Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes - The Original Classic Edition. E Brown

The lightning and the gale!

       This stirring poem--the first to make him known--was written by Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1830, "with a pencil in the White Chamber Stans pede in uno, pretty nearly," and was published in the Boston Advertiser. From these columns it was extensively copied by other newspapers throughout the country, and handbills containing the verses were circulated in[46] Washington. The eloquent, patriotic outburst not only brought instant fame to the young poet, but so thoroughly aroused the heart of the people that the grand old vessel was saved from destruction.

       The "schoolboy" had already entered Harvard College, and among his classmates in that famous class of 1829, were Benjamin R. Curtis, afterwards Judge of the Supreme Court, James Freeman Clarke, Chandler Robbins, Samuel F. Smith (the author of "My country, 'tis of thee"), G.T. Bigelow (Judge of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts), G.T. Davis, and Benjamin Pierce.

       In the class just below him (1830) was Charles Sumner; and his cousin, Wendell Phillips, with John Lothrop Motley, entered Harvard during his Junior year. George Ticknor was one of his instructors, and Josiah Quincy became president of the college before he graduated.

       Throughout his whole college course Oliver Wendell Holmes maintained an excellent rank in scholarship. He was a frequent contributor to the college periodicals, and delivered several poems upon a variety of subjects. One of[47] these was given before the "Hasty Pudding Club," and another entitled "Forgotten Days," at an "Exhibition." He was the class poet; was called upon to write the poem at Commencement, and was one of the sixteen chosen into the Phi Beta Kappa Society.[6]

       After his graduation, he studied law one year in the Dane Law School of Harvard College. It was at this time that The Collegian, a periodical published by a number of the Harvard under-graduates, was started at Cambridge. To this paper the young law student sent numerous anonymous contributions, among them "Evening, by a Tailor," "The Height of the Ridiculous," "The Meeting of the Dryads," and "The Spectre Pig." A brilliant little journal it must have been with Holmes' inimitable outbursts of wit, "Lochfast's"

       (William H. Simmons) translations from Schiller, and the numerous pen thrusts from John O. Sargent, Robert Habersham and Theodore William Snow, who wrote under the respective signatures of "Charles Sherry," "Mr. Airy" and "Geoffery La Touche." Young Motley, too, was an occasional contributor to The Collegian, and his [48]brother-in-law, Park Benjamin, joined Holmes and Epes Sargent, in 1833, in writing a gift book called "The Harbinger," the profits of which were given to Dr. Howe's Asylum for the blind.

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       [49] CHAPTER V. ABROAD.

       AFTER a year's study of law, during which time the Muses were constantly tempting him to "pen a stanza when he should engross,"

       young Holmes determined to take up the study of medicine, which was much more congenial to his tastes than the formulas of Coke and Blackstone. Doctor James Jackson and his associates were his instructors for the following two years and a half; and then before taking his degree of M.D., he spent three years in Europe, perfecting his studies in the hospitals and lecture-rooms of Paris and Edinburgh.

       Of this European tour, we find occasional allusions scattered throughout his writings. Listen, for instance, to this grand description

       of Salisbury Cathedral:

       "It was the first cathedral we ever saw, and none has ever so impressed us since.[50] Vast, simple, awful in dimensions and height,

       just beginning to grow tall at the point where our proudest steeples taper out, it fills the whole soul, pervades the vast landscape over which it reigns, and, like Niagara and the Alps, abolishes that five or six foot personality in the beholder which is fostered by keeping company with the little life of the day in its little dwellings. In the Alps your voice is as the piping of a cricket. Under the sheet of Niagara the beating of your heart seems too trivial a movement to take reckoning of. In the buttressed hollow of one of these paleo-zoic cathedrals you are ashamed of your ribs, and blush for the exiguous pillars of bone on which your breathing structure reposes.... These old cathedrals are beyond all comparison, what are best worth seeing of man's handiwork in Europe."

       "Lively emotions very commonly do not strike us full in front, but obliquely from the side," he says at another time. "A scene or incident in undress often affects us more than one in full costume."

       Is this the mighty ocean?--is this all? [51]

       Says the Princess in Gebir. The rush that should have flooded my soul in the Coliseum did not come. But walking one day in the fields about the city, I stumbled over a fragment of broken masonry, and lo! the World's Mistress in her stone girdle--alta maenia Romae--rose before me, and whitened my cheek with her pale shadow, as never before or since.

       "I used very often, when coming home from my morning's work at one of the public institutions of Paris, to stop in at the dear old church of St. Etienne du Mont. The tomb of St. Genevieve, surrounded by burning candles and votive tablets was there; there was a noble organ with carved figures; the pulpit was borne on the oaken shoulders of a stooping Samson; and there was a marvellous

       staircase, like a coil of lace. These things I mention from memory, but not all of them together impressed me so much as an inscrip-

       tion on a small slab of marble fixed in one of the walls. It told how this Church of St. Stephen was repaired and beautified in the

       16**, and how during the celebration of its re-opening, two girls of the parish (filles de la paroisse),[52] fell from the gallery, carrying a part of the balustrade with them, to the pavement, but by miracle escaped uninjured. Two young girls, nameless, but real presences to my imagination, as much as when they came fluttering down on the tiles with a cry that outscreamed the sharpest treble in the

       Te Deum. All the crowd gone but these two filles de la paroisse--gone as utterly as the dresses they wore, as the shoes that were on

       their feet, as the bread and meat that were in the market on that day.

       "Not the great historical events, but the personal incidents that call up single sharp pictures of some human being in its pang of struggle, reach us most nearly. I remember the platform at Berne, over the parapet of which Theobald Weinzapfli's restive horse sprang with him and landed him more than a hundred feet beneath in the lower town, not dead, but sorely broken, and no longer a wild youth, but God's servant from that day forward. I have forgotten the famous bears and all else. I remember the Percy lion

       on the bridge over the little river at Alnwick--the leaden lion with his tail stretched out straight like a pump-handle--and why?[53] Because of the story of the village boy who must fain bestride the leaden tail, standing out over the water--which breaking, he dropped into the stream far below, and was taken out an idiot for the rest of his life."

       Again he says: "I once ascended the spire of Strasburg Cathedral, which is the highest, I think, in Europe. It is a shaft of stone filigree-work, frightfully open, so that the guide puts his arms behind you to keep you from falling. To climb it is a noonday night-mare, and to think of having climbed it crisps all the fifty-six joints of one's twenty digits. While I was on it, 'pinnacled dim in the intense inane,' a strong wind was blowing, and I felt sure that the spire was rocking. It swayed back and forward like a stalk of rye, or a cat-o'-nine tails (bulrush) with a bobolink on it. I mentioned it to the guide, and he said that the spire did really swing back and

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       forward, I think he said some feet.

       "Keep any line of knowledge ten years and some other line will intersect it. Long after I was hunting out a paper of Dumeril's in an old journal--the 'Magazin Encyclopedique'--for l'an troiseme (1795), when I stumbled upon a[54] brief article on the vibrations of the spire of Strasburg Cathedral. A man can shake it so the movement shall be shown in a vessel of water nearly seventy feet below the summit, and higher up the vibration is like that of an earthquake. I have seen one of those wretched wooden spires with which we very shabbily finish some of our stone churches (thinking that the lidless blue eye of heaven cannot tell the counterfeit we try to pass on it), swinging like a reed in a wind, but one would hardly think of such a thing happening in a stone spire."

       Nor does he forget that dear little child he saw and heard in a French hospital. "Between two and three years old. Fell out of her