognized with
+him the divination of a most pathetic, most signal fact, and he repeated
+the last couplet again at our entreaty, glad to be entreated for it. I do
+not know whether all will agree with him concerning the relative
+importance of the lines, but I think all must feel the exquisite beauty
+of the picture to which they give the final touch.
+
+He said a thousand witty and brilliant things that day, but his pleasure
+in this gave me the most pleasure, and I recall the passage distinctly
+out of the dimness that covers the rest. He chose to figure us younger
+men, in touching upon the literary circumstance of the past and present,
+as representative of modern feeling and thinking, and himself as no
+longer contemporary. We knew he did this to be contradicted, and we
+protested, affectionately, fervently, with all our hearts and minds; and
+indeed there were none of his generation who had lived more widely into
+ours. He was not a prophet like Emerson, nor ever a voice crying in the
+wilderness like Whittier or Lowell. His note was heard rather amid the
+sweet security of streets, but it was always for a finer and gentler
+civility. He imagined no new rule of life, and no philosophy or theory
+of life will be known by his name. He was not constructive; he was
+essentially observant, and in this he showed the scientific nature. He
+made his reader known to himself, first in the little, and then in the
+larger things. From first to last he was a censor, but a most winning
+and delightful censor, who could make us feel that our faults were other
+people's, and who was not wont
+
+     "To bait his homilies with his brother worms."
+
+At one period he sat in the seat of the scorner, as far as Reform was
+concerned, or perhaps reformers, who are so often tedious and ridiculous;
+but he seemed to get a new heart with the new mind which came to him when
+he began to write the Autocrat papers, and the light mocker of former
+days became the serious and compassionate thinker, to whom most truly
+nothing that was human was alien. His readers trusted and loved him; few
+men have ever written so intimately with so much dignity, and perhaps
+none has so endeared himself by saying just the thing for his reader that
+his reader could not say for himself. He sought the universal through
+himself in others, and he found to his delight and theirs that the most
+universal thing was often, if not always, the most personal thing.
+
+In my later meetings with him I was struck more and more by his
+gentleness. I believe that men are apt to grow gentler as they grow
+older, unless they are of the curmudgeon type, which rusts and crusts
+with age, but with Doctor Holmes the gentleness was peculiarly marked. He
+seemed to shrink from all things that could provoke controversy, or even
+difference; he waived what might be a matter of dispute, and rather
+sought the things that he could agree with you upon. In the last talk I
+had with him he appeared to have no grudge left, except for the puritanic
+orthodoxy in which he had been bred as a child. This he was not able to
+forgive, though its tradition was interwoven with what was tenderest and
+dearest in his recollections of childhood. We spoke of puritanism, and I
+said I sometimes wondered what could be the mind of a man towards life
+who had not been reared in its awful shadow, say an English Churchman, or
+a Continental Catholic; and he said he could not imagine, and that he did
+not believe such a man could at all enter into our feelings; puritanism,
+he seemed to think, made an essential and ineradicable difference. I do
+not believe he had any of that false sentiment which attributes virtue of
+character to severity of creed, while it owns the creed to be wrong.
+
+He differed from Longfellow in often speaking of his contemporaries. He
+spoke of them frankly, but with an appreciative rather than a censorious
+criticism. Of Longfellow himself he said that day, when I told him I had
+been writing about him, and he seemed to me a man without error, that he
+could think of but one error in him, and that was an error of taste, of
+almost merely literary taste. It was at an earlier time that he talked
+of Lowell, after his death, and told me that Lowell once in the fever of
+his anti-slavery apostolate had written him, urging him strongly, as a
+matter of duty, to come out for the cause he had himself so much at
+heart. Afterwards Lowell wrote again, owning himself wrong in his
+appeal, which he had come to recognize as invasive. "He was ten years
+younger than I," said the doctor.
+
+I found him that day I speak of in his house at Beverly Farms, where he
+had a pleasant study in a corner by the porch, and he met me with all the
+cheeriness of old. But he confessed that he had been greatly broken up
+by the labor of preparing something that might be read at some
+commemorative meeting, and had suffered from finding first that he could
+not write something specially for it. Even the copying and adapting an
+old poem had overtaxed him, and in this he showed the failing powers of
+age. But otherwise he was still young, intellectually; that is, there
+was no failure of interest in intellectual things, especially literary
+things. Some new book lay on the table at his elbow, and he asked me if
+I had seen it, and made some joke about his having had the good luck to
+read it, and have it lying by him a few days before when the author
+called. I do not know whether he schooled himself against an old man's
+tendency to revert to the past or not, but I know that he seldom did so.
+That morning, however, he made several excursions into it, and told me
+that his youthful satire of the 'Spectre Pig' had been provoked by a poem
+of the elder Dana's, where a phantom horse had been seriously employed,
+with an effect of anticlimax which he had found irresistible. Another
+foray was to recall the oppression and depression of his early religious
+associations, and to speak with moving tenderness of his father, whose
+hard doctrine as a minister was without effect upon his own kindly
+nature.
+
+In a letter written to me a few weeks after this time, upon an occasion
+when he divined that some word from him would be more than commonly dear,
+he recurred to the feeling he then expressed: "Fifty-six years ago--more
+than half a century--I lost my own father, his age being seventy-three
+years. As I have reached that period of life, passed it, and now left it
+far behind, my recollections seem to brighten and bring back my boyhood
+and early manhood in a clearer and fairer light than it came to me in my
+middle decades. I have often wished of late years that I could tell him
+how I cherished his memory; perhaps I may have the happiness of saying
+all I long to tell him on the other side of that thin partition which I
+love to think is all that divides us."
+
+Men are never long together without speaking of women, and I said how
+inevitably men's lives ended where they began, in the keeping of women,
+and their strength failed at last and surrendered itself to their care. I
+had not finished before I was made to feel that I was poaching, and
+"Yes," said the owner of the preserve, "I have spoken of that," and he
+went on to tell me just where. He was not going to have me suppose I had
+invented those notions, and I could not do less than own that I must have
+found them in his book, and forgotten it.
+
+He spoke of his pleasant summer life in the air, at once soft and fresh,
+of that lovely coast, and of his drives up and down the country roads.
+Sometimes this lady and sometimes that came for him, and one or two
+habitually, but he always had his own carriage ordered, if they failed,
+that he might not fail of his drive in any fair weather. His cottage was
+not immediately on the sea, but in full sight of it, and there was a
+sense of the sea about it, as there is in all that incomparable region,
+and I do not think he could have been at home anywhere beyond the reach
+of its salt breath.
+
+I was anxious not to outstay his strength, and I kept my eye on the clock
+in frequent glances. I saw that he followed me in one of these, and I
+said that I knew what his hours were, and I was watching so that I might
+go away in time, and then he sweetly protested. Did I like that chair I
+was sitting in? It was a gift to him, and he said who gave it, with a
+pleasure in the fact that was very charming, as if he liked the
+association of the thing with his friend. He was disposed to excuse the
+formal look of his bookcases, which were filled with sets, and presented
+some phalanxes of fiction in rather severe array.
+
+When I rose to go, he was concerned about my being able to find my way
+readily to the station, and he told me how to go, and what turns to take,
+as if he liked realizing the way to himself. I believe he did not walk
+much of late years, and I fancy he found much the same pleasure in
+letting his imagination make this excursion to the station with me that
+he would have found in actually going.
+
+I saw him once more, but only once, when a day or two later he drove up
+by our hotel in Magnolia toward the cottage where his secretary was
+lodging. He saw us from his carriage, and called us gayly to him, to
+make us rejoice with him at having finally got that commemorative poem
+off his mind. He made a jest of the trouble it had cost him, even some
+sleeplessness, and said he felt now like a convalescent. He was all
+brightness, and friendliness, and eagerness to make us feel his mood,
+through what was common to us all; and I am glad that this last
+impression of him is so one with the first I ever had, and with that
+which every reader receives from his work.
+
+That is bright, and friendly and eager too, for it is throughout the very
+expression of himself. I think it is a pity if an author disappoints
+even the unreasonable expectation of the reader, whom his art has invited
+to love him; but I do not believe that Doctor Holmes could inflict this
+disappointment. Certainly he could disappoint no reasonable expectation,
+no intelligent expectation. What he wrote, that he was, and every one
+felt this who met him. He has therefore not died, as some men die, the
+remote impersonal sort, but he is yet thrillingly alive in every page of
+his books. The quantity of his literature is not great, but the quality
+is very surprising, and surprising first of all as equality. From the
+beginning to the end he wrote one man, of course in his successive
+consciousnesses. Perhaps every one does this, but his work gives the
+impression of an uncommon continuity, in spite of its being the effect of
+a later and an earlier impulse so very marked as to have made the later
+an astonishing revelation to those who thought they knew him.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+It is not for me in such a paper as this to attempt any judgment of his
+work. I have loved it, as I loved him, with a sense of its limitations
+which is by no means a censure of its excellences. He was not a man who
+cared to transcend; he liked bounds, he liked horizons, the constancy of
+shores. If he put to sea, he kept in sight of land, like the ancient
+navigators. He did not discover new continents; and I will own that I,
+for my part, should not have liked to sail with Columbus. I think one
+can safely affirm that as great and as useful men stayed behind, and
+found an America of the mind without stirring from their thresholds.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+   Appeal, which he had come to recognize as invasive
+   Appeared to have no grudge left
+   Could make us feel that our faults were other people's
+   Hard of hearing on one side. But it isn't deafness
+   Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Autocrat clashed upon homeopathy
+   He was not bored because he would not be
+   He was not constructive; he was essentially observant
+   His readers trusted and loved him
+   Men's lives ended where they began, in the keeping of women
+   Not a man who cared to transcend; he liked bounds
+   Not much patience with the unmanly craving for sympathy
+   Old man's disposition to speak of his infirmities
+   Old man's tendency to revert to the past
+   Person who wished to talk when he could listen
+   Reformers, who are so often tedious and ridiculous
+   Secret of the man who is universally interesting
+   Sought the things that he could agree with you upon
+   Spare his years the fatigue of recalling your identity
+   Study in a corner by the porch
+   Those who have sorrowed deepest will understand this best
+   Times when a man's city was a man's country
+   Turn of the talk toward the mystical
+   Work gives the impression of an uncommon continuity
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Oliver Wendell Holmes, by William Dean Howells
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+This etext was produced by David Widger  <widger@cecomet.net>
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+[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
+file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making an
+entire meal of them.  D.W.]
+
+
+
+
+
+LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--Oliver Wendell Holmes
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+Elsewhere we literary folk are apt to be such a common lot, with
+tendencies here and there to be a shabby lot; we arrive from all sorts of
+unexpected holes and corners of the earth, remote, obscure; and at the
+best we do so often come up out of the ground; but at Boston we were of
+ascertained and noted origin, and good part of us dropped from the skies.
+Instead of holding horses before the doors of theatres; or capping verses
+at the plough-tail; or tramping over Europe with nothing but a flute in
+the pocket; or walking up to the metropolis with no luggage but the MS.
+of a tragedy; or sleeping in doorways or under the arches of bridges; or
+serving as apothecaries' 'prentices--we were good society from the
+beginning.  I think this was none the worse for us, and it was vastly the
+better for good society.
+
+Literature in Boston, indeed, was so respectable, and often of so high a
+lineage, that to be a poet was not only to be good society, but almost to
+be good family.  If one names over the men who gave Boston her supremacy
+in literature during that Unitarian harvest-time of the old Puritanic
+seed-time which was her Augustan age, one names the people who were and
+who had been socially first in the city ever since the self-exile of the
+Tories at the time of the Revolution.  To say Prescott, Motley, Parkman,
+Lowell, Norton, Higginson, Dana, Emerson, Channing, was to say patrician,
+in the truest and often the best sense, if not the largest.  Boston was
+small, but these were of her first citizens, and their primacy, in its
+way, was of the same quality as that, say, of the chief families of
+Venice.  But these names can never have the effect for the stranger that
+they had for one to the manner born.  I say had, for I doubt whether in
+Boston they still mean all that they once meant, and that their
+equivalents meant in science, in law, in politics.  The most famous, if
+not the greatest of all the literary men of Boston, I have not mentioned
+with them, for Longfellow was not of the place, though by his sympathies
+and relations he became of it; and I have not mentioned Oliver Wendell
+Holmes, because I think his name would come first into the reader's
+thought with the suggestion of social quality in the humanities.
+
+Holmes was of the Brahminical caste which his humorous recognition
+invited from its subjectivity in the New England consciousness into the
+light where all could know it and own it, and like Longfellow he was
+allied to the patriciate of Boston by the most intimate ties of life.
+For a long time, for the whole first period of his work, he stood for
+that alone, its tastes, its prejudices, its foibles even, and when he
+came to stand in his 'second period, for vastly, for infinitely more,
+and to make friends with the whole race, as few men have ever done,
+it was always, I think, with a secret shiver of doubt, a backward look of
+longing, and an eye askance.  He was himself perfectly aware of this at
+times, and would mark his several misgivings with a humorous sense of the
+situation.  He was essentially too kind to be of a narrow world, too
+human to be finally of less than humanity, too gentle to be of the finest
+gentility.  But such limitations as he had were in the direction I have
+hinted, or perhaps more than hinted; and I am by no means ready to make a
+mock of them, as it would be so easy to do for some reasons that he has
+himself suggested.  To value aright the affection which the old Bostonian
+had for Boston one must conceive of something like the patriotism of men
+in the times when a man's city was a man's country, something Athenian,
+something Florentine.  The war that nationalized us liberated this love
+to the whole country, but its first tenderness remained still for Boston,
+and I suppose a Bostonian still thinks of himself first as a Bostonian
+and then as an American, in a way that no New-Yorker could deal with
+himself.  The rich historical background dignifies and ennobles the
+intense public spirit of the place, and gives it a kind of personality.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+In literature Doctor Holmes survived all the Bostonians who had given the
+city her primacy in letters, but when I first knew him there was no
+apparent ground for questioning it.  I do not mean now the time when I
+visited New England, but when I came to live near Boston, and to begin
+the many happy years which I spent in her fine, intellectual air.
+I found time to run in upon him, while I was there arranging to take my
+place on the Atlantic Monthly, and I remember that in this brief moment
+with him he brought me to book about some vaunting paragraph in the
+'Nation' claiming the literary primacy for New York.  He asked me if I
+knew who wrote it, and I was obliged to own that I had written it myself,
+when with the kindness he always showed me he protested against my
+position.  To tell the truth, I do not think now I had any very good
+reasons for it, and I certainly could urge none that would stand against
+his.  I could only fall back upon the saving clause that this primacy was
+claimed mainly if not wholly for New York in the future.  He was willing
+to leave me the connotations of prophecy, but I think he did even this
+out of politeness rather than conviction, and I believe he had always a
+sensitiveness where Boston was concerned, which could not seem ungenerous
+to any generous mind.  Whatever lingering doubt of me he may have had,
+with reference to Boston, seemed to satisfy itself when several years
+afterwards he happened to speak of a certain character in an early novel
+of mine, who was not quite the kind of Bostonian one could wish to be.
+The thing came up in talk with another person, who had referred to my
+Bostonian, and the doctor had apparently made his acquaintance in the
+book, and not liked him.  "I understood, of course," he said, "that he
+was a Bostonian, not the Bostonian," and I could truthfully answer that
+this was by all means my own understanding too.
+
+His fondness for his city, which no one could appreciate better than
+myself, I hope, often found expression in a burlesque excess in his
+writings, and in his talk perhaps oftener still.  Hard upon my return
+from Venice I had a half-hour with him in his old study on Charles
+Street, where he still lived in 1865, and while I was there a young man
+came in for the doctor's help as a physician, though he looked so very
+well, and was so lively and cheerful, that I have since had my doubts
+whether he had not made a pretext for a glimpse of him as the Autocrat.
+The doctor took him upon his word, however, and said he had been so long
+out of practice that he could not do anything for him, but he gave him
+the address of another physician, somewhere near Washington Street.
+"And if you don't know where Washington Street is," he said, with a gay
+burst at a certain vagueness which had come into the young man's face,
+"you don't know anything."
+
+We had been talking of Venice, and what life was like there, and he made
+me tell him in some detail.  He was especially interested in what I had
+to say of the minute subdivision and distribution of the necessaries,
+the small coins, and the small values adapted to their purchase,
+the intensely retail character, in fact, of household provisioning;
+and I could see how he pleased himself in formulating the theory that the
+higher a civilization the finer the apportionment of the demands and
+supplies.  The ideal, he said, was a civilization in which you could buy
+two cents' worth of beef, and a divergence from this standard was towards
+barbarism.
+
+The secret of the man who is universally interesting is that he is
+universally interested, and this was, above all, the secret of the charm
+that Doctor Holmes had for every one.  No doubt he knew it, for what that
+most alert intelligence did not know of itself was scarcely worth
+knowing.  This knowledge was one of his chief pleasures, I fancy; he
+rejoiced in the consciousness which is one of the highest attributes of
+the highly organized man, and he did not care for the consequences in
+your mind, if you were so stupid as not to take him aright.  I remember
+the delight Henry James, the father of the novelist, had in reporting to
+me the frankness of the doctor, when he had said to him, "Holmes, you are
+intellectually the most alive man I ever knew."  "I am, I am," said the
+doctor.  "From the crown of my head to the sole of my foot, I'm alive,
+I'm alive!"  Any one who ever saw him will imagine the vivid relish he
+had in recognizing the fact.  He could not be with you a moment without
+shedding upon you the light of his flashing wit, his radiant humor, and
+he shone equally upon the rich and poor in mind.  His gaiety of heart
+could not withhold itself from any chance of response, but he did wish
+always to be fully understood, and to be liked by those he liked.  He
+gave his liking cautiously, though, for the affluence of his sympathies
+left him without the reserves of colder natures, and he had to make up
+for these with careful circumspection.  He wished to know the character
+of the person who made overtures to his acquaintance, for he was aware
+that his friendship lay close to it; he wanted to be sure that he was a
+nice person, and though I think he preferred social quality in his
+fellow-man, he did not refuse himself to those who had merely a sweet and
+wholesome humanity.  He did not like anything that tasted or smelt of
+Bohemianism in the personnel of literature, but he did not mind the scent
+of the new-ploughed earth, or even of the barn-yard.  I recall his
+telling me once that after two younger brothers-in-letters had called
+upon him in the odor of an habitual beeriness and smokiness, he opened
+the window; and the very last time I saw him he remembered at eighty-five
+the offence he had found on his first visit to New York, when a
+metropolitan poet had asked him to lunch in a basement restaurant.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+He seemed not to mind, however, climbing to the little apartment we had
+in Boston when we came there in 1866, and he made this call upon us in
+due form, bringing Mrs. Holmes with him as if to accent the recognition
+socially.  We were then incredibly young, much younger than I find people
+ever are nowadays, and in the consciousness of our youth we felt, to the
+last exquisite value of the fact, what it was to have the Autocrat come
+to see us; and I believe he was not displeased to perceive this; he liked
+to know that you felt his quality in every way.  That first winter,
+however, I did not see him often, and in the spring we went to live in
+Cambridge, and thereafter I met him chiefly at Longfellow's, or when I
+came in to dine at the Fieldses', in Boston.  It was at certain meetings
+of the Dante Club, when Longfellow read aloud his translation for
+criticism, and there was supper later, that one saw the doctor; and his
+voice was heard at the supper rather than at the criticism, for he was no
+Italianate.  He always seemed to like a certain turn of the talk toward
+the mystical, but with space for the feet on a firm ground of fact this
+side of the shadows; when it came to going over among them, and laying
+hold of them with the band of faith, as if they were substance, he was
+not of the excursion.  It is well known how fervent, I cannot say devout,
+a spiritualist Longfellow's brother-in-law, Appleton, was; and when he
+was at the table too, it took all the poet's delicate skill to keep him
+and the Autocrat from involving themselves in a cataclysmal controversy
+upon the matter of manifestations.  With Doctor Holmes the inquiry was
+inquiry, to the last, I believe, and the burden of proof was left to the
+ghosts and their friends.  His attitude was strictly scientific; he
+denied nothing, but he expected the supernatural to be at least as
+convincing as the natural.
+
+There was a time in his history when the popular ignorance classed him
+with those who were once rudely called infidels; but the world has since
+gone so fast and so far that the mind he was of concerning religious
+belief would now be thought religious by a good half of the religious
+world.  It is true that he had and always kept a grudge against the
+ancestral Calvinism which afflicted his youth; and he was through all
+rises and lapses of opinion essentially Unitarian; but of the honest
+belief of any one, I am sure he never felt or spoke otherwise than most
+tolerantly, most tenderly.  As often as he spoke of religion, and his
+talk tended to it very often, I never heard an irreligious word from him,
+far less a scoff or sneer at religion; and I am certain that this was not
+merely because he would have thought it bad taste, though undoubtedly he
+would have thought it bad taste; I think it annoyed, it hurt him, to be
+counted among the iconoclasts, and he would have been profoundly grieved
+if he could have known how widely this false notion of him once
+prevailed.  It can do no harm at this late day to impart from the secrets
+of the publishing house the fact that a supposed infidelity in the tone
+of his story The Guardian Angel cost the Atlantic Monthly many
+subscribers.  Now the tone of that story would not be thought even mildly
+agnostic, I fancy; and long before his death the author had outlived the
+error concerning him.
+
+It was not the best of his stories, by any means, and it would not be too
+harsh to say that it was the poorest.  His novels all belonged to an
+order of romance which was as distinctly his own as the form of
+dramatized essay which he invented in the Autocrat.  If he did not think
+poorly of them, he certainly did not think too proudly, and I heard him
+quote with relish the phrase of a lady who had spoken of them to him as
+his " medicated novels."  That, indeed, was perhaps what they were; a
+faint, faint odor of the pharmacopoeia clung to their pages; their magic
+was scientific.  He knew this better than any one else, of course, and if
+any one had said it in his turn he would hardly have minded it.  But what
+he did mind was the persistent misinterpretation of his intention in
+certain quarters where he thought he had the right to respectful
+criticism in stead of the succession of sneers that greeted the
+successive numbers of his story; and it was no secret that he felt the
+persecution keenly.  Perhaps he thought that he had already reached that
+time in his literary life when he was a fact rather than a question,
+and when reasons and not feelings must have to do with his acceptance or
+rejection.  But he had to live many years yet before he reached this
+state.  When he did reach it, happily a good while before his death,
+I do not believe any man ever enjoyed the like condition more. He loved
+to feel himself out of the fight, with much work before him still,
+but with nothing that could provoke ill-will in his activities.  He loved
+at all times to take himself objectively, if I may so express my sense of
+a mental attitude that misled many.  As I have said before, he was
+universally interested, and he studied the universe from himself.  I do
+not know how one is to study it otherwise; the impersonal has really no
+existence; but with all his subtlety and depth he was of a make so
+simple, of a spirit so naive, that he could not practise the feints some
+use to conceal that interest in self which, after all, every one knows is
+only concealed.  He frankly and joyously made himself the starting-point
+in all his inquest of the hearts and minds of other men, but so far from
+singling himself out in this, and standing apart in it, there never was
+any one who was more eagerly and gladly your fellow-being in the things
+of the soul.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+In the things of the world, he had fences, and looked at some people
+through palings and even over the broken bottles on the tops of walls;
+and I think he was the loser by this, as well as they.  But then I think
+all fences are bad, and that God has made enough differences between men;
+we need not trouble ourselves to multiply them.  Even behind his fences,
+however, Holmes had a heart kind for the outsiders, and I do not believe
+any one came into personal relations with him who did not experience this
+kindness.  In that long and delightful talk I had with him on my return
+from Venice (I can praise the talk because it was mainly his), we spoke
+of the status of domestics in the Old World, and how fraternal the
+relation of high and low was in Italy, while in England, between master
+and man, it seemed without acknowledgment of their common humanity.
+"Yes," he said, "I always felt as if English servants expected to be
+trampled on; but I can't do that.  If they want to be trampled on, they
+must get some one else."  He thought that our American way was infinitely
+better; and I believe that in spite of the fences there was always an
+instinctive impulse with him to get upon common ground with his fellow-
+man.  I used to notice in the neighborhood cabman who served our block on
+Beacon Street a sort of affectionate reverence for the Autocrat, which
+could have come from nothing but the kindly terms between them; if you
+went to him when he was engaged to Doctor Holmes, he told you so with a
+sort of implication in his manner that the thought of anything else for
+the time was profanation.  The good fellow who took him his drives about
+the Beverly and Manchester shores seemed to be quite in the joke of the
+doctor's humor, and within the bounds of his personal modesty and his
+functional dignity permitted himself a smile at the doctor's sallies,
+when you stood talking with him, or listening to him at the carriage-
+side.
+
+The civic and social circumstance that a man values himself on is
+commonly no part of his value, and certainly no part of his greatness.
+Rather, it is the very thing that limits him, and I think that Doctor
+Holmes appeared in the full measure of his generous personality to those
+who did not and could not appreciate his circumstance, and not to those
+who formed it, and who from life-long association were so dear and
+comfortable to him.  Those who best knew how great a man he was were
+those who came from far to pay him their duty, or to thank him for some
+help they had got from his books, or to ask his counsel or seek his
+sympathy.  With all such he was most winningly tender, most intelligently
+patient.  I suppose no great author was ever more visited by letter and
+in person than he, or kept a faithfuler conscience for his guests.  With
+those who appeared to him in the flesh he used a miraculous tact, and I
+fancy in his treatment of all the physician native in him bore a
+characteristic part.  No one seemed to be denied access to him, but it
+was after a moment of preparation that one was admitted, and any one who
+was at all sensitive must have felt from the first moment in his presence
+that there could be no trespassing in point of time.  If now and then
+some insensitive began to trespass, there was a sliding-scale of
+dismissal that never failed of its work, and that really saved the author
+from the effect of intrusion.  He was not bored because he would not be.
+
+I transfer at random the impressions of many years to my page, and I
+shall not try to observe a chronological order in these memories.  Vivid
+among them is that of a visit which I paid him with Osgood the publisher,
+then newly the owner of the Atlantic Monthly, when I had newly become the
+sole editor.  We wished to signalize our accession to the control of the
+magazine by a stroke that should tell most in the public eye, and we
+thought of asking Doctor Holmes to do something again in the manner of
+the Autocrat and the Professor at the Breakfast Table.  Some letters had
+passed between him and the management concerning our wish, and then
+Osgood thought that it would be right and fit for us to go to him in
+person.  He proposed the visit, and Doctor Holmes received us with a mind
+in which he had evidently formulated all his thoughts upon the matter.
+His main question was whether at his age of sixty years a man was
+justified in seeking to recall a public of the past, or to create a new
+public in the present.  He seemed to have looked the ground over not only
+with a personal interest in the question, but with a keen scientific zest
+for it as something which it was delightful to consider in its generic
+relations; and I fancy that the pleasure of this inquiry more than
+consoled him for such pangs of misgiving as he must have had in the
+personal question.  As commonly happens in the solution of such problems,
+it was not solved; he was very willing to take our minds upon it, and to
+incur the risk, if we thought it well and were willing to share it.
+
+We came away rejoicing, and the new series began with the new year
+following.  It was by no means the popular success that we had hoped;
+not because the author had not a thousand new things to say, or failed to
+say them with the gust and freshness of his immortal youth, but because
+it was not well to disturb a form associated in the public mind with an
+achievement which had become classic.  It is of the Autocrat of the
+Breakfast Table that people think, when they think of the peculiar
+species of dramatic essay which the author invented, and they think also
+of the Professor at the Breakfast Table, because he followed so soon;
+but the Poet at the Breakfast Table came so long after that his advent
+alienated rather than conciliated liking.  Very likely, if the Poet had
+come first he would have had no second place in the affections of his
+readers, for his talk was full of delightful matter; and at least one of
+the poems which graced each instalment was one of the finest and greatest
+that Doctor Holmes ever wrote.  I mean "Homesick in Heaven," which seems
+to me not only what I have said, but one of the most important, the most
+profoundly pathetic in the language.  Indeed, I do not know any other
+that in the same direction goes so far with suggestion so penetrating.
+The other poems were mainly of a cast which did not win; the metaphysics
+in them were too much for the human interest, and again there rose a
+foolish clamor of the creeds against him on account of them.  The great
+talent, the beautiful and graceful fancy, the eager imagination of the
+Autocrat could not avail in this third attempt, and I suppose the Poet at
+the Breakfast Table must be confessed as near a failure as Doctor Holmes
+could come.  It certainly was so in the magazine which the brilliant
+success of the first had availed to establish in the high place the
+periodical must always hold in the history of American literature.
+Lowell was never tired of saying, when he recurred to the first days of
+his editorship, that the magazine could never have gone at all without
+the Autocrat papers.  He was proud of having insisted upon Holmes's doing
+something for the new venture, and he was fond of recalling the author's
+misgivings concerning his contributions, which later repeated themselves
+with too much reason, though not with the reason that was in his own
+mind.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+He lived twenty-five years after that self-question at sixty, and after
+eighty he continued to prove that threescore was not the limit of a man's
+intellectual activity or literary charm.  During all that time the work
+he did in mere quantity was the work that a man in the prime of life
+might well have been vain of doing, and it was of a quality not less
+surprising.  If I asked him with any sort of fair notice I could rely
+upon him always for something for the January number, and throughout the
+year I could count upon him for those occasional pieces in which he so
+easily excelled all former writers of occasional verse, and which he
+liked to keep from the newspapers for the magazine.  He had a pride in
+his promptness with copy, and you could always trust his promise.  The
+printer's toe never galled the author's kibe in his case; he wished to
+have an early proof, which he corrected fastidiously, but not overmuch,
+and he did not keep it long.  He had really done all his work in the
+manuscript, which came print-perfect and beautifully clear from his pen,
+in that flowing, graceful hand which to the last kept a suggestion of the
+pleasure he must have had in it.  Like all wise contributors, he was not
+only patient, but very glad of all the queries and challenges that proof-
+reader and editor could accumulate on the margin of his proofs, and when
+they were both altogether wrong he was still grateful.  In one of his
+poems there was some Latin-Quarter French, which our collective purism
+questioned, and I remember how tender of us he was in maintaining that in
+his Parisian time, at least, some ladies beyond the Seine said "Eh,
+b'en," instead of " Eh, bien."  He knew that we must be always on the
+lookout for such little matters, and he would not wound our ignorance.
+I do not think any one enjoyed praise more than he.  Of course he would
+not provoke it, but if it came of itself, he would not deny himself the
+pleasure, as long as a relish of it remained.  He used humorously to
+recognize his delight in it, and to say of the lecture audiences which
+in earlier times hesitated applause, "Why don't they give me three times
+three?  I can stand it!"  He himself gave in the generous fulness he
+desired.  He did not praise foolishly or dishonestly, though he would
+spare an open dislike; but when a thing pleased him he knew how to say so
+cordially and skilfully, so that it might help as well as delight.
+I suppose no great author has tried more sincerely and faithfully to
+befriend the beginner than he; and from time to time he would commend
+something to me that he thought worth looking at, but never insistently.
+In certain cases, where he had simply to ease a burden, from his own to
+the editorial shoulders, he would ask that the aspirant might be
+delicately treated.  There might be personal reasons for this, but
+usually his kindness of heart moved him.  His tastes had their
+geographical limit, but his sympathies were boundless, and the hopeless
+creature for whom he interceded was oftener remote from Boston and New
+England than otherwise.
+
+It seems to me that he had a nature singularly affectionate, and that it
+was this which was at fault if he gave somewhat too much of himself to
+the celebration of the Class of '29, and all the multitude of Boston
+occasions, large and little, embalmed in the clear amber of his verse,
+somewhat to the disadvantage of the amber.  If he were asked he could not
+deny the many friendships and fellowships which united in the asking;
+the immediate reclame from these things was sweet to him; but he loved
+to comply as much as he loved to be praised.  In the pleasure he got he
+could feel himself a prophet in his own country, but the country which
+owned him prophet began perhaps to feel rather too much as if it owned
+him, and did not prize his vaticinations at all their worth.  Some polite
+Bostonians knew him chiefly on this side, and judged him to their own
+detriment from it.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+After we went to live in Cambridge, my life and the delight in it were so
+wholly there that in ten years I had hardly been in as many Boston
+houses.  As I have said, I met Doctor Holmes at the Fieldses', and at
+Longfellow's, when he came out to a Dante supper, which was not often,
+and somewhat later at the Saturday Club dinners.  One parlous time at the
+publisher's I have already recalled, when Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe and
+the Autocrat clashed upon homeopathy, and it required all the tact of the
+host to lure them away from the dangerous theme.  As it was, a battle
+waged in the courteous forms of Fontenoy, went on pretty well through the
+dinner, and it was only over the coffee that a truce was called.  I need
+not say which was heterodox, or that each had a deep and strenuous
+conscience in the matter.  I have always felt it a proof of his extreme
+leniency to me, unworthy, that the doctor was able to tolerate my own
+defection from the elder faith in medicine; and I could not feel his
+kindness less caressing because I knew it a concession to an infirmity.
+He said something like, After all a good physician was the great matter;
+and I eagerly turned his clemency to praise of our family doctor.
+
+He was very constant at the Saturday Club, as long as his strength
+permitted, and few of its members missed fewer of its meetings.
+He continued to sit at its table until the ghosts of Hawthorne,
+of Agassiz, of Emerson, of Longfellow, of Lowell, out of others less
+famous, bore him company there among the younger men in the flesh.
+It must have been very melancholy, but nothing could deeply cloud his
+most cheerful spirit.  His strenuous interest in life kept him alive to
+all the things of it, after so many of his friends were dead.  The
+questions which he was wont to deal with so fondly, so wisely, the great
+problems of the soul, were all the more vital, perhaps, because the
+personal concern in them was increased by the translation to some other
+being of the men who had so often tried with him to fathom them here.
+The last time I was at that table he sat alone there among those great
+memories; but he was as gay as ever I saw him; his wit sparkled, his
+humor gleamed; the poetic touch was deft and firm as of old; the serious
+curiosity, the instant sympathy remained.  To the witness he was
+pathetic, but to himself he could only have been interesting, as the
+figure of a man surviving, in an alien but not unfriendly present, the
+past which held so vast a part of all that had constituted him.  If he
+had thought of himself in this way, it would have been without one
+emotion of self-pity, such as more maudlin souls indulge, but with a love
+of knowledge and wisdom as keenly alert as in his prime.
+
+For three privileged years I lived all but next-door neighbor of Doctor
+Holmes in that part of Beacon Street whither he removed after he left his
+old home in Charles Street, and during these years I saw him rather
+often.  We were both on the water side, which means so much more than the
+words say, and our library windows commanded the same general view of the
+Charles rippling out into the Cambridge marshes and the sunsets, and
+curving eastward under Long Bridge, through shipping that increased
+onward to the sea.  He said that you could count fourteen towns and
+villages in the compass of that view, with the three conspicuous
+monuments accenting the different attractions of it: the tower of
+Memorial Hall at Harvard; the obelisk on Bunker Hill; and in the centre
+of the picture that bulk of Tufts College which he said he expected to
+greet his eyes the first thing when he opened them in the other world.
+But the prospect, though generally the same, had certain precious
+differences for each of us, which I have no doubt he valued himself as
+much upon as I did.  I have a notion that he fancied these were to be
+enjoyed best in his library through two oval panes let into the bay there
+apart from the windows, for he was apt to make you come and look out of
+them if you got to talking of the view before you left.  In this pleasant
+study he lived among the books, which seemed to multiply from case to
+case and shelf to shelf, and climb from floor to ceiling.  Everything was
+in exquisite order, and the desk where he wrote was as scrupulously neat
+as if the sloven disarray of most authors' desks were impossible to him.
+He had a number of ingenious little contrivances for helping his work,
+which he liked to show you; for a time a revolving book-case at the
+corner of his desk seemed to be his pet; and after that came his
+fountain-pen, which he used with due observance of its fountain
+principle, though he was tolerant of me when I said I always dipped mine
+in the inkstand; it was a merit in his eyes to use a fountain pen in
+anywise.  After you had gone over these objects with him, and perhaps
+taken a peep at something he was examining through his microscope, he sat
+down at one corner of his hearth, and invited you to an easy chair at the
+other.  His talk was always considerate of your wish to be heard, but the
+person who wished to talk when he could listen to Doctor Holmes was his
+own victim, and always the loser.  If you were well advised you kept
+yourself to the question and response which manifested your interest in
+what he was saying, and let him talk on, with his sweet smile, and that
+husky laugh he broke softly into at times.  Perhaps he was not very well
+when you came in upon him; then he would name his trouble, with a
+scientific zest and accuracy, and pass quickly to other matters.  As I
+have noted, he was interested in himself only on the universal side; and
+he liked to find his peculiarity in you better than to keep it his own;
+he suffered a visible disappointment if he could not make you think or
+say you were so and so too.  The querulous note was not in his most
+cheerful register; he would not dwell upon a specialized grief; though
+sometimes I have known him touch very lightly and currently upon a slight
+annoyance, or disrelish for this or that.  As he grew older, he must have
+had, of course, an old man's disposition to speak of his infirmities; but
+it was fine to see him catch himself up in this, when he became conscious
+of it, and stop short with an abrupt turn to something else.  With a real
+interest, which he gave humorous excess, he would celebrate some little
+ingenious thing that had fallen in his way, and I have heard him
+expatiate with childlike delight upon the merits of a new razor he had
+got: a sort of mower, which he could sweep recklessly over cheek and chin
+without the least danger of cutting himself.  The last time I saw him he
+asked me if he had ever shown me that miraculous razor; and I doubt if he
+quite liked my saying I had seen one of the same kind.
+
+It seemed to me that he enjoyed sitting at his chimney-corner rather as
+the type of a person having a good time than as such a person; he would
+rather be up and about something, taking down a book, making a note,
+going again to his little windows, and asking you if you had seen the
+crows yet that sometimes alighted on the shoals left bare by the ebb-tide
+behind the house.  The reader will recall his lovely poem, "My Aviary,"
+which deals with the winged life of that pleasant prospect.  I shared
+with him in the flock of wild-ducks which used to come into our neighbor
+waters in spring, when the ice broke up, and stayed as long as the
+smallest space of brine remained unfrozen in the fall.  He was graciously
+willing I should share in them, and in the cloud of gulls which drifted
+about in the currents of the sea and sky there, almost the whole year
+round.  I did not pretend an original right to them, coming so late as I
+did to the place, and I think my deference pleased him.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+As I have said, he liked his fences, or at least liked you to respect
+them, or to be sensible of them.  As often as I went to see him I was
+made to wait in the little reception-room below, and never shown at once
+to his study.  My name would be carried up, and I would hear him
+verifying my presence from the maid through the opened door; then there
+came a cheery cry of wellcome: "Is that you?  Come up, come up!" and I
+found him sometimes half-way down the stairs to meet me.  He would make
+an excuse for having kept me below a moment, and say something about the
+rule he had to observe in all cases, as if he would not have me feel his
+fence a personal thing.  I was aware how thoroughly his gentle spirit
+pervaded the whole house; the Irish maid who opened the door had the
+effect of being a neighbor too, and of being in the joke of the little
+formality; she apologized in her turn for the reception-room; there was
+certainly nothing trampled upon in her manner, but affection and
+reverence for him whose gate she guarded, with something like the
+sentiment she would have cherished for a dignitary of the Church, but
+nicely differenced and adjusted to the Autocrat's peculiar merits.
+
+The last time I was in that place, a visitant who had lately knocked at
+my own door was about to enter.  I met the master of the house on the
+landing of the stairs outside his study, and he led me in for the few
+moments we could spend together.  He spoke of the shadow so near, and
+said he supposed there could be no hope, but he did not refuse the cheer
+I offered him from my ignorance against his knowledge, and at something
+that was thought or said he smiled, with even a breath of laughter, so
+potent is the wont of a lifetime, though his eyes were full of tears, and
+his voice broke with his words.  Those who have sorrowed deepest will
+understand this best.
+
+It was during the few years of our Beacon Street neighborhood that he
+spent those hundred days abroad in his last visit to England and France.
+He was full of their delight when he came back, and my propinquity gave
+me the advantage of hearing him speak of them at first hand.  He
+whimsically pleased himself most with his Derby-day experiences, and
+enjoyed contrasting the crowd and occasion with that of forty or fifty
+years earlier, when he had seen some famous race of the Derby won;
+nothing else in England seemed to have moved him so much, though all that
+royalties, dignities, and celebrities could well do for him had been
+done.  Of certain things that happened to him, characteristic of the
+English, and interesting to him in their relation to himself through his
+character of universally interested man, he spoke freely; but he has said
+what he chose to the public about them, and I have no right to say more.
+The thing that most vexed him during his sojourn apparently was to have
+been described in one of the London papers as quite deaf; and I could
+truly say to him that I had never imagined him at all deaf, or heard him
+accused of it before.  "Oh, yes," he said, "I am a little hard of hearing
+on one side.  But it isn't deafness."
+
+He had, indeed, few or none of the infirmities of age that make
+themselves painfully or inconveniently evident.  He carried his slight
+figure erect, and until his latest years his step was quick and sure.
+Once he spoke of the lessened height of old people, apropos of something
+that was said, and "They will shrink, you know," he added, as if he were
+not at all concerned in the fact himself.  If you met him in the street,
+you encountered a spare, carefully dressed old gentleman, with a clean-
+shaven face and a friendly smile, qualified by the involuntary frown of
+his thick, senile brows; well coated, lustrously shod, well gloved, in a
+silk hat, latterly wound with a mourning-weed.  Sometimes he did not know
+you when he knew you quite well, and at such times I think it was kind to
+spare his years the fatigue of recalling your identity; at any rate, I am
+glad of the times when I did so.  In society he had the same vagueness,
+the same dimness; but after the moment he needed to make sure of you, he
+was as vivid as ever in his life.  He made me think of a bed of embers on
+which the ashes have thinly gathered, and which, when these are breathed
+away, sparkles and tinkles keenly up with all the freshness of a newly
+kindled fire.  He did not mind talking about his age, and I fancied
+rather enjoyed doing so.  Its approaches interested him; if he was going,
+he liked to know just how and when he was going.  Once he spoke of his
+lasting strength in terms of imaginative humor: he was still so intensely
+interested in nature, the universe, that it seemed to him he was not like
+an old man so much as a lusty infant which struggles against having the
+breast snatched from it.  He laughed at the notion of this, with that
+impersonal relish which seemed to me singularly characteristic of the
+self-consciousness so marked in him.  I never heard one lugubrious word
+from him in regard to his years.  He liked your sympathy on all grounds
+where he could have it self-respectfully, but he was a most manly spirit,
+and he would not have had it even as a type of the universal decay.
+Possibly he would have been interested to have you share in that analysis
+of himself which he was always making, if such a thing could have been.
+
+He had not much patience with the unmanly craving for sympathy in others,
+and chiefly in our literary craft, which is somewhat ignobly given to it,
+though he was patient, after all.  He used to say, and I believe he has
+said it in print,--[Holmes said it in print many times, in his three
+novels and scattered through the "Breakfast Table" series.  D.W.]-- that
+unless a man could show a good reason for writing verse, it was rather
+against him, and a proof of weakness.  I suppose this severe conclusion
+was something he had reached after dealing with innumerable small poets
+who sought the light in him with verses that no editor would admit to
+print.  Yet of morbidness he was often very tender; he knew it to be
+disease, something that must be scientifically rather than ethically
+treated.  He was in the same degree kind to any sensitiveness, for he was
+himself as sensitive as he was manly, and he was most delicately
+sensitive to any rightful social claim upon him.  I was once at a dinner
+with him, where he was in some sort my host, in a company of people whom
+he had not seen me with before, and he made a point of acquainting me
+with each of them.  It did not matter that I knew most of them already;
+the proof of his thoughtfulness was precious, and I was sorry when I had
+to disappoint it by confessing a previous knowledge.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+I had three memorable meetings with him not very long before he died: one
+a year before, and the other two within a few months of the end.  The
+first of these was at luncheon in the summer-house of a friend whose
+hospitality made it summer the year round, and we all went out to meet
+him, when he drove up in his open carriage, with the little sunshade in
+his hand, which he took with him for protection against the heat, and
+also, a little, I think, for the whim of it.  He sat a moment after he
+arrived, as if to orient himself in respect to each of us.  Beside the
+gifted hostess, there was the most charming of all the American
+essayists, and the Autocrat seemed at once to find himself singularly at
+home with the people who greeted him.  There was no interval needed for
+fanning away the ashes; he tinkled up before he entered the house, and at
+the table he was as vivid and scintillant as I ever saw him, if indeed I
+ever saw him as much so.  The talk began at once, and we had made him
+believe that there was nothing egotistic in his taking the word, or
+turning it in illustration from himself upon universal matters.  I spoke
+among other things of some humble ruins on the road to Gloucester, which
+gave the way-side a very aged look; the tumbled foundation-stones of poor
+bits of houses, and "Ah," he said, "the cellar and the well?"  He added,
+to the company generally, "Do you know what I think are the two lines of
+mine that go as deep as any others, in a certain direction?" and he began
+to repeat stragglingly certain verses from one of his earlier poems,
+until he came to the closing couplet.  But I will give them in full,
+because in going to look them up I have found them so lovely, and because
+I can hear his voice again in every fondly accented syllable:
+
+         "Who sees unmoved, a ruin at his feet,
+          The lowliest home where human hearts have beat?
+          Its hearth-stone, shaded with the bistre stain,
+          A century's showery torrents wash in vain;
+          Its starving orchard where the thistle blows,
+          And mossy trunks still mark the broken rows;
+          Its chimney-loving poplar, oftenest seen
+          Next an old roof, or where a roof has been;
+          Its knot-grass, plantain,--all the social weeds,
+          Man's mute companions following where he leads;
+          Its dwarfed pale flowers, that show their straggling heads,
+          Sown by the wind from grass-choked garden-beds;
+          Its woodbine creeping where it used to climb;
+          Its roses breathing of the olden time;
+          All the poor shows the curious idler sees,
+          As life's thin shadows waste by slow degrees,
+          Till naught remains, the saddening tale to tell,
+          Save home's last wrecks--the CELLAR AND THE WELL!"
+
+The poet's chanting voice rose with a triumphant swell in the climax, and
+"There," he said, "isn't it so?  The cellar and the well--they can't be
+thrown down or burnt up; they are the human monuments that last longest
+and defy decay."  He rejoiced openly in the sympathy that recognized with
+him the divination of a most pathetic, most signal fact, and he repeated
+the last couplet again at our entreaty, glad to be entreated for it.
+I do not know whether all will agree with him concerning the relative
+importance of the lines, but I think all must feel the exquisite beauty
+of the picture to which they give the final touch.
+
+He said a thousand witty and brilliant things that day, but his pleasure
+in this gave me the most pleasure, and I recall the passage distinctly
+out of the dimness that covers the rest.  He chose to figure us younger
+men, in touching upon the literary circumstance of the past and present,
+as representative of modern feeling and thinking, and himself as no
+longer contemporary.  We knew he did this to be contradicted, and we
+protested, affectionately, fervently, with all our hearts and minds; and
+indeed there were none of his generation who had lived more widely into
+ours.  He was not a prophet like Emerson, nor ever a voice crying in the
+wilderness like Whittier or Lowell.  His note was heard rather amid the
+sweet security of streets, but it was always for a finer and gentler
+civility.  He imagined no new rule of life, and no philosophy or theory
+of life will be known by his name.  He was not constructive; he was
+essentially observant, and in this he showed the scientific nature.
+He made his reader known to himself, first in the little, and then in the
+larger things.  From first to last he was a censor, but a most winning
+and delightful censor, who could make us feel that our faults were other
+people's, and who was not wont
+
+          "To bait his homilies with his brother worms."
+
+At one period he sat in the seat of the scorner, as far as Reform was
+concerned, or perhaps reformers, who are so often tedious and ridiculous;
+but he seemed to get a new heart with the new mind which came to him when
+he began to write the Autocrat papers, and the light mocker of former
+days became the serious and compassionate thinker, to whom most truly
+nothing that was human was alien.  His readers trusted and loved him; few
+men have ever written so intimately with so much dignity, and perhaps
+none has so endeared himself by saying just the thing for his reader that
+his reader could not say for himself.  He sought the universal through
+himself in others, and he found to his delight and theirs that the most
+universal thing was often, if not always, the most personal thing.
+
+In my later meetings with him I was struck more and more by his
+gentleness.  I believe that men are apt to grow gentler as they grow
+older, unless they are of the curmudgeon type, which rusts and crusts
+with age, but with Doctor Holmes the gentleness was peculiarly marked.
+He seemed to shrink from all things that could provoke controversy, or
+even difference; he waived what might be a matter of dispute, and rather
+sought the things that he could agree with you upon.  In the last talk I
+had with him he appeared to have no grudge left, except for the puritanic
+orthodoxy in which he had been bred as a child.  This he was not able to
+forgive, though its tradition was interwoven with what was tenderest and
+dearest in his recollections of childhood.  We spoke of puritanism, and
+I said I sometimes wondered what could be the mind of a man towards life
+who had not been reared in its awful shadow, say an English Churchman, or
+a Continental Catholic; and he said he could not imagine, and that he did
+not believe such a man could at all enter into our feelings; puritanism,
+he seemed to think, made an essential and ineradicable difference.  I do
+not believe he had any of that false sentiment which attributes virtue of
+character to severity of creed, while it owns the creed to be wrong.
+
+He differed from Longfellow in often speaking of his contemporaries.  He
+spoke of them frankly, but with an appreciative rather than a censorious
+criticism.  Of Longfellow himself he said that day, when I told him I had
+been writing about him, and he seemed to me a man without error, that he
+could think of but one error in him, and that was an error of taste, of
+almost merely literary taste.  It was at an earlier time that he talked
+of Lowell, after his death, and told me that Lowell once in the fever of
+his anti-slavery apostolate had written him, urging him strongly, as a
+matter of duty, to come out for the cause he had himself so much at
+heart.  Afterwards Lowell wrote again, owning himself wrong in his
+appeal, which he had come to recognize as invasive.  "He was ten years
+younger than I," said the doctor.
+
+I found him that day I speak of in his house at Beverly Farms, where he
+had a pleasant study in a corner by the porch, and he met me with all the
+cheeriness of old.  But he confessed that he had been greatly broken up
+by the labor of preparing something that might be read at some
+commemorative meeting, and had suffered from finding first that he could
+not write something specially for it.  Even the copying and adapting an
+old poem had overtaxed him, and in this he showed the failing powers of
+age.  But otherwise he was still young, intellectually; that is, there
+was no failure of interest in intellectual things, especially literary
+things.  Some new book lay on the table at his elbow, and he asked me if
+I had seen it, and made some joke about his having had the good luck to
+read it, and have it lying by him a few days before when the author
+called.  I do not know whether he schooled himself against an old man's
+tendency to revert to the past or not, but I know that he seldom did so.
+That morning, however, he made several excursions into it, and told me
+that his youthful satire of the 'Spectre Pig' had been provoked by a poem
+of the elder Dana's, where a phantom horse had been seriously employed,
+with an effect of anticlimax which he had found irresistible.  Another
+foray was to recall the oppression and depression of his early religious
+associations, and to speak with moving tenderness of his father, whose
+hard doctrine as a minister was without effect upon his own kindly
+nature.
+
+In a letter written to me a few weeks after this time, upon an occasion
+when he divined that some word from him would be more than commonly dear,
+he recurred to the feeling he then expressed: "Fifty-six years ago--more
+than half a century--I lost my own father, his age being seventy-three
+years.  As I have reached that period of life, passed it, and now left it
+far behind, my recollections seem to brighten and bring back my boyhood
+and early manhood in a clearer and fairer light than it came to me in my
+middle decades.  I have often wished of late years that I could tell him
+how I cherished his memory; perhaps I may have the happiness of saying
+all I long to tell him on the other side of that thin partition which I
+love to think is all that divides us."
+
+Men are never long together without speaking of women, and I said how
+inevitably men's lives ended where they began, in the keeping of women,
+and their strength failed at last and surrendered itself to their care.
+I had not finished before I was made to feel that I was poaching, and
+"Yes," said the owner of the preserve, "I have spoken of that," and he
+went on to tell me just where.  He was not going to have me suppose I had
+invented those notions, and I could not do less than own that I must have
+found them in his book, and forgotten it.
+
+He spoke of his pleasant summer life in the air, at once soft and fresh,
+of that lovely coast, and of his drives up and down the country roads.
+Sometimes this lady and sometimes that came for him, and one or two
+habitually, but he always had his own carriage ordered, if they failed,
+that he might not fail of his drive in any fair weather.  His cottage was
+not immediately on the sea, but in full sight of it, and there was a
+sense of the sea about it, as there is in all that incomparable region,
+and I do not think he could have been at home anywhere beyond the reach
+of its salt breath.
+
+I was anxious not to outstay his strength, and I kept my eye on the clock
+in frequent glances.  I saw that he followed me in one of these, and I
+said that I knew what his hours were, and I was watching so that I might
+go away in time, and then he sweetly protested.  Did I like that chair I
+was sitting in?  It was a gift to him, and he said who gave it, with a
+pleasure in the fact that was very charming, as if he liked the
+association of the thing with his friend.  He was disposed to excuse the
+formal look of his bookcases, which were filled with sets, and presented
+some phalanxes of fiction in rather severe array.
+
+When I rose to go, he was concerned about my being able to find my way
+readily to the station, and he told me how to go, and what turns to take,
+as if he liked realizing the way to himself.  I believe he did not walk
+much of late years, and I fancy he found much the same pleasure in
+letting his imagination make this excursion to the station with me that
+he would have found in actually going.
+
+I saw him once more, but only once, when a day or two later he drove up
+by our hotel in Magnolia toward the cottage where his secretary was
+lodging.  He saw us from his carriage, and called us gayly to him, to
+make us rejoice with him at having finally got that commemorative poem
+off his mind.  He made a jest of the trouble it had cost him, even some
+sleeplessness, and said he felt now like a convalescent.  He was all
+brightness, and friendliness, and eagerness to make us feel his mood,
+through what was common to us all; and I am glad that this last
+impression of him is so one with the first I ever had, and with that
+which every reader receives from his work.
+
+That is bright, and friendly and eager too, for it is throughout the very
+expression of himself.  I think it is a pity if an author disappoints
+even the unreasonable expectation of the reader, whom his art has invited
+to love him; but I do not believe that Doctor Holmes could inflict this
+disappointment.  Certainly he could disappoint no reasonable expectation,
+no intelligent expectation.  What he wrote, that he was, and every one
+felt this who met him.  He has therefore not died, as some men die, the
+remote impersonal sort, but he is yet thrillingly alive in every page of
+his books.  The quantity of his literature is not great, but the quality
+is very surprising, and surprising first of all as equality.  From the
+beginning to the end he wrote one man, of course in his successive
+consciousnesses.  Perhaps every one does this, but his work gives the
+impression of an uncommon continuity, in spite of its being the effect of
+a later and an earlier impulse so very marked as to have made the later
+an astonishing revelation to those who thought they knew him.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+It is not for me in such a paper as this to attempt any judgment of his
+work.  I have loved it, as I loved him, with a sense of its limitations
+which is by no means a censure of its excellences.  He was not a man who
+cared to transcend; he liked bounds, he liked horizons, the constancy of
+shores.  If he put to sea, he kept in sight of land, like the ancient
+navigators.  He did not discover new continents; and I will own that I,
+for my part, should not have liked to sail with Columbus.  I think one
+can safely affirm that as great and as useful men stayed behind, and
+found an America of the mind without stirring from their thresholds.
+
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Appeal, which he had come to recognize as invasive . . . . . . . . . . .
+Appeared to have no grudge left. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Could make us feel that our faults were other people's . . . . . . . . .
+Hard of hearing on one side.  But it isn't deafness. . . . . . . . . . .
+Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Autocrat clashed upon homeopathy . . . . .
+He was not bored because he would not be.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+He was not constructive; he was essentially observant. . . . . . . . . .
+His readers trusted and loved him. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Men's lives ended where they began, in the keeping of women. . . . . . .
+Not a man who cared to transcend; he liked bounds. . . . . . . . . . . .
+Not much patience with the unmanly craving for sympathy. . . . . . . . .
+Old man's disposition to speak of his infirmities. . . . . . . . . . . .
+Old man's tendency to revert to the past . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Person who wished to talk when he could listen . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Reformers, who are so often tedious and ridiculous . . . . . . . . . . .
+Secret of the man who is universally interesting . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Sought the things that he could agree with you upon. . . . . . . . . . .
+Spare his years the fatigue of recalling your identity . . . . . . . . .
+Study in a corner by the porch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Those who have sorrowed deepest will understand this best. . . . . . . .
+Times when a man's city was a man's country. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Turn of the talk toward the mystical . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Work gives the impression of an uncommon continuity. . . . . . . . . . .
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Oliver Wendell Holmes, by Howells
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Oliver Wendell Holmes, by Howells
+#42 in our series by William Dean Howells
+
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+Title: Oliver Wendell Holmes
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+Author: William Dean Howells
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+Release Date: August, 2002  [Etext #3395]
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Oliver Wendell Holmes, by Howells
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+
+
+LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--Oliver Wendell Holmes
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
+
+
+Elsewhere we literary folk are apt to be such a common lot, with
+tendencies here and there to be a shabby lot; we arrive from all sorts of
+unexpected holes and corners of the earth, remote, obscure; and at the
+best we do so often come up out of the ground; but at Boston we were of
+ascertained and noted origin, and good part of us dropped from the skies.
+Instead of holding horses before the doors of theatres; or capping verses
+at the plough-tail; or tramping over Europe with nothing but a flute in
+the pocket; or walking up to the metropolis with no luggage but the MS.
+of a tragedy; or sleeping in doorways or under the arches of bridges; or
+serving as apothecaries' 'prentices--we were good society from the
+beginning.  I think this was none the worse for us, and it was vastly the
+better for good society.
+
+Literature in Boston, indeed, was so respectable, and often of so high a
+lineage, that to be a poet was not only to be good society, but almost to
+be good family.  If one names over the men who gave Boston her supremacy
+in literature during that Unitarian harvest-time of the old Puritanic
+seed-time which was her Augustan age, one names the people who were and
+who had been socially first in the city ever since the self-exile of the
+Tories at the time of the Revolution.  To say Prescott, Motley, Parkman,
+Lowell, Norton, Higginson, Dana, Emerson, Channing, was to say patrician,
+in the truest and often the best sense, if not the largest.  Boston was
+small, but these were of her first citizens, and their primacy, in its
+way, was of the same quality as that, say, of the chief families of
+Venice.  But these names can never have the effect for the stranger that
+they had for one to the manner born.  I say had, for I doubt whether in
+Boston they still mean all that they once meant, and that their
+equivalents meant in science, in law, in politics.  The most famous, if
+not the greatest of all the literary men of Boston, I have not mentioned
+with them, for Longfellow was not of the place, though by his sympathies
+and relations he became of it; and I have not mentioned Oliver Wendell
+Holmes, because I think his name would come first into the reader's
+thought with the suggestion of social quality in the humanities.
+
+Holmes was of the Brahminical caste which his humorous recognition
+invited from its subjectivity in the New England consciousness into the
+light where all could know it and own it, and like Longfellow he was
+allied to the patriciate of Boston by the most intimate ties of life.
+For a long time, for the whole first period of his work, he stood for
+that alone, its tastes, its prejudices, its foibles even, and when he
+came to stand in his 'second period, for vastly, for infinitely more,
+and to make friends with the whole race, as few men have ever done,
+it was always, I think, with a secret shiver of doubt, a backward look of
+longing, and an eye askance.  He was himself perfectly aware of this at
+times, and would mark his several misgivings with a humorous sense of the
+situation.  He was essentially too kind to be of a narrow world, too
+human to be finally of less than humanity, too gentle to be of the finest
+gentility.  But such limitations as he had were in the direction I have
+hinted, or perhaps more than hinted; and I am by no means ready to make a
+mock of them, as it would be so easy to do for some reasons that he has
+himself suggested.  To value aright the affection which the old Bostonian
+had for Boston one must conceive of something like the patriotism of men
+in the times when a man's city was a man's country, something Athenian,
+something Florentine.  The war that nationalized us liberated this love
+to the whole country, but its first tenderness remained still for Boston,
+and I suppose a Bostonian still thinks of himself first as a Bostonian
+and then as an American, in a way that no New-Yorker could deal with
+himself.  The rich historical background dignifies and ennobles the
+intense public spirit of the place, and gives it a kind of personality.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+In literature Doctor Holmes survived all the Bostonians who had given the
+city her primacy in letters, but when I first knew him there was no
+apparent ground for questioning it.  I do not mean now the time when I
+visited New England, but when I came to live near Boston, and to begin
+the many happy years which I spent in her fine, intellectual air.
+I found time to run in upon him, while I was there arranging to take my
+place on the Atlantic Monthly, and I remember that in this brief moment
+with him he brought me to book about some vaunting paragraph in the
+'Nation' claiming the literary primacy for New York.  He asked me if I
+knew who wrote it, and I was obliged to own that I had written it myself,
+when with the kindness he always showed me he protested against my
+position.  To tell the truth, I do not think now I had any very good
+reasons for it, and I certainly could urge none that would stand against
+his.  I could only fall back upon the saving clause that this primacy was
+claimed mainly if not wholly for New York in the future.  He was willing
+to leave me the connotations of prophecy, but I think he did even this
+out of politeness rather than conviction, and I believe he had always a
+sensitiveness where Boston was concerned, which could not seem ungenerous
+to any generous mind.  Whatever lingering doubt of me he may have had,
+with reference to Boston, seemed to satisfy itself when several years
+afterwards he happened to speak of a certain character in an early novel
+of mine, who was not quite the kind of Bostonian one could wish to be.
+The thing came up in talk with another person, who had referred to my
+Bostonian, and the doctor had apparently made his acquaintance in the
+book, and not liked him.  "I understood, of course," he said, "that he
+was a Bostonian, not the Bostonian," and I could truthfully answer that
+this was by all means my own understanding too.
+
+His fondness for his city, which no one could appreciate better than
+myself, I hope, often found expression in a burlesque excess in his
+writings, and in his talk perhaps oftener still.  Hard upon my return
+from Venice I had a half-hour with him in his old study on Charles
+Street, where he still lived in 1865, and while I was there a young man
+came in for the doctor's help as a physician, though he looked so very
+well, and was so lively and cheerful, that I have since had my doubts
+whether he had not made a pretext for a glimpse of him as the Autocrat.
+The doctor took him upon his word, however, and said he had been so long
+out of practice that he could not do anything for him, but he gave him
+the address of another physician, somewhere near Washington Street.
+"And if you don't know where Washington Street is," he said, with a gay
+burst at a certain vagueness which had come into the young man's face,
+"you don't know anything."
+
+We had been talking of Venice, and what life was like there, and he made
+me tell him in some detail.  He was especially interested in what I had
+to say of the minute subdivision and distribution of the necessaries,
+the small coins, and the small values adapted to their purchase,
+the intensely retail character, in fact, of household provisioning;
+and I could see how he pleased himself in formulating the theory that the
+higher a civilization the finer the apportionment of the demands and
+supplies.  The ideal, he said, was a civilization in which you could buy
+two cents' worth of beef, and a divergence from this standard was towards
+barbarism.
+
+The secret of the man who is universally interesting is that he is
+universally interested, and this was, above all, the secret of the charm
+that Doctor Holmes had for every one.  No doubt he knew it, for what that
+most alert intelligence did not know of itself was scarcely worth
+knowing.  This knowledge was one of his chief pleasures, I fancy; he
+rejoiced in the consciousness which is one of the highest attributes of
+the highly organized man, and he did not care for the consequences in
+your mind, if you were so stupid as not to take him aright.  I remember
+the delight Henry James, the father of the novelist, had in reporting to
+me the frankness of the doctor, when he had said to him, "Holmes, you are
+intellectually the most alive man I ever knew."  "I am, I am," said the
+doctor.  "From the crown of my head to the sole of my foot, I'm alive,
+I'm alive!"  Any one who ever saw him will imagine the vivid relish he
+had in recognizing the fact.  He could not be with you a moment without
+shedding upon you the light of his flashing wit, his radiant humor, and
+he shone equally upon the rich and poor in mind.  His gaiety of heart
+could not withhold itself from any chance of response, but he did wish
+always to be fully understood, and to be liked by those he liked.  He
+gave his liking cautiously, though, for the affluence of his sympathies
+left him without the reserves of colder natures, and he had to make up
+for these with careful circumspection.  He wished to know the character
+of the person who made overtures to his acquaintance, for he was aware
+that his friendship lay close to it; he wanted to be sure that he was a
+nice person, and though I think he preferred social quality in his
+fellow-man, he did not refuse himself to those who had merely a sweet and
+wholesome humanity.  He did not like anything that tasted or smelt of
+Bohemianism in the personnel of literature, but he did not mind the scent
+of the new-ploughed earth, or even of the barn-yard.  I recall his
+telling me once that after two younger brothers-in-letters had called
+upon him in the odor of an habitual beeriness and smokiness, he opened
+the window; and the very last time I saw him he remembered at eighty-five
+the offence he had found on his first visit to New York, when a
+metropolitan poet had asked him to lunch in a basement restaurant.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+He seemed not to mind, however, climbing to the little apartment we had
+in Boston when we came there in 1866, and he made this call upon us in
+due form, bringing Mrs. Holmes with him as if to accent the recognition
+socially.  We were then incredibly young, much younger than I find people
+ever are nowadays, and in the consciousness of our youth we felt, to the
+last exquisite value of the fact, what it was to have the Autocrat come
+to see us; and I believe he was not displeased to perceive this; he liked
+to know that you felt his quality in every way.  That first winter,
+however, I did not see him often, and in the spring we went to live in
+Cambridge, and thereafter I met him chiefly at Longfellow's, or when I
+came in to dine at the Fieldses', in Boston.  It was at certain meetings
+of the Dante Club, when Longfellow read aloud his translation for
+criticism, and there was supper later, that one saw the doctor; and his
+voice was heard at the supper rather than at the criticism, for he was no
+Italianate.  He always seemed to like a certain turn of the talk toward
+the mystical, but with space for the feet on a firm ground of fact this
+side of the shadows; when it came to going over among them, and laying
+hold of them with the band of faith, as if they were substance, he was
+not of the excursion.  It is well known how fervent, I cannot say devout,
+a spiritualist Longfellow's brother-in-law, Appleton, was; and when he
+was at the table too, it took all the poet's delicate skill to keep him
+and the Autocrat from involving themselves in a cataclysmal controversy
+upon the matter of manifestations.  With Doctor Holmes the inquiry was
+inquiry, to the last, I believe, and the burden of proof was left to the
+ghosts and their friends.  His attitude was strictly scientific; he
+denied nothing, but he expected the supernatural to be at least as
+convincing as the natural.
+
+There was a time in his history when the popular ignorance classed him
+with those who were once rudely called infidels; but the world has since
+gone so fast and so far that the mind he was of concerning religious
+belief would now be thought religious by a good half of the religious
+world.  It is true that he had and always kept a grudge against the
+ancestral Calvinism which afflicted his youth; and he was through all
+rises and lapses of opinion essentially Unitarian; but of the honest
+belief of any one, I am sure he never felt or spoke otherwise than most
+tolerantly, most tenderly.  As often as he spoke of religion, and his
+talk tended to it very often, I never heard an irreligious word from him,
+far less a scoff or sneer at religion; and I am certain that this was not
+merely because he would have thought it bad taste, though undoubtedly he
+would have thought it bad taste; I think it annoyed, it hurt him, to be
+counted among the iconoclasts, and he would have been profoundly grieved
+if he could have known how widely this false notion of him once
+prevailed.  It can do no harm at this late day to impart from the secrets
+of the publishing house the fact that a supposed infidelity in the tone
+of his story The Guardian Angel cost the Atlantic Monthly many
+subscribers.  Now the tone of that story would not be thought even mildly
+agnostic, I fancy; and long before his death the author had outlived the
+error concerning him.
+
+It was not the best of his stories, by any means, and it would not be too
+harsh to say that it was the poorest.  His novels all belonged to an
+order of romance which was as distinctly his own as the form of
+dramatized essay which he invented in the Autocrat.  If he did not think
+poorly of them, he certainly did not think too proudly, and I heard him
+quote with relish the phrase of a lady who had spoken of them to him as
+his "medicated novels."  That, indeed, was perhaps what they were; a
+faint, faint odor of the pharmacopoeia clung to their pages; their magic
+was scientific.  He knew this better than any one else, of course, and if
+any one had said it in his turn he would hardly have minded it.  But what
+he did mind was the persistent misinterpretation of his intention in
+certain quarters where he thought he had the right to respectful
+criticism in stead of the succession of sneers that greeted the
+successive numbers of his story; and it was no secret that he felt the
+persecution keenly.  Perhaps he thought that he had already reached that
+time in his literary life when he was a fact rather than a question,
+and when reasons and not feelings must have to do with his acceptance or
+rejection.  But he had to live many years yet before he reached this
+state.  When he did reach it, happily a good while before his death,
+I do not believe any man ever enjoyed the like condition more. He loved
+to feel himself out of the fight, with much work before him still,
+but with nothing that could provoke ill-will in his activities.  He loved
+at all times to take himself objectively, if I may so express my sense of
+a mental attitude that misled many.  As I have said before, he was
+universally interested, and he studied the universe from himself.  I do
+not know how one is to study it otherwise; the impersonal has really no
+existence; but with all his subtlety and depth he was of a make so
+simple, of a spirit so naive, that he could not practise the feints some
+use to conceal that interest in self which, after all, every one knows is
+only concealed.  He frankly and joyously made himself the starting-point
+in all his inquest of the hearts and minds of other men, but so far from
+singling himself out in this, and standing apart in it, there never was
+any one who was more eagerly and gladly your fellow-being in the things
+of the soul.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+In the things of the world, he had fences, and looked at some people
+through palings and even over the broken bottles on the tops of walls;
+and I think he was the loser by this, as well as they.  But then I think
+all fences are bad, and that God has made enough differences between men;
+we need not trouble ourselves to multiply them.  Even behind his fences,
+however, Holmes had a heart kind for the outsiders, and I do not believe
+any one came into personal relations with him who did not experience this
+kindness.  In that long and delightful talk I had with him on my return
+from Venice (I can praise the talk because it was mainly his), we spoke
+of the status of domestics in the Old World, and how fraternal the
+relation of high and low was in Italy, while in England, between master
+and man, it seemed without acknowledgment of their common humanity.
+"Yes," he said, "I always felt as if English servants expected to be
+trampled on; but I can't do that.  If they want to be trampled on, they
+must get some one else."  He thought that our American way was infinitely
+better; and I believe that in spite of the fences there was always an
+instinctive impulse with him to get upon common ground with his fellow-
+man.  I used to notice in the neighborhood cabman who served our block on
+Beacon Street a sort of affectionate reverence for the Autocrat, which
+could have come from nothing but the kindly terms between them; if you
+went to him when he was engaged to Doctor Holmes, he told you so with a
+sort of implication in his manner that the thought of anything else for
+the time was profanation.  The good fellow who took him his drives about
+the Beverly and Manchester shores seemed to be quite in the joke of the
+doctor's humor, and within the bounds of his personal modesty and his
+functional dignity permitted himself a smile at the doctor's sallies,
+when you stood talking with him, or listening to him at the carriage-
+side.
+
+The civic and social circumstance that a man values himself on is
+commonly no part of his value, and certainly no part of his greatness.
+Rather, it is the very thing that limits him, and I think that Doctor
+Holmes appeared in the full measure of his generous personality to those
+who did not and could not appreciate his circumstance, and not to those
+who formed it, and who from life-long association were so dear and
+comfortable to him.  Those who best knew how great a man he was were
+those who came from far to pay him their duty, or to thank him for some
+help they had got from his books, or to ask his counsel or seek his
+sympathy.  With all such he was most winningly tender, most intelligently
+patient.  I suppose no great author was ever more visited by letter and
+in person than he, or kept a faithfuler conscience for his guests.  With
+those who appeared to him in the flesh he used a miraculous tact, and I
+fancy in his treatment of all the physician native in him bore a
+characteristic part.  No one seemed to be denied access to him, but it
+was after a moment of preparation that one was admitted, and any one who
+was at all sensitive must have felt from the first moment in his presence
+that there could be no trespassing in point of time.  If now and then
+some insensitive began to trespass, there was a sliding-scale of
+dismissal that never failed of its work, and that really saved the author
+from the effect of intrusion.  He was not bored because he would not be.
+
+I transfer at random the impressions of many years to my page, and I
+shall not try to observe a chronological order in these memories.  Vivid
+among them is that of a visit which I paid him with Osgood the publisher,
+then newly the owner of the Atlantic Monthly, when I had newly become the
+sole editor.  We wished to signalize our accession to the control of the
+magazine by a stroke that should tell most in the public eye, and we
+thought of asking Doctor Holmes to do something again in the manner of
+the Autocrat and the Professor at the Breakfast Table.  Some letters had
+passed between him and the management concerning our wish, and then
+Osgood thought that it would be right and fit for us to go to him in
+person.  He proposed the visit, and Doctor Holmes received us with a mind
+in which he had evidently formulated all his thoughts upon the matter.
+His main question was whether at his age of sixty years a man was
+justified in seeking to recall a public of the past, or to create a new
+public in the present.  He seemed to have looked the ground over not only
+with a personal interest in the question, but with a keen scientific zest
+for it as something which it was delightful to consider in its generic
+relations; and I fancy that the pleasure of this inquiry more than
+consoled him for such pangs of misgiving as he must have had in the
+personal question.  As commonly happens in the solution of such problems,
+it was not solved; he was very willing to take our minds upon it, and to
+incur the risk, if we thought it well and were willing to share it.
+
+We came away rejoicing, and the new series began with the new year
+following.  It was by no means the popular success that we had hoped;
+not because the author had not a thousand new things to say, or failed to
+say them with the gust and freshness of his immortal youth, but because
+it was not well to disturb a form associated in the public mind with an
+achievement which had become classic.  It is of the Autocrat of the
+Breakfast Table that people think, when they think of the peculiar
+species of dramatic essay which the author invented, and they think also
+of the Professor at the Breakfast Table, because he followed so soon;
+but the Poet at the Breakfast Table came so long after that his advent
+alienated rather than conciliated liking.  Very likely, if the Poet had
+come first he would have had no second place in the affections of his
+readers, for his talk was full of delightful matter; and at least one of
+the poems which graced each instalment was one of the finest and greatest
+that Doctor Holmes ever wrote.  I mean "Homesick in Heaven," which seems
+to me not only what I have said, but one of the most important, the most
+profoundly pathetic in the language.  Indeed, I do not know any other
+that in the same direction goes so far with suggestion so penetrating.
+The other poems were mainly of a cast which did not win; the metaphysics
+in them were too much for the human interest, and again there rose a
+foolish clamor of the creeds against him on account of them.  The great
+talent, the beautiful and graceful fancy, the eager imagination of the
+Autocrat could not avail in this third attempt, and I suppose the Poet at
+the Breakfast Table must be confessed as near a failure as Doctor Holmes
+could come.  It certainly was so in the magazine which the brilliant
+success of the first had availed to establish in the high place the
+periodical must always hold in the history of American literature.
+Lowell was never tired of saying, when he recurred to the first days of
+his editorship, that the magazine could never have gone at all without
+the Autocrat papers.  He was proud of having insisted upon Holmes's doing
+something for the new venture, and he was fond of recalling the author's
+misgivings concerning his contributions, which later repeated themselves
+with too much reason, though not with the reason that was in his own
+mind.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+He lived twenty-five years after that self-question at sixty, and after
+eighty he continued to prove that threescore was not the limit of a man's
+intellectual activity or literary charm.  During all that time the work
+he did in mere quantity was the work that a man in the prime of life
+might well have been vain of doing, and it was of a quality not less
+surprising.  If I asked him with any sort of fair notice I could rely
+upon him always for something for the January number, and throughout the
+year I could count upon him for those occasional pieces in which he so
+easily excelled all former writers of occasional verse, and which he
+liked to keep from the newspapers for the magazine.  He had a pride in
+his promptness with copy, and you could always trust his promise.  The
+printer's toe never galled the author's kibe in his case; he wished to
+have an early proof, which he corrected fastidiously, but not overmuch,
+and he did not keep it long.  He had really done all his work in the
+manuscript, which came print-perfect and beautifully clear from his pen,
+in that flowing, graceful hand which to the last kept a suggestion of the
+pleasure he must have had in it.  Like all wise contributors, he was not
+only patient, but very glad of all the queries and challenges that proof-
+reader and editor could accumulate on the margin of his proofs, and when
+they were both altogether wrong he was still grateful.  In one of his
+poems there was some Latin-Quarter French, which our collective purism
+questioned, and I remember how tender of us he was in maintaining that in
+his Parisian time, at least, some ladies beyond the Seine said "Eh,
+b'en," instead of "Eh, bien."  He knew that we must be always on the
+lookout for such little matters, and he would not wound our ignorance.
+I do not think any one enjoyed praise more than he.  Of course he would
+not provoke it, but if it came of itself, he would not deny himself the
+pleasure, as long as a relish of it remained.  He used humorously to
+recognize his delight in it, and to say of the lecture audiences which
+in earlier times hesitated applause, "Why don't they give me three times
+three?  I can stand it!"  He himself gave in the generous fulness he
+desired.  He did not praise foolishly or dishonestly, though he would
+spare an open dislike; but when a thing pleased him he knew how to say so
+cordially and skilfully, so that it might help as well as delight.
+I suppose no great author has tried more sincerely and faithfully to
+befriend the beginner than he; and from time to time he would commend
+something to me that he thought worth looking at, but never insistently.
+In certain cases, where he had simply to ease a burden, from his own to
+the editorial shoulders, he would ask that the aspirant might be
+delicately treated.  There might be personal reasons for this, but
+usually his kindness of heart moved him.  His tastes had their
+geographical limit, but his sympathies were boundless, and the hopeless
+creature for whom he interceded was oftener remote from Boston and New
+England than otherwise.
+
+It seems to me that he had a nature singularly affectionate, and that it
+was this which was at fault if he gave somewhat too much of himself to
+the celebration of the Class of '29, and all the multitude of Boston
+occasions, large and little, embalmed in the clear amber of his verse,
+somewhat to the disadvantage of the amber.  If he were asked he could not
+deny the many friendships and fellowships which united in the asking;
+the immediate reclame from these things was sweet to him; but he loved
+to comply as much as he loved to be praised.  In the pleasure he got he
+could feel himself a prophet in his own country, but the country which
+owned him prophet began perhaps to feel rather too much as if it owned
+him, and did not prize his vaticinations at all their worth.  Some polite
+Bostonians knew him chiefly on this side, and judged him to their own
+detriment from it.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+After we went to live in Cambridge, my life and the delight in it were so
+wholly there that in ten years I had hardly been in as many Boston
+houses.  As I have said, I met Doctor Holmes at the Fieldses', and at
+Longfellow's, when he came out to a Dante supper, which was not often,
+and somewhat later at the Saturday Club dinners.  One parlous time at the
+publisher's I have already recalled, when Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe and
+the Autocrat clashed upon homeopathy, and it required all the tact of the
+host to lure them away from the dangerous theme.  As it was, a battle
+waged in the courteous forms of Fontenoy, went on pretty well through the
+dinner, and it was only over the coffee that a truce was called.  I need
+not say which was heterodox, or that each had a deep and strenuous
+conscience in the matter.  I have always felt it a proof of his extreme
+leniency to me, unworthy, that the doctor was able to tolerate my own
+defection from the elder faith in medicine; and I could not feel his
+kindness less caressing because I knew it a concession to an infirmity.
+He said something like, After all a good physician was the great matter;
+and I eagerly turned his clemency to praise of our family doctor.
+
+He was very constant at the Saturday Club, as long as his strength
+permitted, and few of its members missed fewer of its meetings.
+He continued to sit at its table until the ghosts of Hawthorne,
+of Agassiz, of Emerson, of Longfellow, of Lowell, out of others less
+famous, bore him company there among the younger men in the flesh.
+It must have been very melancholy, but nothing could deeply cloud his
+most cheerful spirit.  His strenuous interest in life kept him alive to
+all the things of it, after so many of his friends were dead.  The
+questions which he was wont to deal with so fondly, so wisely, the great
+problems of the soul, were all the more vital, perhaps, because the
+personal concern in them was increased by the translation to some other
+being of the men who had so often tried with him to fathom them here.
+The last time I was at that table he sat alone there among those great
+memories; but he was as gay as ever I saw him; his wit sparkled, his
+humor gleamed; the poetic touch was deft and firm as of old; the serious
+curiosity, the instant sympathy remained.  To the witness he was
+pathetic, but to himself he could only have been interesting, as the
+figure of a man surviving, in an alien but not unfriendly present, the
+past which held so vast a part of all that had constituted him.  If he
+had thought of himself in this way, it would have been without one
+emotion of self-pity, such as more maudlin souls indulge, but with a love
+of knowledge and wisdom as keenly alert as in his prime.
+
+For three privileged years I lived all but next-door neighbor of Doctor
+Holmes in that part of Beacon Street whither he removed after he left his
+old home in Charles Street, and during these years I saw him rather
+often.  We were both on the water side, which means so much more than the
+words say, and our library windows commanded the same general view of the
+Charles rippling out into the Cambridge marshes and the sunsets, and
+curving eastward under Long Bridge, through shipping that increased
+onward to the sea.  He said that you could count fourteen towns and
+villages in the compass of that view, with the three conspicuous
+monuments accenting the different attractions of it: the tower of
+Memorial Hall at Harvard; the obelisk on Bunker Hill; and in the centre
+of the picture that bulk of Tufts College which he said he expected to
+greet his eyes the first thing when he opened them in the other world.
+But the prospect, though generally the same, had certain precious
+differences for each of us, which I have no doubt he valued himself as
+much upon as I did.  I have a notion that he fancied these were to be
+enjoyed best in his library through two oval panes let into the bay there
+apart from the windows, for he was apt to make you come and look out of
+them if you got to talking of the view before you left.  In this pleasant
+study he lived among the books, which seemed to multiply from case to
+case and shelf to shelf, and climb from floor to ceiling.  Everything was
+in exquisite order, and the desk where he wrote was as scrupulously neat
+as if the sloven disarray of most authors' desks were impossible to him.
+He had a number of ingenious little contrivances for helping his work,
+which he liked to show you; for a time a revolving book-case at the
+corner of his desk seemed to be his pet; and after that came his
+fountain-pen, which he used with due observance of its fountain
+principle, though he was tolerant of me when I said I always dipped mine
+in the inkstand; it was a merit in his eyes to use a fountain pen in
+anywise.  After you had gone over these objects with him, and perhaps
+taken a peep at something he was examining through his microscope, he sat
+down at one corner of his hearth, and invited you to an easy chair at the
+other.  His talk was always considerate of your wish to be heard, but the
+person who wished to talk when he could listen to Doctor Holmes was his
+own victim, and always the loser.  If you were well advised you kept
+yourself to the question and response which manifested your interest in
+what he was saying, and let him talk on, with his sweet smile, and that
+husky laugh he broke softly into at times.  Perhaps he was not very well
+when you came in upon him; then he would name his trouble, with a
+scientific zest and accuracy, and pass quickly to other matters.  As I
+have noted, he was interested in himself only on the universal side; and
+he liked to find his peculiarity in you better than to keep it his own;
+he suffered a visible disappointment if he could not make you think or
+say you were so and so too.  The querulous note was not in his most
+cheerful register; he would not dwell upon a specialized grief; though
+sometimes I have known him touch very lightly and currently upon a slight
+annoyance, or disrelish for this or that.  As he grew older, he must have
+had, of course, an old man's disposition to speak of his infirmities; but
+it was fine to see him catch himself up in this, when he became conscious
+of it, and stop short with an abrupt turn to something else.  With a real
+interest, which he gave humorous excess, he would celebrate some little
+ingenious thing that had fallen in his way, and I have heard him
+expatiate with childlike delight upon the merits of a new razor he had
+got: a sort of mower, which he could sweep recklessly over cheek and chin
+without the least danger of cutting himself.  The last time I saw him he
+asked me if he had ever shown me that miraculous razor; and I doubt if he
+quite liked my saying I had seen one of the same kind.
+
+It seemed to me that he enjoyed sitting at his chimney-corner rather as
+the type of a person having a good time than as such a person; he would
+rather be up and about something, taking down a book, making a note,
+going again to his little windows, and asking you if you had seen the
+crows yet that sometimes alighted on the shoals left bare by the ebb-tide
+behind the house.  The reader will recall his lovely poem, "My Aviary,"
+which deals with the winged life of that pleasant prospect.  I shared
+with him in the flock of wild-ducks which used to come into our neighbor
+waters in spring, when the ice broke up, and stayed as long as the
+smallest space of brine remained unfrozen in the fall.  He was graciously
+willing I should share in them, and in the cloud of gulls which drifted
+about in the currents of the sea and sky there, almost the whole year
+round.  I did not pretend an original right to them, coming so late as I
+did to the place, and I think my deference pleased him.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+As I have said, he liked his fences, or at least liked you to respect
+them, or to be sensible of them.  As often as I went to see him I was
+made to wait in the little reception-room below, and never shown at once
+to his study.  My name would be carried up, and I would hear him
+verifying my presence from the maid through the opened door; then there
+came a cheery cry of wellcome: "Is that you?  Come up, come up!" and I
+found him sometimes half-way down the stairs to meet me.  He would make
+an excuse for having kept me below a moment, and say something about the
+rule he had to observe in all cases, as if he would not have me feel his
+fence a personal thing.  I was aware how thoroughly his gentle spirit
+pervaded the whole house; the Irish maid who opened the door had the
+effect of being a neighbor too, and of being in the joke of the little
+formality; she apologized in her turn for the reception-room; there was
+certainly nothing trampled upon in her manner, but affection and
+reverence for him whose gate she guarded, with something like the
+sentiment she would have cherished for a dignitary of the Church, but
+nicely differenced and adjusted to the Autocrat's peculiar merits.
+
+The last time I was in that place, a visitant who had lately knocked at
+my own door was about to enter.  I met the master of the house on the
+landing of the stairs outside his study, and he led me in for the few
+moments we could spend together.  He spoke of the shadow so near, and
+said he supposed there could be no hope, but he did not refuse the cheer
+I offered him from my ignorance against his knowledge, and at something
+that was thought or said he smiled, with even a breath of laughter, so
+potent is the wont of a lifetime, though his eyes were full of tears, and
+his voice broke with his words.  Those who have sorrowed deepest will
+understand this best.
+
+It was during the few years of our Beacon Street neighborhood that he
+spent those hundred days abroad in his last visit to England and France.
+He was full of their delight when he came back, and my propinquity gave
+me the advantage of hearing him speak of them at first hand.  He
+whimsically pleased himself most with his Derby-day experiences, and
+enjoyed contrasting the crowd and occasion with that of forty or fifty
+years earlier, when he had seen some famous race of the Derby won;
+nothing else in England seemed to have moved him so much, though all that
+royalties, dignities, and celebrities could well do for him had been
+done.  Of certain things that happened to him, characteristic of the
+English, and interesting to him in their relation to himself through his
+character of universally interested man, he spoke freely; but he has said
+what he chose to the public about them, and I have no right to say more.
+The thing that most vexed him during his sojourn apparently was to have
+been described in one of the London papers as quite deaf; and I could
+truly say to him that I had never imagined him at all deaf, or heard him
+accused of it before.  "Oh, yes," he said, "I am a little hard of hearing
+on one side.  But it isn't deafness."
+
+He had, indeed, few or none of the infirmities of age that make
+themselves painfully or inconveniently evident.  He carried his slight
+figure erect, and until his latest years his step was quick and sure.
+Once he spoke of the lessened height of old people, apropos of something
+that was said, and "They will shrink, you know," he added, as if he were
+not at all concerned in the fact himself.  If you met him in the street,
+you encountered a spare, carefully dressed old gentleman, with a clean-
+shaven face and a friendly smile, qualified by the involuntary frown of
+his thick, senile brows; well coated, lustrously shod, well gloved, in a
+silk hat, latterly wound with a mourning-weed.  Sometimes he did not know
+you when he knew you quite well, and at such times I think it was kind to
+spare his years the fatigue of recalling your identity; at any rate, I am
+glad of the times when I did so.  In society he had the same vagueness,
+the same dimness; but after the moment he needed to make sure of you, he
+was as vivid as ever in his life.  He made me think of a bed of embers on
+which the ashes have thinly gathered, and which, when these are breathed
+away, sparkles and tinkles keenly up with all the freshness of a newly
+kindled fire.  He did not mind talking about his age, and I fancied
+rather enjoyed doing so.  Its approaches interested him; if he was going,
+he liked to know just how and when he was going.  Once he spoke of his
+lasting strength in terms of imaginative humor: he was still so intensely
+interested in nature, the universe, that it seemed to him he was not like
+an old man so much as a lusty infant which struggles against having the
+breast snatched from it.  He laughed at the notion of this, with that
+impersonal relish which seemed to me singularly characteristic of the
+self-consciousness so marked in him.  I never heard one lugubrious word
+from him in regard to his years.  He liked your sympathy on all grounds
+where he could have it self-respectfully, but he was a most manly spirit,
+and he would not have had it even as a type of the universal decay.
+Possibly he would have been interested to have you share in that analysis
+of himself which he was always making, if such a thing could have been.
+
+He had not much patience with the unmanly craving for sympathy in others,
+and chiefly in our literary craft, which is somewhat ignobly given to it,
+though he was patient, after all.  He used to say, and I believe he has
+said it in print,--[Holmes said it in print many times, in his three
+novels and scattered through the "Breakfast Table" series.  D.W.]--that
+unless a man could show a good reason for writing verse, it was rather
+against him, and a proof of weakness.  I suppose this severe conclusion
+was something he had reached after dealing with innumerable small poets
+who sought the light in him with verses that no editor would admit to
+print.  Yet of morbidness he was often very tender; he knew it to be
+disease, something that must be scientifically rather than ethically
+treated.  He was in the same degree kind to any sensitiveness, for he was
+himself as sensitive as he was manly, and he was most delicately
+sensitive to any rightful social claim upon him.  I was once at a dinner
+with him, where he was in some sort my host, in a company of people whom
+he had not seen me with before, and he made a point of acquainting me
+with each of them.  It did not matter that I knew most of them already;
+the proof of his thoughtfulness was precious, and I was sorry when I had
+to disappoint it by confessing a previous knowledge.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+I had three memorable meetings with him not very long before he died: one
+a year before, and the other two within a few months of the end.  The
+first of these was at luncheon in the summer-house of a friend whose
+hospitality made it summer the year round, and we all went out to meet
+him, when he drove up in his open carriage, with the little sunshade in
+his hand, which he took with him for protection against the heat, and
+also, a little, I think, for the whim of it.  He sat a moment after he
+arrived, as if to orient himself in respect to each of us.  Beside the
+gifted hostess, there was the most charming of all the American
+essayists, and the Autocrat seemed at once to find himself singularly at
+home with the people who greeted him.  There was no interval needed for
+fanning away the ashes; he tinkled up before he entered the house, and at
+the table he was as vivid and scintillant as I ever saw him, if indeed I
+ever saw him as much so.  The talk began at once, and we had made him
+believe that there was nothing egotistic in his taking the word, or
+turning it in illustration from himself upon universal matters.  I spoke
+among other things of some humble ruins on the road to Gloucester, which
+gave the way-side a very aged look; the tumbled foundation-stones of poor
+bits of houses, and "Ah," he said, "the cellar and the well?"  He added,
+to the company generally, "Do you know what I think are the two lines of
+mine that go as deep as any others, in a certain direction?" and he began
+to repeat stragglingly certain verses from one of his earlier poems,
+until he came to the closing couplet.  But I will give them in full,
+because in going to look them up I have found them so lovely, and because
+I can hear his voice again in every fondly accented syllable:
+
+         "Who sees unmoved, a ruin at his feet,
+          The lowliest home where human hearts have beat?
+          Its hearth-stone, shaded with the bistre stain,
+          A century's showery torrents wash in vain;
+          Its starving orchard where the thistle blows,
+          And mossy trunks still mark the broken rows;
+          Its chimney-loving poplar, oftenest seen
+          Next an old roof, or where a roof has been;
+          Its knot-grass, plantain,--all the social weeds,
+          Man's mute companions following where he leads;
+          Its dwarfed pale flowers, that show their straggling heads,
+          Sown by the wind from grass-choked garden-beds;
+          Its woodbine creeping where it used to climb;
+          Its roses breathing of the olden time;
+          All the poor shows the curious idler sees,
+          As life's thin shadows waste by slow degrees,
+          Till naught remains, the saddening tale to tell,
+          Save home's last wrecks--the CELLAR AND THE WELL!"
+
+The poet's chanting voice rose with a triumphant swell in the climax, and
+"There," he said, "isn't it so?  The cellar and the well--they can't be
+thrown down or burnt up; they are the human monuments that last longest
+and defy decay."  He rejoiced openly in the sympathy that recognized with
+him the divination of a most pathetic, most signal fact, and he repeated
+the last couplet again at our entreaty, glad to be entreated for it.
+I do not know whether all will agree with him concerning the relative
+importance of the lines, but I think all must feel the exquisite beauty
+of the picture to which they give the final touch.
+
+He said a thousand witty and brilliant things that day, but his pleasure
+in this gave me the most pleasure, and I recall the passage distinctly
+out of the dimness that covers the rest.  He chose to figure us younger
+men, in touching upon the literary circumstance of the past and present,
+as representative of modern feeling and thinking, and himself as no
+longer contemporary.  We knew he did this to be contradicted, and we
+protested, affectionately, fervently, with all our hearts and minds; and
+indeed there were none of his generation who had lived more widely into
+ours.  He was not a prophet like Emerson, nor ever a voice crying in the
+wilderness like Whittier or Lowell.  His note was heard rather amid the
+sweet security of streets, but it was always for a finer and gentler
+civility.  He imagined no new rule of life, and no philosophy or theory
+of life will be known by his name.  He was not constructive; he was
+essentially observant, and in this he showed the scientific nature.
+He made his reader known to himself, first in the little, and then in the
+larger things.  From first to last he was a censor, but a most winning
+and delightful censor, who could make us feel that our faults were other
+people's, and who was not wont
+
+          "To bait his homilies with his brother worms."
+
+At one period he sat in the seat of the scorner, as far as Reform was
+concerned, or perhaps reformers, who are so often tedious and ridiculous;
+but he seemed to get a new heart with the new mind which came to him when
+he began to write the Autocrat papers, and the light mocker of former
+days became the serious and compassionate thinker, to whom most truly
+nothing that was human was alien.  His readers trusted and loved him; few
+men have ever written so intimately with so much dignity, and perhaps
+none has so endeared himself by saying just the thing for his reader that
+his reader could not say for himself.  He sought the universal through
+himself in others, and he found to his delight and theirs that the most
+universal thing was often, if not always, the most personal thing.
+
+In my later meetings with him I was struck more and more by his
+gentleness.  I believe that men are apt to grow gentler as they grow
+older, unless they are of the curmudgeon type, which rusts and crusts
+with age, but with Doctor Holmes the gentleness was peculiarly marked.
+He seemed to shrink from all things that could provoke controversy, or
+even difference; he waived what might be a matter of dispute, and rather
+sought the things that he could agree with you upon.  In the last talk I
+had with him he appeared to have no grudge left, except for the puritanic
+orthodoxy in which he had been bred as a child.  This he was not able to
+forgive, though its tradition was interwoven with what was tenderest and
+dearest in his recollections of childhood.  We spoke of puritanism, and
+I said I sometimes wondered what could be the mind of a man towards life
+who had not been reared in its awful shadow, say an English Churchman, or
+a Continental Catholic; and he said he could not imagine, and that he did
+not believe such a man could at all enter into our feelings; puritanism,
+he seemed to think, made an essential and ineradicable difference.  I do
+not believe he had any of that false sentiment which attributes virtue of
+character to severity of creed, while it owns the creed to be wrong.
+
+He differed from Longfellow in often speaking of his contemporaries.  He
+spoke of them frankly, but with an appreciative rather than a censorious
+criticism.  Of Longfellow himself he said that day, when I told him I had
+been writing about him, and he seemed to me a man without error, that he
+could think of but one error in him, and that was an error of taste, of
+almost merely literary taste.  It was at an earlier time that he talked
+of Lowell, after his death, and told me that Lowell once in the fever of
+his anti-slavery apostolate had written him, urging him strongly, as a
+matter of duty, to come out for the cause he had himself so much at
+heart.  Afterwards Lowell wrote again, owning himself wrong in his
+appeal, which he had come to recognize as invasive.  "He was ten years
+younger than I," said the doctor.
+
+I found him that day I speak of in his house at Beverly Farms, where he
+had a pleasant study in a corner by the porch, and he met me with all the
+cheeriness of old.  But he confessed that he had been greatly broken up
+by the labor of preparing something that might be read at some
+commemorative meeting, and had suffered from finding first that he could
+not write something specially for it.  Even the copying and adapting an
+old poem had overtaxed him, and in this he showed the failing powers of
+age.  But otherwise he was still young, intellectually; that is, there
+was no failure of interest in intellectual things, especially literary
+things.  Some new book lay on the table at his elbow, and he asked me if
+I had seen it, and made some joke about his having had the good luck to
+read it, and have it lying by him a few days before when the author
+called.  I do not know whether he schooled himself against an old man's
+tendency to revert to the past or not, but I know that he seldom did so.
+That morning, however, he made several excursions into it, and told me
+that his youthful satire of the 'Spectre Pig' had been provoked by a poem
+of the elder Dana's, where a phantom horse had been seriously employed,
+with an effect of anticlimax which he had found irresistible.  Another
+foray was to recall the oppression and depression of his early religious
+associations, and to speak with moving tenderness of his father, whose
+hard doctrine as a minister was without effect upon his own kindly
+nature.
+
+In a letter written to me a few weeks after this time, upon an occasion
+when he divined that some word from him would be more than commonly dear,
+he recurred to the feeling he then expressed: "Fifty-six years ago--more
+than half a century--I lost my own father, his age being seventy-three
+years.  As I have reached that period of life, passed it, and now left it
+far behind, my recollections seem to brighten and bring back my boyhood
+and early manhood in a clearer and fairer light than it came to me in my
+middle decades.  I have often wished of late years that I could tell him
+how I cherished his memory; perhaps I may have the happiness of saying
+all I long to tell him on the other side of that thin partition which I
+love to think is all that divides us."
+
+Men are never long together without speaking of women, and I said how
+inevitably men's lives ended where they began, in the keeping of women,
+and their strength failed at last and surrendered itself to their care.
+I had not finished before I was made to feel that I was poaching, and
+"Yes," said the owner of the preserve, "I have spoken of that," and he
+went on to tell me just where.  He was not going to have me suppose I had
+invented those notions, and I could not do less than own that I must have
+found them in his book, and forgotten it.
+
+He spoke of his pleasant summer life in the air, at once soft and fresh,
+of that lovely coast, and of his drives up and down the country roads.
+Sometimes this lady and sometimes that came for him, and one or two
+habitually, but he always had his own carriage ordered, if they failed,
+that he might not fail of his drive in any fair weather.  His cottage was
+not immediately on the sea, but in full sight of it, and there was a
+sense of the sea about it, as there is in all that incomparable region,
+and I do not think he could have been at home anywhere beyond the reach
+of its salt breath.
+
+I was anxious not to outstay his strength, and I kept my eye on the clock
+in frequent glances.  I saw that he followed me in one of these, and I
+said that I knew what his hours were, and I was watching so that I might
+go away in time, and then he sweetly protested.  Did I like that chair I
+was sitting in?  It was a gift to him, and he said who gave it, with a
+pleasure in the fact that was very charming, as if he liked the
+association of the thing with his friend.  He was disposed to excuse the
+formal look of his bookcases, which were filled with sets, and presented
+some phalanxes of fiction in rather severe array.
+
+When I rose to go, he was concerned about my being able to find my way
+readily to the station, and he told me how to go, and what turns to take,
+as if he liked realizing the way to himself.  I believe he did not walk
+much of late years, and I fancy he found much the same pleasure in
+letting his imagination make this excursion to the station with me that
+he would have found in actually going.
+
+I saw him once more, but only once, when a day or two later he drove up
+by our hotel in Magnolia toward the cottage where his secretary was
+lodging.  He saw us from his carriage, and called us gayly to him, to
+make us rejoice with him at having finally got that commemorative poem
+off his mind.  He made a jest of the trouble it had cost him, even some
+sleeplessness, and said he felt now like a convalescent.  He was all
+brightness, and friendliness, and eagerness to make us feel his mood,
+through what was common to us all; and I am glad that this last
+impression of him is so one with the first I ever had, and with that
+which every reader receives from his work.
+
+That is bright, and friendly and eager too, for it is throughout the very
+expression of himself.  I think it is a pity if an author disappoints
+even the unreasonable expectation of the reader, whom his art has invited
+to love him; but I do not believe that Doctor Holmes could inflict this
+disappointment.  Certainly he could disappoint no reasonable expectation,
+no intelligent expectation.  What he wrote, that he was, and every one
+felt this who met him.  He has therefore not died, as some men die, the
+remote impersonal sort, but he is yet thrillingly alive in every page of
+his books.  The quantity of his literature is not great, but the quality
+is very surprising, and surprising first of all as equality.  From the
+beginning to the end he wrote one man, of course in his successive
+consciousnesses.  Perhaps every one does this, but his work gives the
+impression of an uncommon continuity, in spite of its being the effect of
+a later and an earlier impulse so very marked as to have made the later
+an astonishing revelation to those who thought they knew him.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+It is not for me in such a paper as this to attempt any judgment of his
+work.  I have loved it, as I loved him, with a sense of its limitations
+which is by no means a censure of its excellences.  He was not a man who
+cared to transcend; he liked bounds, he liked horizons, the constancy of
+shores.  If he put to sea, he kept in sight of land, like the ancient
+navigators.  He did not discover new continents; and I will own that I,
+for my part, should not have liked to sail with Columbus.  I think one
+can safely affirm that as great and as useful men stayed behind, and
+found an America of the mind without stirring from their thresholds.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Appeal, which he had come to recognize as invasive
+Appeared to have no grudge left
+Could make us feel that our faults were other people's
+Hard of hearing on one side.  But it isn't deafness
+Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Autocrat clashed upon homeopathy
+He was not bored because he would not be
+He was not constructive; he was essentially observant
+His readers trusted and loved him
+Men's lives ended where they began, in the keeping of women
+Not a man who cared to transcend; he liked bounds
+Not much patience with the unmanly craving for sympathy
+Old man's disposition to speak of his infirmities
+Old man's tendency to revert to the past
+Person who wished to talk when he could listen
+Reformers, who are so often tedious and ridiculous
+Secret of the man who is universally interesting
+Sought the things that he could agree with you upon
+Spare his years the fatigue of recalling your identity
+Study in a corner by the porch
+Those who have sorrowed deepest will understand this best
+Times when a man's city was a man's country
+Turn of the talk toward the mystical
+Work gives the impression of an uncommon continuity
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Oliver Wendell Holmes
+by William Dean Howells
+
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