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

"The worst of a modern stylish mansion is, that it has no place for ghosts.... Now the old house had wainscots behind which the mice were always scampering, and squeaking, and rattling down the plaster, and enacting family scenes and parlor theatricals. It had a cellar where the cold slug clung to the walls and the misanthropic spider withdrew from the garish day; where the green mould loved to grow, and the long, white, potato-shoots went feeling along the floor if happily they might find the daylight; it had great brick pillars, always in a cold sweat with holding up the burden they had been aching under day and night for a century and more; it had sepulchral arches closed by rough doors that hung on hinges rotten with rust, behind which doors, if there was not a heap of bones connected with a mysterious disappearance of long ago, there well might have been, for it was just the place to look for them.

       "Let us look at the garret as I can reproduce it from memory. It has a flooring of[62] lath, with ridges of mortar squeezed up between them, which if you tread on you will go to--the Lord have mercy on you! where will you go to?--the same being crossed by narrow bridges of boards, on which you may put your feet, but with fear and trembling.

       "Above you and around you are beams and joists, on some of which you may see, when the light is let in, the marks of the conchoi-dal clippings of the broadaxes, showing the rude way in which the timber was shaped, as it came, full of sap, from the neighboring forest. It is a realm of darkness and thick dust, and shroudlike cobwebs and dead things they wrap in their gray folds. For a garret

       is like a seashore, where wrecks are thrown up and slowly go to pieces. There is the cradle which the old man you just remember

       was rocked in; there is the ruin of the bedstead he died on; that ugly slanting contrivance used to be put under his pillow in the days when his breath came hard; there is his old chair with both arms gone, symbol of the desolate time when he had nothing earthly left to lean on; there is the large wooden reel which the blear-eyed old deacon sent the minister's lady, who thanked him gra[63]ciously, and twirled it smilingly, and in fitting season bowed it out decently to the limbo of troublesome conveniences. And there are old leather portmanteaus, like stranded porpoises, their mouths gaping in gaunt hunger for the food with which they used to be gorged to bulging repletion; and the empty churn with its idle dasher which the Nancys and Phebes, who have left their comfortable places

       to the Bridgets and Norahs, used to handle to good purpose; and the brown, shaky old spinningwheel, which was running, it may be, in the days when they were hanging the Salem witches.

       "Under the dark and haunted garret were attic chambers which themselves had histories.... The rooms of the second story, the chambers of birth and death, are sacred to silent memories.

       "Let us go down to the ground floor. I retain my doubts about those dents on the floor of the right-hand room, the study of successive occupants, said to have been made by the butts of the Continental militia's firelocks, but this was the cause the story told me in childhood, laid them to. That military[64] consultations were held in that room when the house was General Ward's headquarters, that the Provincial generals and colonels and other men of war there planned the movement which ended in the fortifying of Bunker's Hill, that Warren slept in the house the night before the battle, that President Langdon went forth from the western door

       and prayed for God's blessing on the men just setting forth on their bloody expedition--all these things have been told, and perhaps

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       none of them need be doubted....

       "In the days of my earliest remembrance, a row of tall Lombardy poplars mounted guard on the western side of the old mansion. Whether like the cypress, these trees suggest the idea of the funeral torch or the monumental spire, whether their tremulous leaves make us afraid by sympathy with their nervous thrills, whether the faint balsamic smell of their leaves and their closely swathed limbs have in them vague hints of dead Pharaohs stiffened in their cerements, I will not guess; but they always seemed to me to give an air of sepulchral sadness to the house before which they stood sentries.

       [65]

       "Not so with the row of elms you may see leading up towards the western entrance. I think the patriarch of them all went over in the great gale of 1815; I know I used to shake the youngest of them with my hands, stout as it is now, with a trunk that would defy the bully of Crotona, or the strong man whose liaison with the Lady Delilah proved so disastrous.

       "The College plain would be nothing without its elms. As the long hair of a woman is a glory to her, so are these green tresses that bank themselves against the sky in thick clustered masses, the ornament and the pride of the classic green....

       "There is a row of elms just in front of the old house on the south. When I was a child the one at the southwest corner was struck by lightning, and one of its limbs and a long ribbon of bark torn away. The tree never fully recovered its symmetry and vigor, and forty years and more afterwards a second thunderbolt crashed upon it and set its heart on fire, like those of the lost souls in the Hall of Eblis. Heaven had twice blasted it, and the axe finished what the lightning had begun."

       [66]

       "Ah me!" he exclaims at another time, "what strains of unwritten verse pulsate through my soul when I open a certain closet in the ancient house where I was born! On its shelves used to lie bundles of sweet marjoram and pennyroyal and lavender and mint and3 catnip; there apples were stored until their seeds should grow black, which happy period there were sharp little milk teeth always ready to anticipate; there peaches lay in the dark, thinking of the sunshine they had lost, until, like the hearts of saints that dream of

       heaven in their sorrow, they grew fragrant as the breath of angels. The odorous echo of a score of dead summers lingers yet in those

       dim recesses."

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       CHAPTER VII. THE PROFESSOR.

       IN 1839, Doctor Holmes was appointed Professor of Anatomy and Physiology in Dartmouth College, and pleasantly describes in The Professor, his "Autumnal sojourn by the Connecticut, where it comes loitering down from its mountain fastnesses like a great lord swallowing up the small proprietary rivulets very quietly as it goes." The little country tavern where he stayed while delivering his lectures, he calls "that caravansary on the banks of the stream where Ledyard launched his log canoe, and the jovial old Colonel used to lead the Commencement processions." And what a charming description this of the little town of Hanover, "where blue Ascutney looked down from the far distance and the 'hills of Beulah' rolled up the opposite horizon in soft, climbing masses, so suggestive of the Pilgrim's Heavenward Path[68] that he (the Professor) used to look through his old 'Dollond' to see if the Shining Ones were not within range of sight--sweet visions, sweetest in those Sunday walks which carried him by the peaceful common, through the solemn village lying in cataleptic stillness under the shadow of the rod of Moses, to the terminus of his harmless stroll, the spreading beech-tree."

       In 1840, Doctor Holmes was married to Amelia Lee Jackson, a daughter of Hon. Charles Jackson, formerly judge of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts. The first home of the young couple was at No. 8, Montgomery Place, the house at the left-hand side of the court, and next the farther corner. Here Doctor Holmes resided for about eighteen years,[7] and here all his children were born.

       "When he entered that door, two shadows glided over the threshold; five lingered in the doorway when he passed through it for

       the last time, and one of the shadows was claimed by its owner to be longer than his own. What changes he saw in that quiet place! Death rained through every roof but his; children came into life, grew to maturity, wedded, [69]faded away, threw themselves away; the whole drama of life was played in that stock company's theatre of a dozen houses, one of which was his, and no deep sorrow or severe calamity ever entered his dwelling in that little court where he lived in gay loneliness so long."

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       In order to devote himself more strictly to his practice in Boston, Doctor Holmes resigned his professorship at Dartmouth College soon after his marriage. During the summer months, however, he delivered lectures before the Berkshire Medical School at Pittsfield, Mass., and established his summer residence "up among those hills that shut in the amber-flowing Housatonic, in the home overlooking the winding stream and the smooth, flat meadow;