Guest post: Holmes and his hunt for Holmes

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Though he is most famous for his role as a Justice of the Supreme Court, an appointment which was made December 15, 1882, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was also the son of poet and author Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. Years prior to his appointment, Holmes, Jr. had been a Captain for the Twentieth Regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry of the Union Army during the Civil War. He participated in a number of major battles and was wounded first at the Battle of Ball's Bluff where many of his Harvard classmates fell and then again at Antietam in the fall of 1862. When his father received a telegram informing him that his son was wounded through the neck at Antietam he set out on a journey to find him and wrote his account of the story in a piece titled "My Hunt after ‘The Captain’." It was first published in The Atlantic in December 1862. The search lasted many days after false leads, backtracking, and a combination of train and carriage rides. Although anxious, Dr. Holmes commented on the many incidental sights and conversations during his travels.

...though I had a worrying ache and inward tremor underlying all the outward play of the senses and the mind, yet it is the simple truth that I did look out of the car- windows with an eye for all that passed, that I did take cognizance of strange sights and singular people, that I did act much as persons act from the ordinary promptings of curiosity, and from time to time even laugh very much as others do who are attacked with a convulsive sense of the ridiculous, the epilepsy of the diaphragm.

His descriptions of the battlefields and hospitals brought home to the Northern readers a bit of the reality of the war:

We followed the road through the village for a space, then turned off to the right, and wandered somewhat vaguely, for want of precise directions, over the hills. Inquiring as we went, we forded a wide creek in which soldiers were washing their clothes, the name of which we did not then know, but which must have been the Antietam. At one point we met a party, women among them, bringing off various trophies they had picked up on the battlefield. Still wandering along, we were at last pointed to a hill in the distance, a part of the summit of which was covered with Indian corn. There, we were told, some of the fiercest fighting of the day had been done. The fences were taken down so as to make a passage across the fields, and the tracks worn within the last few days looked like old roads. We passed a fresh grave under a tree near the road. A board was nailed to the tree, bearing the name, as well as I could make it out, of Gardiner, of a New Hampshire regiment.

At one point he visits a Union camp and speaks with some Confederate prisoners of war:

I put the question, in a quiet, friendly way, to several of the prisoners, what they were fighting for. One answered, "For our homes." Two or three others said they did not know, and manifested great indifference to the whole matter, at which another of their number, a sturdy fellow, took offence, and muttered opinions strongly derogatory to those who would not stand up for the cause they had been fighting for.

After numerous attempts to find the Captain, traveling hundreds of miles and at times being so close but missing each other, the two finally share a reserved reunion and head home to Boston:

I saw my Captain; there saw I him, even my first-born, whom I had sought through many cities.
"How are you, Boy?"
"How are you, Dad?"
Such are the proprieties of life, as they are observed among us Anglo-Saxons of the nineteenth century, decently disguising those natural impulses that made Joseph, the Prime Minister of Egypt, weep aloud so that the Egyptians and the house of Pharaoh heard, nay, which had once overcome his shaggy old uncle Esau so entirely that he fell on his brother's neck and cried like a baby in the presence of all the women. But the hidden cisterns of the soul may be filling fast with sweet tears, while the windows through which it looks are undimmed by a drop or a film of moisture.

* Jessica Bussmann is the Education and Volunteer Coordinator at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts where Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. is buried.

Death of Howe: the friend our earth has lost

Samuel Gridley Howe was an active abolitionist (he was a member of the Secret Six which financed John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry) along with his wife Julia Ward Howe. He was also well-respected as a physician and educator who worked particularly with the blind. When he died in 1876, Boston's elite mourned him in a three-hour ceremony at Boston Music Hall. At that program, held February 8, 1876, fellow physician Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes offered a poem titled "A Memorial Tribute":

Leader of armies, Israel's God,
   Thy soldier's fight is won!
Master, whose lowly path he trod,
   Thy servant's work is done!

No voice is heard from Sinai's steep
   Our wandering feet to guide;
From Horeb's rock no waters leap,
   No Jordan's waves divide;

No prophet cleaves our western sky
   On wheels of whirling fire;
No shepherds hear the song on high
   Of heaven's angelic choir.

Yet here as to the patriarch's tent
   God's angel comes a guest;
He comes on Heaven's high errand sent,
   In earth's poor raiment drest.

We see no halo round his brow
   Till love its own recalls,
And like a leaf that quits the bough,
   The mortal vesture falls.

In autumn's chill declining day,
   Ere winter's killing frost,
The message came; so passed away
   The friend our earth has lost.

Still, Father, in thy love we trust;
   Forgive us if we mourn
The saddening hour that laid in dust
   His robe of flesh outworn.

How long the wreck-strewn journey seems
   To reach the far-off past
That woke his youth from peaceful dreams
   With Freedom's trumpet-blast!

Along her classic hillsides rung
   The Paynim's battle-cry,
And like a red-cross knight he sprung
   For her to live or die.

No trustier service claimed the wreath
   For Sparta's bravest son;
No truer soldier sleeps beneath
   The mound of Marathon;

Yet not for him the warrior's grave
   In front of angry foes;
To lift, to shield, to help, to save,
   The holier task he chose.

He touched the eyelids of the blind,
   And lo! the veil withdrawn,
As o'er the midnight of the mind
   He led the light of dawn.

He asked not whence the fountains roll
   No traveller's foot has found,
But mapped the desert of the soul
   Untracked by sight or sound.

What prayers have reached the sapphire throne,
   By silent fingers spelt,
For him who first through depths unknown
   His doubtful pathway felt.

Who sought the slumbering sense that lay
   Close shut with bolt and bar,
And showed awakening thought the ray
   Of reason's morning star!

Where'er he moved, his shadowy form
   The sightless orbs would seek,
And smiles of welcome light and warm
   The lips that could not speak.

No labored line, no sculptor's art,
   Such hallowed memory needs;
His tablet is the human heart,
   His record loving deeds.

The rest that earth denied is thine,—
   Ah, is it rest? we ask,
Or, traced by knowledge more divine,
   Some larger, nobler task?

Had but those boundless fields of blue
   One darkened sphere like this;
But what has heaven for thee to do
   In realms of perfect bliss?

No cloud to lift, no mind to clear,
   No rugged path to smooth,
No struggling soul to help and cheer,
   No mortal grief to soothe!

Enough; is there a world of love,
   No more we ask to know;
The hand will guide thy ways above
   That shaped thy task below.

Most welcome and most wholesome tears

A friend recommended to Oliver Wendell Holmes that he read the short story "The Bell of Saint Basil's." Moved by the story, he wrote a letter on May 31, 1891 to its author, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward. "I may as well confess that the pathos of your story quite overcame me," he wrote. "I did not know I had so many tears in my emotional fountains... It did me good to have a good, long cry."

The story which left Dr. Holmes in tears follows an elderly couple from Virginia, Mr. and Mrs. Peyton, in the decades after the Civil War. Mr. Peyton serves as President of the fictitious Saint Basil's College, though the aftermath of the war has left him without students. Even so, he makes his way to the chapel every morning to ring the bells and offer a prayer to the empty pews:

Saint Basil's boys have gone beyond the urging voice of the chapel bell. Saint Basil cannot call her roll to-day... Saint Basil was, in short, a college without a boy. She had kept her ancient name, her distinguished President, her college buildings, her extended real estate, her chartered rights, and to some extent her invested endowments. What she had not kept was her students. Virginians spoke of the college as they do of the corn-fields, the mansions, the very chickens; nay, the moon in the heavens: "Oh, you ought to have seen it before the war!"

One day, however, Mr. Peyton discovers a man sitting in the final row. It was the revelation of that man's identity that moved Dr. Holmes. "I could not help writing on the spot, while the impression of your story was still tingling all through me," he wrote to Ward. "The ink on the first page of this note and the tears on my cheeks dried at the same moment. I thank you, then, for all these most welcome and most wholesome tears."

The curtain was rung down

The issue of the Boston Evening Transcript for March 4, 1885, reported a "genuine surprise" for some of Boston's literary elite. The prior evening, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and William Dean Howells went to dine with Thomas Bailey Aldrich, then editor of The Atlantic Monthly, to meet one of that magazine's newest sensations. Charles Egbert Craddock, whose writings included "The Dancin' Party at Harrison's Cove" and "In the Tennessee Mountains," was the special guest of the evening. Though they knew the name was a fake, they did not expect that the pseudonym hid that the talented writer was a woman.

For six years, it was not known that Craddock was really Mary N. Murfree, a young writer from St. Louis. As the Transcript reported, "Thus the curtain was rung down on one of the neatest comedies ever presented to the American reading public. And what a distinguished cast the comedy had!"

Aldrich (himself a poet and playwright) had met Murfree the night before and was quite shocked, expecting a strapping and broad-shoulder six-foot man from Tennessee. Knowing that the same reaction would come from Holmes and Howells, he orchestrated the dinner the next evening. The three men, it was reported, referred to Craddock/Murfree using the plural "they" for the evening. Upon seeing her, Holmes is said to have shouted, "He is a woman!" Irony must not have been lost on Howells; during his late tenure on the Atlantic before Aldrich took over, he had published some of the works of Craddock/Murfree. Later, in his Literature and Life: Studies, he praised Craddock/Murfree for the use of regional dialect and local color. But, somewhat passive-aggressively, he referred to her as "Miss Murfree, who so long masqueraded as Charles Egbert Craddock."

*At least one account mentions that Annie Adams Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett were also present. Their reaction is not recorded, so far as I have found.

Moulton: as the fragrance of a rose

In 1889, the Connecticut-born writer Louise Chandler Moulton published her book of poems In the Garden of Dreams (she gave a copy as a Christmas gift to her friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson; that copy has been digitally scanned here). Though a published author for 35 years, she turned to a veteran writer for advice: Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. In a letter dated December 29, 1889, Holmes wrote to her:

I thank you most cordially for sending me your beautiful volume of poems. They tell me that they are breathed from a woman's heart as plainly as the fragrance of a rose reveals its birthplace. I have read nearly all of them — a statement I would not venture to make of most of the volumes I receive, the number of which is legion, and I cannot help feeling flattered that the author of such impassioned poems should have thought well enough of my own productions to honor me with the kind words I find on the blank leaf of a little book that seems to me to hold leaves torn out of the heart's record.

Holmes may have been impressed as early as the first page, which printed a poem of lament for the past titled "Come Back, Dear Days":

Come back, dear days, from out the past!
...I see your gentle ghosts arise;
You look at me with mournful eyes,
And then the night grows vague and vast:
You have gone back to Paradise...

You left no pledges when you went:
The years since then are bleak and cold;
No bursting buds the Junes unfold.
While you were here my all I spent;
Now I am poor and sad and old.

Within a couple years of this letter, Holmes would become one of the last of his generation of authors still living — a frequently lamented fact. Earlier, Holmes had written a poem, "No Time Like the Old Time," about his own nostalgia for the "dear days" of old:

There is no time like the old time, when you and I were young,
When the buds of April blossomed and the birds of springtime sung!

John Greenleaf Whittier's 70th birthday

John Greenleaf Whittier was born in the family homestead in Haverhill, Massachusetts on December 17, 1807. As was traditional in the 19th century, his 70th birthday party in 1877 was a major event — in more ways than one.

The party was thrown by the Atlantic Monthly at Boston's Brunswick Hotel. Guests included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Charles Eliot Norton, Richard Henry Stoddard, and about fifty others. Speeches were presented in Whittier's honor, and Oliver Wendell Holmes presented a poem. Perhaps out of place among these New England literary giants was Mark Twain — who ended up stealing the show.

Twain, invited by his friend and Atlantic editor William Dean Howells, presented a speech intended to be humorous. He described a man he met while traveling who had recently hosted Emerson, Holmes, and Longfellow. According to Twain, the man referred to Emerson as "a seedy little bit of a chap," while Holmes was "as fat as a balloon... and had double chins all the way down to his stomach," while Longfellow had "cropped and bristly" hair "as if he had a wig made of hair brushes." The three men start quoting obscure passages of poetry to the man, who clearly does not understand.

The man tells Twain that he now plans to move, saying, "I ain't suited to a littery atmosphere." Twain responds by telling him they must not have been the true "gracious singers" but imposters. When the newspapers reported the speech as an "attack," Twain sent letters of apology to Emerson, Holmes, Longfellow and Whittier. Longfellow responded that the newspapers were responsible for the "mischief" and that everyone else recognized the "bit of humor." Longfellow concluded: "It was a very pleasant dinner, and I think Whittier enjoyed it very much." No response from Whittier regarding Twain's speech is known.

Holmes: Pay thee with a grateful rhyme

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes was interested in many things. In addition to being a poet, novelist, and essayist, he was a physician, a professor, and an inventor. It should be no surprise that he was particularly fascinated by the transit of Venus, an occurrence where the planet Venus is visible in front of the sun, appearing as a small black circle. Holmes observed this astronomical event from Boston Common on December 6, 1882 (it was not seen again until 2004) and wrote a poem about it, "The Flâneur" (a French word, meaning "idler" or "loafer"):

I love all sights of earth and skies,
From flowers that glow to stars that shine;
The comet and the penny show,
All curious things, above, below,
Hold each in turn my wandering eyes:
I claim the Christian Pagan's line,
Humani nihil, — even so, —
And is not human life divine?

Holmes admits his favorite human innovation is "the tube that spies / The orbs celestial in their march" (a telescope). He heads to Boston Common, to join a crowd preparing to observe the transit of Venus. After paying "the scanty fee":

...I go the patient crowd to join
That round the tube my eyes discern,
The last new-comer of the file,
And wait, and wait, a weary while,
And gape, and stretch, and shrug, and smile,
(For each his place must fairly earn,
Hindmost and foremost, in his turn,)
Till hitching onward, pace by pace,
I gain at last the envied place,
And pay the white exiguous coin:
The sun and I are face to face;
He glares at me, I stare at him;
And lo! my straining eye has found
A little spot that, black and round,
Lies near the crimsoned fire-orb's rim...

A black, round spot, — and that is all;
And such a speck our earth would be
If he who looks upon the stars
Through the red atmosphere of Mars
Could see our little creeping ball
Across the disk of crimson crawl
As I our sister planet see.

Holmes then imagines that Venus is "a world like ours," wondering if there are flowers or even cities on its surface, "and life and love... and death." He is "lost in a dream" until:

A mortal's voice dissolves my dream:
My patient neighbor, next in line,
Hints gently there are those who wait.
O guardian of the starry gate,
What coin shall pay this debt of mine?
Too slight thy claim, too small the fee
That bids thee turn the potent key
The Tuscan's hand has placed in thine.
Forgive my own the small affront,
The insult of the proffered dime;
Take it, O friend, since this thy wont,
But still shall faithful memory be
A bankrupt debtor unto thee,
And pay thee with a grateful rhyme.

Guest post: Death of Poe and Holmes

*Today's guest blog is by novelist Matthew Pearl, whose historical fiction mysteries include The Dante Club and The Poe Shadow. His third novel, The Last Dickens, follows the publisher James R. Osgood in pursuit of the last manuscript of Charles Dickens. Matthew has also written a two-part guest blog for The Edgar Allan Poe Calendar. For more information, please visit his web site.

Edgar Allan Poe and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. both died on October 7, one in 1849, the latter in 1894. There are many interesting ways to compare and contrast Holmes and Poe from the points of view of a biographer, a historian, or a reader. I have some thoughts on the two figures from the perspective of a fiction writer who has used both as characters in novels.

I chose Holmes as the central figure in my first novel, The Dante Club. This was not an obvious decision, because the story (as the title suggests) really is an ensemble, and I had my pick of terrific historical personalities from a small group that helped complete the first American translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. For a while, I leaned toward James Russell Lowell, another colorful poet and close friend of Holmes's. Why did I end up hitching my wagon to Holmes? Holmes's strength as a character reflects one of his personal strengths in life: versatility. In writing a novel about poets who must embark on a dangerous investigation, the historical novelist could ask for no better recruit than Holmes: not only a popular poet, but a Harvard Medical School professor, a physician, and himself a novelist — not to mention a savant at conversation, wit and socializing.

Think of the challenge of writing about writers and trying to make it engaging and dramatic. A writer's central occupation involves sitting at a desk and, well, writing, and their personalities are often introverted. Not material that necessarily lends itself to external drama. Being one myself, I know I'd make a pretty boring character! No wonder doctors, lawyers and police officers are such frequent choices as protagonists for books, films and television. But Holmes erases these worries, and grants you wonderful settings for scenes, as well, other than a writer's library. I'm not the only one to think so, either: check out Tess Gerritsen's The Bone Garden for another Holmes adventure.

Poe presents such a different profile to the fiction writer. His persona is so larger than life and enigmatic, many novelists are tempted to make him come off as somewhat demented, similar to some of the characters he created. Fellow novelist Louis Bayard and I actually contributed a joint article about the appeal of using Poe as a character for Poe Studies journal. Unlike Lou, whose novel The Pale Blue Eye caught up with Poe as a young cadet at West Point, in my novel, The Poe Shadow, Poe has just died and the intrigue surrounding his death animates the story. I've told Lou I think he's very brave by using Poe as a character. For me, trying to compete with reader's own ideas of what Poe would be like as a person was too daunting, and a hit-or-miss proposition. Unlike Holmes, whom many of my readers discovered for the first time in my novel, everyone has their "own" Poe. That's part of the way I wanted instead to use Poe's "shadow": to show how unattainable the real Poe is, and how that could send my characters on an adventure of discovery that, in the context of my novel, becomes a matter of life or death.

I also liked the idea of reminding my readers that enjoying and caring about Poe in 1849 took courage and originality, that he was not the icon he is today. Having this distance from Poe, rather than placing him center stage as a character, also allowed my characters to realize, as I did, that, unlike the mythical Poe, at the end of the day Poe was looking for a normal, stable, family and financial life... one that might have looked something like Holmes's, had Poe survived long enough to see his plans through.

Guest post: Mount Auburn Cemetery consecrated

Mount Auburn Cemetery, a National Historic Landmark, was consecrated on September 24, 1831. In his consecration address, Justice Joseph Story (later buried in the cemetery; see image at right) noted that, "Here are the lofty oak, the beech,... the rustling pine, and the drooping willow... All around us there breathes a solemn calm, as if we were in the bosom of a wilderness."

Both literature and horticulture have been important elements at Mount Auburn since its inception. The cemetery's founding drew upon roots from earlier literary proponents of Romanticism expressed in landscape design and it was originally incorporated under the auspices of the then new Massachusetts Horticultural Society in 1829. Mount Auburn cultivated necessary early support from Bostonians interested in both horticulture and literature.

Indeed the Cemetery drew upon literature even for its name. In the early 1800s, this rolling, wooded land that once had been a colonial-era farm became known colloquially as "Sweet Auburn." This name drew from Oliver Goldsmith’s nostalgic poem "The Deserted Village" (1770) which references a fictitious town of Sweet Auburn. Founding trustees of the cemetery named its highest hill Mount Auburn.

A visitor today may stop at monuments commemorating dozens of literary figures as well as explore the horticultural diversity of this nationally-acclaimed arboretum. The cornucopia of individuals with literary affiliations at Mount Auburn is varied: novelists, poets, playwrights, historians, editors, publishers, journalists, legal and classical scholars, technical writers and children's book authors, among others.

Many of those writers use horticultural imagery. For example, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow begins his poem "The Village Blacksmith" with, "Under the spreading chestnut tree / The village smithy stands." In "A Gleam of Sunshine" (1845), he writes:

The shadow of the linden-trees
Lay moving on the grass;
Between them and the moving boughs,
A shadow, thou didst pass.

Nathaniel Parker Willis, buried at Mount Auburn in 1867, wrote "City Lyrics" in 1850. The poem includes the stanza:

Oh woman! Thou secret past knowing!
Like lilachs [sic] that grow by the wall,
You breathe every air that is going,
Yet gather but sweetness from all!

Another Mount Auburn notable is Sarah Sprague Jacobs, who wrote poetry and authored several books for young adults including Nonantum and Natick (1853), which notes:

High upon the straight black cherry
The pigeon swings,—
With its fruit he maketh merry,
Flapping his wings;
As, on the neighboring dead ash limbs,
The stealthy hen-hawk watches him.

Oliver Wendell Holmes makes several references to notable trees in his 1858 The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, including:

What we want is the meaning, the character, the expression of a tree, as a kind and as an individual. There is a mother-idea in each particular kind of tree, which if well marked, is probably embodied in the poetry of every language.

While not all of the many literary individuals that are buried here included horticulture in their writings, they certainly chose to be surrounded by horticulture in memorialization at Mount Auburn Cemetery.

*This guest blog was written by Jim Gorman, a certified arborist who is also fond of the written word. He has been a docent at Mount Auburn for the past three years.

Melvill and Holmes: the last leaves

When Thomas Melvill died on September 16, 1832, he was 86 years old and one of the last remnants of the generation that fought for American independence. A member of the Sons of Liberty in Boston, Melvill participated in the so-called Boston Tea Party. Some of the tea leaves from that event found their way into his boots; he saved them and those leaves are now on display in Boston's Old State House.

Despite living well into the 19th century, Melvill remained a throwback to the colonial/Revolutionary era, in fashion and figure. Boston poet Oliver Wendell Holmes (who later shared champagne with Melvill's grandson, the novelist Herman Melville) noted the anachronism in one of his greatest poems, "The Last Leaf" (1831):

...They say that in his prime,
Ere the pruning-knife of Time
    Cut him down,
Not a better man was found
By the Crier on his round
    Through the town.

...I know it is a sin
For me to sit and grin
    At him here;
But the old three-cornered hat,
And the breeches, and all that,
    Are so queer!

And if I should live to be
The last leaf upon the tree
    In the spring,
Let them smile, as I do now,
At the old forsaken bough
    Where I cling.

Holmes himself nearly lived to the end of the century and was the last of the Fireside Poets living. In a sense, then, Holmes was the last leaf of his own generation, much like Thomas Mevill was the last of his. Holmes noticed the irony shortly before his death, writing in a letter: "I have lasted long enough to serve as an illustration of my own poem."

Holmes: Now here I stand at fifty

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts on August 29, 1809, Oliver Wendell Holmes became a medical doctor and reformer, a poet, a novelist, and one of the most defining members of Boston culture. He was a standard speaker for various events, meetings, anniversaries, and parties for visiting dignitaries in Boston — and, perhaps most importantly, he gave the city its self-centered nickname as the "Hub of the Solar System."

Holmes was known for his humor, his conversation, and his self-confidence. Perhaps, then, it is no surprise that he was the main speaker for his own 50th birthday party on August 29, 1859. He presented a poem which well represented his wit, "At a Meeting of Friends." In it, he both reaffirms and denies that he is approaching old age:

I remember — why yes! God bless me! and was it so long ago?
I fear I'm growing forgetful, as old folks do, you know;
It must have been in 'forty — I would say 'thirty-nine—
We talked this matter over, I and a friend of mine.

He and his friend discuss the question of when old age begins. "Up to the age of thirty we spend our years like change" but somewhere after 30 years old, youth suddenly begins to disappear. They agree that the former youth is old the moment he turns 40... until his 40th birthday:

But one fine August morning I found myself awake:
My birthday: — By Jove, I'm forty! Yes, forty, and no mistake!
Why this is the very milestone, I think I used to hold,
That when a fellow had come to, a fellow would then be old!

In his wizened years, of course, he realizes 40 is not so old after all, and pledges old age does not start until 50. But, now on his 50th birthday, Holmes asks his friends if they think he is old:

Now here I stand at fifty, my jury gathered round;
Sprinkled with dust of silver, but not yet silver-crowned,
Ready to meet your verdict, waiting to hear it told;
Guilty of fifty summers; speak! Is the verdict old?

Tramping over the soil

August 5, 1850 may have been the most exciting day in American literary history. A band of now-recognized literary giants (and a couple less gigantic) climbed Monument Mountain in western Massachusetts. According to the publisher James T. Fields:

I have just got back to my desk from the Berkshire Hills where we have been tramping over the soil with Hawthorne; dining with Holmes... and sitting... with Melville, the author of 'Typee.'

Fields, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Herman Melville were joined by editor Evert Augustus Duyckinck and writer Cornelius Mathews. Once at the top, they read William Cullen Bryant's poem "Monument Mountain," and passed around a single silver mug frequently replenished with champagne (a prescription brought along for the trip by Dr. Holmes).

Perhaps most important to this incident is that it marks the beginning of the friendship of Hawthorne and Melville, who had never previously met. Melville was so taken by the author of the recently-published The Scarlet Letter that he would soon earn the dedication of Moby-Dick, which he was then writing. Some suggest that Melville's infatuation with Hawthorne was more than merely literary admiration and that, perhaps, the younger author was developing a romantic interest. "Where Hawthorne is known,” Melville wrote a few days later, “he seems to be deemed... a sequestered, harmless man, from whom any deep and weighty thing would hardly be anticipated—a man who means no meanings.”

Melville soon wrote a particularly flattering review of Mosses from an Old Manse, then old by about four years. His pseudonymous review, "Hawthorne and his Mosses," was published by Duyckinck in his weekly periodical Literary World. He was the first to notice that Hawthorne's tales were significantly dark: "shrouded in blackness, ten times black." Hawthorne wrote to Duyckinck later that month that he had "a progressive appreciation" of Melville. "No writer ever put the reality before his reader more unflinchingly than he does."

*Image above is courtesy of the Trustees of Reservations.

Holmes: The dogma of inherited guilt

A true Renaissance man, Oliver Wendell Holmes had a long, storied life. He was a poet, a scholar/academic, a doctor,  medical reformer, coiner of new terms, inventor, and more. His first novel, Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny, was originally serialized for the Atlantic Monthly, before appearing in book form in 1861.

It had a long, successful run. After several republications, Holmes offered a new preface for the final edition he oversaw in his lifetime. Dated August 3, 1891, Holmes notes that the book "was not written for popularity, but with a very serious purpose." In fact, he was writing about the traditional belief in original sin."The only use of the story," the preface states, "is to bring the dogma of inherited guilt and its consequences into a clearer point of view."

The novel is one of the most interesting produced in the 19th century. It follows a young schoolmaster named Bernard Langdon to a small New England town, where he is immediately arrested by the strange yet alluring beauty of 17-year old Elsie Venner. Elsie is a unique, somewhat tortured character, who does not fit in with the striated social structures around her. Instead, she spends the night on the local mountain, a place where no others dare to go. She picks exotic flowers, rarely speaks, and saved Langdon's life from a striking cobra. Langdon, who sought Elsie's hiding place in the mountain, was exploring a cave when it happened:

His look was met by the glitter of two diamond eyes, small, sharp, cold, shining out of the darkness, but gliding with a smooth, steady motion towards the light, and himself... The two sparks of light came forward until they grew to circles of flame, and all at once lifted themselves up as if in angry surprise. Then for the first time thrilled in Mr. Bernard's ears the dreadful sound ... — the long, loud, stinging whirr, as the huge, thickbodied reptile shook his many-jointed rattle and adjusted his loops for the fatal stroke... He waited as in a trance, — waited as one that longs to have the blow fall, and all over, as the man who shall be in two pieces in a second waits for the axe to drop. But while he looked straight into the flaming eyes, it seemed to him that they were losing their light and terror, that they were growing tame and dull; the charm was dissolving, the numbness was passing away, he could move once more. He heard a light breathing close to his ear, and, half turning, saw the face of Elsie Venner, looking motionless into the reptile's eyes, which had shrunk and faded under the stronger enchantment of her own.

Elsie Venner is, after all, half snake.

Her lisp, her own poison-like nature, and her isolation from "normal" society bring to mind the nature of evil: can she overpower her own genetics which predisposes her to evil? What will be her fate if she does? I can't recommend this novel enough; if you enjoy Nathaniel Hawthorne's short stories, you simply must read Elsie Venner.

*Further recommended reading: Oliver Wendell Holmes: Physician and Man of Letters, a collection of essays (mostly on Holmes's medical career), edited by Scott Podolsky and Charles S. Bryan. I am thanked on the acknowledgments page. The book includes an essay by Peter Gibian, author of Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Culture of Conversation, probably the most complete book on the career of Holmes ever written.

Death of Harriet Beecher Stowe

Though primarily remembered for one novel, one which was the highest-selling of the century, Harriet Beecher Stowe (pictured at left, 1886) wrote much more than Uncle Tom's Cabin. In 1889, however, she suffered a crippling stroke. It took a major toll on her and she realized she was nearing her death. As she wrote to Oliver Wendell Holmes four years later:

I am passing the last days of my life in the city where I passed my school-girl life [Hartford, Connecticut]. My physical health, since I recovered from my alarming illness, I had four years ago has been excellent... [but] my mental condition might be called nomadic.

By 1894, her children noted their mother's change. "She herself is changed very very much. Should you meet her without knowing who she was, I don't think you would recognize her at all. Her hair is snowywhite, her face very thin... and has the vague wondering expression of infancy."

By the end of June, Stowe was confined to her bed with brain congestion and apparent paralysis. Stowe died on July 1, 1896, surrounded by family at her home at Nook Farm. It was about two weeks after her 85th birthday.

"I love everybody," Stowe once wrote in a letter. Years later, her son and biographer wrote, "She was impelled by love and did what she did, and wrote what she did, under the impulse of love."

*Much of the information from this post comes from Philip McFarland's The Loves of Harriet Beecher Stowe, which closes (quite poetically) with the emphasis on Stowe's love.

Holmes: Angel of Peace

Oliver Wendell Holmes was the go-to guy in the Boston area (and beyond) whenever an occasional poem was needed. He wrote poems specific to events like college reunions, ground-breaking of buildings, dinner parties, birthday parties, annual meetings for various social and academic societies, and more. Known for his good nature, his humor, and his ability to work the crowd (so to speak), Holmes sometimes showed up with a flute to entertain his audiences. Sometimes, his original poems were set to music, usually to well-known tunes.

On June 15, 1869, Holmes attended the "Jubilee" celebration for the end of the Civil War. His poem, "A Hymn of Peace," was sung to the tune of Matthias Keller's "American Hymn":

Angel of Peace, thou hast wandered too long!
Spread thy white wings to the sunshine of love!
Come while our voices are blended in song,—
Fly to our ark like the storm-beaten dove!
Fly to our ark on the wings of the dove,—
Speed o'er the far-sounding billows of song,
Crowned with thine olive-leaf garland of love,—
Angel of Peace, thou hast waited too long!

Joyous we meet, on this altar of thine
Mingling the gifts we have gathered for thee,
Sweet with the odors of myrtle and pine,
Breeze of the prairie and breath of the sea,—
Meadow and mountain and forest and sea!
Sweet is the fragrance of myrtle and pine,
Sweeter the incense we offer to thee,
Brothers once more round this altar of thine!

Angels of Bethlehem, answer the strain!
Hark! a new birth-song is filling the sky!—
Loud as the storm-wind that tumbles the main
Bid the full breath of the organ reply,—
Let the loud tempest of voices reply,—
Roll its long surge like the-earth-shaking main!
Swell the vast song till it mounts to the sky!
Angels of Bethlehem, echo the strain! 

In the lead-up to the Civil War, Holmes stayed mostly on the fence. When his son (the future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.) was injured in battle, the elder Holmes famously went to find him. It was then that Holmes's major pro-Union stance was sparked.

Holmes: our brave old tree

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes once confessed that he was a bit provincial. Indeed, much of his writing centers on Boston, which he called the "Hub of the Solar System." He was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a home where (allegedly) the Battle of Bunker Hill was planned. Just a couple hundred yards from his front door stood a famous tree where, local legend has it, General George Washington took command of the Continental Army in 1775. On April 27, 1861, Holmes sat under that tree and composed a poem on its legend, "Under the Washington Elm, Cambridge":

    Eighty years have passed, and more,
    Since under the brave old tree
Our fathers gathered in arms, and swore
They would follow the sign their banners bore,
    And fight till the land was free.

    Half of their work was done,
    Half is left to do,—
Cambridge, and Concord, and Lexington!
When the battle is fought and won,
    What should be told of you?

    Hark! — 'tis the south-wind moans, —
    Who are the martyrs down?
Ah, the marrow was true in your children's bones
That sprinkled with blood the cursed stones
    Of the murder-haunted town!

    What if the storm-clouds blow?
    What if the green leaves fall?
Better the crashing tempest's throe
Than the army of worms that gnawed below;
    Trample them one and all!

    Then, when the battle is won,
    And the land from traitors free,
Our children shall tell of the strife begun
When Liberty's second April sun
    Was bright on our brave old tree!

In its own way, the poem is somewhat like "Paul Revere's Ride" in that it discusses a Revolutionary War topic in the context of the Civil War ("the south wind moans"). Earlier in the month when Holmes wrote it, his son Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. enlisted in the Union Army.

The tree no longer stands; when it became old it was torn down (and cut into souvenir pieces). There is no significant proof of the connection to Washington. Even so, a marker exists (shaped innocuously like a manhole cover) in the street in the middle of one of the most dangerous intersections in Cambridge (gawkers, beware).

*The image above is courtesy of the Cambridge Historical Society. Its headquarters, the Hooper-Lee-Nichols House, includes a small exhibit on the Washington Elm and its transition to souvenir pieces. More information on the tree is easily found on their web site.

Longfellow visits the dentist, has daughter

On April 8, 1847, the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow experimented with drugs — so to speak. That day, he visited his dentist, Dr. Nathan Cooley Keep, to have a tooth "extraction." Dr. Keep was experimenting with ether as an anesthetic (a term coined by Longfellow's friend and fellow poet, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes). Longfellow recorded the experience in his journal:

Stepped into Dr. Keep's and had a double tooth extracted under the ethereal vapor. On inhaling it, I burst into fits of laughter. Then my brain whirled round, and I seemed to soar like a lark spirally into the air. I was conscious when he took the tooth out and cried out as if from infinitely deep caverns, 'Stop;' but I could not control my muscles or make any resistance, and out came the tooth without pain.

Longfellow was often willing to try novel medical techniques. Throughout his life, he suffered from neuralgia and poor eyesight, both of which he treated with the water therapy and other treatments. He was happy to advocate these medical techniques with others. In fact, just the day before Longfellow's visit to the dentist, on April 7, 1847, his wife Frances Appleton gave birth to the couple's first daughter, whom they named Fanny, after her mother. Dr. Keep administered ether to Mrs. Longfellow — making her the first woman in the United States to give birth under anesthesia. Friends were worried when she agreed to use ether but she reassured them because her husband felt confident about it. He was fairly impressed she went through with it. Longfellow wrote about it to his friend Charles Sumner:

The great experiment has been tried, and with grand success! Fanny has a daughter born this morning, at ten. Both are well. The Ether was heroically inhaled.

We know it was controversial even among family members, judging by allusions made in letters in the few days after the birth. Longfellow tries to laugh off their concern, noting that if his wife had been asked if she would prefer a boy or a girl, "she would have replied, I will take ether." Alas, young Fanny did not survive more than a couple years.

*The image above shows Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Frances Appleton Longfellow with their first two children, Charles (center) and Ernest. After the birth of baby Fanny, they would have three more daughters.

Bicentennial of James Freeman Clarke

James Freeman Clarke was born 200 years ago today on April 4, 1810. After graduating from Harvard Divinity School, he preached his first sermon in Waltham, Massachusetts before moving to Kentucky (then a slave state). There, he became an ardent abolitionist. He soon returned to Massachusetts and contributed to The Dial, The Christian Examiner, The Atlantic Monthly, and other publications. Many of his books were religious, but he also wrote poetry and prose, especially short biographies.

As a Transcendentalist, he maintained a particularly close friendship with Margaret Fuller. While editing the Western Messenger in Kentucky, he commissioned her first literary review; she later became America's first woman to be a full-time literary critic. After her death, Clarke assisted Ralph Waldo Emerson in preparing Fuller's posthumous memoirs, particularly focusing on her early years. After the failure of Brook Farm, Clarke purchased the land in West Roxbury, later donating it to Abraham Lincoln for use as a training ground for soldiers.

On his 70th birthday in 1880, Clarke's friend Oliver Wendell Holmes presented a poem prepared for the occasion, titled "To James Freeman Clarke" (slightly trimmed for length here):

How few still breathe this mortal air
  We called by school-boy names!
You still, whatever robe you wear,
  To me are always James.

That name the kind apostle bore
  Who shames the sullen creeds,
Not trusting less, but loving more,
  And showing faith by deeds.

What blending thoughts our memories share!
  What visions of yours and mine
Of May-days in whose morning air
  The dews were golden wine,

Of vistas bright with opening day,
  Whose all-awakening sun
Showed in life's landscape, far away,
  The summits to be won!

His labors, — will they ever case, —
  With hand and tongue and pen?
Shall wearied Nature ask release
  At threescore years and ten?

Count not his years while earth has need
  Of souls that Heaven inflames
With sacred seal to save, to lead, —
  Long live our dear Saint James!

Dr Holmes and the Teachers of America

The National Education Association met in Boston on February 23, 1893. Often called upon for special functions in his native city, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes was asked to present a special poem for the occasion. The 83-year old poet obliged with an original 26-line poem, "To the Teachers of America."

In the poem, Holmes praised the "noble" task of teachers, comparing them to farmers who toil over their crops. Holmes himself had served as a teacher, one of the many hats he wore before his death just about 20 months after this poem was presented. He first taught at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire from 1838 to 1840. Then, he dedicated himself to medical reform, publishing his famous essay on "The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever" in 1843. He also coined the term "anaesthesia" before taking a position as Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at Harvard Medical School in 1847.

While working at his alma mater, he also served as the Dean for a short time. During that time, he granted admission to Harriet Kezia Hunt, making her the first woman allowed into the Medical School. Because of pressure from the all-male student body, however, Holmes asked her to withdraw her application (a woman would not be admitted until 1945). He later attempted to admit three African-Americans, including Martin Delany (a friend of Frederick Douglass). Again, pressure from others led to their dismissal. Holmes resigned as Chair in 1853 but continued to teach at Harvard Medical school until 1882. He was well-liked, and his final lecture was photographed.

"To the Teachers of America" (1893)

Teachers of teachers! Yours the task,
Noblest that noble minds can ask,
High up Aonia's murmurous mount,
To watch, to guard the sacred fount
That feeds the streams below;
To guide the hurrying flood that fills
A thousand silvery rippling rills
In ever-widening flow.

Rich is the harvest from the fields
That bounteous Nature kindly yields,
But fairer growths enrich the soil
Ploughed deep by thought's unwearied toil
In Learning's broad domain.
And where the leaves, the flowers, the fruits,
Without your watering at the roots,
To fill each branching vein?

Welcome! the Author's firmest friends,
Your voice the surest Godspeed lends.
Of you the growing mind demands
The patient care, the guiding hands,
Through all the mists of morn.
And knowing well the future's need,
Your prescient wisdom sows the seed
To flower in years unborn.

Lowell's birthday verses

Though he has since faded into relative obscurity, James Russell Lowell was a well-known poet, critic, editor, scholar, abolitionist, and diplomat. During his lifetime he had a strong following, particularly in his native New England. On February 22, 1843, he celebrated his 24th birthday by writing a sonnet which read, in part:

Now have I quite passed by that cloudy If
That darkened the wild hope of boyish days,
When first I launched my slender-sided skiff
Upon the wide sea's dim, unsounded ways.

Perhaps Lowell's boyhood was long-gone at age 24, but he had a long way to go in life; he would live almost to the end of the century. His birthday (February 22, 1819) was on the anniversary of the birth of George Washington; it would continue to be celebrated for many years — often with help from other poets. One of his closest friends was Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who celebrated Lowell's birthday in verse in 1859 (Holmes was also the only one of the Fireside Poets to outlive Lowell).

In his poem to Lowell, "At a Birthday Festival," Holmes wrote that "We will not speak of years to-night." Indeed, Lowell was only 40 years old that day. Holmes emphasized that each coming year would bring "floods" of life and song (e.g. poetry). The poem emphasizes friendship, optimism, and joy:

We will not speak of years to-night,—
  For what have years to bring
But larger floods of love and light,
  And sweeter songs to sing?

We will not drown in wordy praise
  The kindly thoughts that rise;
If Friendship own one tender phrase,
  He reads it in our eyes.

We need not waste our school-boy art
  To gild this notch of Time;—
Forgive me if my wayward heart
  Has throbbed in artless rhyme.

Enough for him the silent grasp
  That knits us hand in hand,
And he the bracelet's radiant clasp
  That locks our circling band.

Strength to his hours of many toil!
  Peace to his starlit dreams!
Who loves alike the furrowed soil,
  The music-haunted streams!

Sweet smiles to keep forever bright
  The sunshine on his lips,
And faith that sees the ring of light
  Round nature's last eclipse!