Part 12

Mr. Appleton had no intention of palming off doubtful paintings on his friends or the public; but in regard to "Il Coconotte" he was confident of its true value, and rightly so. The painting, so called from a head in the group covered very thinly with hair, was the pride of his collection and one of the best of Bassano's works. The other painting looked to me like a Palma, and I have always supposed that it was one.

After this Mr. Appleton branched off on to an interesting anecdote concerning an Italian cicerone, and finally left his audience as well entertained as if they had been to the theatre.

In 1871 he published a volume of poems for private circulation, in which there were a number of excellent pieces, and especially two which deserve a place in any choice collection of American poetry. One is called the "Whip of the Sky" and relates to a subject which Mr. Appleton often dwelt upon,--the unnecessary haste and restlessness of American life, and is given here for the wider circulation which it amply deserves:

THE WHIP OF THE SKY.

Weary with travel, charmed with home, The youth salutes New England's air; Nor notes, within the azure dome, A vigilant, menacing figure there, Whose thonged hand swings A whip which sings: "Step, step, step," sings the whip of the sky: "Hurry up, move along, you can if you try!"

Remembering Como's languid side, Where, pulsing from the citron deep, The nightingale's aerial tide Floats through the day, repose and sleep, Reclined in groves,-- A voice reproves. "Step, step, step," cracks the whip of the sky: "Hurry up, jump along, rest when you die!"

Slave of electric will, which strips From him the bliss of easeful hours; And bids, as from a tyrant's lips, Rest, quiet, fly, as useless flowers, He wings his heart To make him smart. "Step, step, step," snaps the whip of the sky: "Hurry up, race along, rest when you die!"

He maddens in the breathless race, Nor misses station, power or pelf; And only loses in the chase The hunted lord of all,--himself. His gain is loss, His treasure dross. "Step, step, step," mocks the whip of the sky, "Hurry up, limp along, rest when you die!"

With care he burthens all his soul; Heaped ingots curve his willing back; Submissive to that fierce control, He needs at last the sky-whip's crack, Till at the grave, No more a slave,-- "Rest, rest, rest," sighs the whip of the sky: "Hurry not, haste no more, rest when you die!"

Celia Thaxter, the finest of poetic readers, read this to me one September morning at the Isles of Shoals, and at the conclusion she remarked: "If that could only be read every year in our public schools it might do the American people some good."

As compared with this, the sonnet on Pompeii has the effect of a strong complementary color,--for instance, like orange against dark blue. It echoes the pathetic reverie that we feel on beholding the monuments of the mighty past. It contains not the pathos of yesterday, nor of a hundred years ago, but as Emerson says, "of the time out of mind."

POMPEII.

The silence there was what most haunted me. Long, speechless streets, whose stepping-stones invite Feet which shall never come; to left and right Gay colonnades and courts,--beyond, the glee, Heartless, of that forgetful Pagan sea. O'er roofless homes and waiting streets, the light Lies with a pathos sorrowfuler than night. Fancy forbids this doom of Life with Death Wedded; and with a wand restores the Life. The jostling throngs swarm, animate, beneath The open shops, and all the tropic strife Of voices, Roman, Greek, Barbarian, mix. The wreath Indolent hangs on far Vesuvius's crest; And beyond the glowing town, and guiltless sea, sweet rest.

Tom Appleton was greatly interested in the performances of the spiritualists, trance mediums, and other persons pretending to supernatural powers. How far he believed in this occult science can now only be conjectured, but he was not a man to be easily played upon. He thought at least that there was more in it than was dreamed of by philosophers. When the Longfellow party was at Florence in April, 1869, Prince George of Hanover, recently driven from his kingdom by Bismarck, called to see the poet, and finding that he had gone out, was entertained by Mr. Appleton with some remarkable stories of hypnotic and spiritualistic performances. The prince, who was a most amiable looking young German, was evidently very much interested.

Deafness came upon Mr. Appleton in the last years of his life, though not so as to prevent his enjoying the society of those who had clear voices and who spoke distinctly. When one of his friends suggested that the trouble might be wax in his ears, he shook his head sadly and said: "Oh no: not wax, but wane."

He was finally taken ill while all alone in New York City, and the Longfellows were telegraphed for. When one of his relatives came to him he spoke of his malady in a stoically humorous manner; and his last words were when he was dying: "How interesting this all is!" A man never left this world with a more perfect faith in immortality!

DOCTOR HOLMES

I have often been inside the old Holmes house in Cambridge. It served as a boarding-house during our college days, but afterwards Professor James B. Thayer rented it for a term of years, until it was finally swept away like chaff by President Eliot's broom of reform. The popular notion that it was a quaint-looking old mansion of the eighteenth century, which seems to have been encouraged by Doctor Holmes himself, is a misconception. It was a two-and-a-half story, low-studied house, such as were built at the beginning of the last century, with a roof at an angle of forty-five degrees and a two-story ell on the right side of the front door. Doctor Holmes says:

"Gambrel, gambrel; let me beg You will look at a horse's hinder leg. First great angle above the hoof,-- That is the gambrel; hence gambrel roof."

Now, any one who looks carefully at the picture of the old Holmes house, in Morse's biography of the Doctor, will perceive that this was not the style of roof which the house had,--at least, in its later years.

Doctor Holmes graduated at Harvard in 1829 at the age of twenty. His class has been a celebrated one in Boston, and there were certainly some good men in it,--especially Benjamin Pierce and James Freeman Clarke,-- but I think it was Doctor Holmes's class-poems that gave it its chief celebrity, which, after all, means that it was a good deal talked about. In one of these he said:

"No wonder the tutor can't sleep in his bed With two twenty-niners over his head."

He was said to have composed twenty-nine poems for his class, and then declared that he had reached the proper limit,--that it would not be prudent to go beyond the magical number. It was not a dissipated class, but one with a good deal of life in it, much given to late hours and jokes, practical and unpractical. The Doctor himself is mysteriously silent concerning his college course, and so are his biographers; but we may surmise that it was not very different in general tenor from Lowell's; although his Yankee shrewdness would seem to have preserved him from serious catastrophes.

In the "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table" Doctor Holmes mentions an early acquaintance with Margaret Fuller, which is not referred to by Mr. Morse, but must have arisen either at Mrs. Prentiss's Boston school or at the Cambridgeport school which young Oliver afterwards attended. Even at that age he recognized Margaret's intellectual gifts, and he was not a little emulous of her; for he fancied that he "had also drawn a small prize in the great literary lottery." He looked into one of her compositions, which was lying on the teacher's desk, and felt quite crest-fallen by discovering a word in it which he did not know the meaning of. This word was trite; and it may he suspected that a good many use it without being aware of its proper significance.

Margaret Fuller rose to celebrity with the spontaneity of true genius, and left her name high upon the natural bridge of American literature. Holmes did not come before the public until years after her death; and then perhaps it might not have happened but for James Russell Lowell and the Atlantic. He was a bright man, and possessed a peculiar mental quality of his own; but as we think of him now we can hardly call him a genius. He would evidently have liked in his youth to have made a profession of literature; but his verse lacked the charm and universality which made Longfellow popular so readily; nor did he possess the daring spirit of innovation with which Emerson startled and convinced his contemporaries. He first tried the law, and as that did not suit his taste he fell into medicine, but evidently without any natural bent or inclination for the profession. He was fond of the university, and when, after a temporary professorship at Dartmouth he was appointed lecturer on anatomy at the Harvard Medical-School, his friends realized that he had found his right position.

Lecturing on anatomy is a routine, but by no means a sinecure. It requires a clearness and accuracy of statement which might be compared to the work of an optician. Some idea of it can be derived from the fact that there may be eight or ten points to a human bone, each of which has a name of eight or ten syllables,--only to be acquired by the hardest study. Doctor Holmes's lecturing manner was incisive and sometimes pungent, like his conversation, but always good-humored and well calculated to make an impression even on the most lymphatic temperaments. While it may be said that others might have done it as well, it is doubtful if he could have been excelled in his own specialty. His ready fund of wit often served to revive the drooping spirits of his audience, and many of his jests have become a kind of legendary lore at the Medical-School. Most of them, however, were of a too anatomical character to be reproduced in print.

So the years rolled over Doctor Holmes's head; living quietly, working steadily, and accumulating a store of proverbial wisdom by the way. In June, 1840, he married Amelia Lee Jackson, of Boston, an alliance which brought him into relationship with half the families on Beacon Street, and which may have exercised a determining influence on the future course of his life. Doctor Holmes was always liberally inclined, and ready to welcome such social and political improvements as time might bring; but he never joined any of the liberal or reformatory movements of his time. Certain old friends of Emerson affirmed, when Holmes published his biography of the Concord sage in 1885, that no one else was so much given to jesting as Emerson in his younger days. This may have been true; but it is also undeniable that Emerson himself had changed much during that time, and that the socialistic Emerson of 1840 was largely a different person from the author of "Society and Solitude." Holmes had already composed one of the fairest tributes to Emerson's intellectual quality that has yet been written.

"He seems a winged Franklin, heavenly wise, Born to unlock the secrets of the skies."