The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. Oliver Wendell Holmes

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СКАЧАТЬ superior mind that held a different one. How many of our most cherished beliefs are like those drinking-glasses of the ancient pattern, that serve us well so long as we keep them in our hand, but spill all if we attempt to set them down! I have sometimes compared conversation to the Italian game of mora, in which one player lifts his hand with so many fingers extended, and the other gives the number if he can. I show my thought, another his; if they agree, well; if they differ, we find the largest common factor, if we can, but at any rate avoid disputing about remainders and fractions, which is to real talk what tuning an instrument is to playing on it.

      —What if, instead of talking this morning, I should read you a copy of verses, with critical remarks by the author? Any of the company can retire that like.

      ALBUM VERSES.

      When Eve had led her lord away,

       And Cain had killed his brother,

       The stars and flowers, the poets say,

       Agreed with one another

      To cheat the cunning tempter’s art,

       And teach the race its duty,

       By keeping on its wicked heart

       Their eyes of light and beauty.

      A million sleepless lids, they say,

       Will be at least a warning;

       And so the flowers would watch by day,

       The stars from eve to morning.

      On hill and prairie, field and lawn,

       Their dewy eyes upturning,

       The flowers still watch from reddening dawn

       Till western skies are burning.

      Alas! each hour of daylight tells

       A tale of shame so crushing,

       That some turn white as sea-bleached shells,

       And some are always blushing.

      But when the patient stars look down

       On all their light discovers,

       The traitor’s smile, the murderer’s frown,

       The lips of lying lovers,

      They try to shut their saddening eyes,

       And in the vain endeavour

       We see them twinkling in the skies,

       And so they wink forever.

      What do you think of these verses my friends?—Is that piece an impromptu? said my landlady’s daughter. (Aet. 19 +. Tender-eyed blonde. Long ringlets. Cameo pin. Gold pencil-case on a chain. Locket. Bracelet. Album. Autograph book. Accordeon. Reads Byron, Tupper, and Sylvanus Cobb, junior, while her mother makes the puddings. Says “Yes?” when you tell her anything.)—Oui et non, ma petite—Yes and no, my child. Five of the seven verses were written off-hand; the other two took a week—that is, were hanging round the desk in a ragged, forlorn, unrhymed condition as long as that. All poets will tell you just such stories. C’est le dernier pas qui coute. Don’t you know how hard it is for some people to get out of a room after their visit is really over? They want to be off, and you want to have them off, but they don’t know how to manage it. One would think they had been built in your parlour or study, and were waiting to be launched. I have contrived a sort of ceremonial inclined plane for such visitors, which being lubricated with certain smooth phrases, I back them down, metaphorically speaking, stern-foremost, into their “native element,” the great ocean of out-doors. Well, now, there are poems as hard to get rid of as these rural visitors. They come in glibly, use up all the serviceable rhymes, day, ray, beauty, duty, skies, eyes, other, brother, mountain, fountain, and the like; and so they go on until you think it is time for the wind-up, and the wind-up won’t come on any terms. So they lie about until you get sick of the sight of them, and end by thrusting some cold scrap of a final couplet upon them, and turning them out of doors. I suspect a good many “impromptus” could tell just such a story as the above.—Here turning to our landlady, I used an illustration which pleased the company much at the time, and has since been highly commanded. “Madam,” I said, “you can pour three gills and three quarters of honey from that pint jug, if it is full, in less than one minute; but, Madam, you could not empty that last quarter of a gill, though you were turned into a marble Hebe, and held the vessel upside down for a thousand years.”

      One gets tired to death of the old, old rhymes, such as you see in that copy of verses—which I don’t mean to abuse, or to praise either. I always feel as if I were a cobbler, putting new top-leathers to an old pair of boot-soles and bodies, when I am fitting sentiments to these venerable jingles.

      … youth

      . … . morning

      . … . truth

      . … . warning

      Nine tenths of the “Juvenile Poems” written spring out of the above musical and suggestive coincidences.

      “Yes?” said our landlady’s daughter.

      I did not address the following remark to her, and I trust, from her limited range of reading, she will never see it; I said it softly to my next neighbour.

      When a young female wears a flat circular side—curl, gummed on each temple—when she walks with a male, not arm in arm, but his arm against the back of hers—and when she says “Yes?” with the note of interrogation, you are generally safe in asking her what wages she gets, and who the “feller” was you saw her with.

      “What were you whispering?” said the daughter of the house, moistening her lips, as she spoke, in a very engaging manner.

      “I was only laying down a principle of social diagnosis.”

      “Yes?”

      —It is curious to see how the same wants and tastes find the same implements and modes of expression in all times and places. The young ladies of Otaheite, as you may see in Cook’s Voyages, had a sort of crinoline arrangement fully equal in radius to the largest spread of our own lady-baskets. When I fling a Bay-State shawl over my shoulders, I am only taking a lesson from the climate that the Indian had learned before me. A blanket-shawl we call it, and not a plaid; and we wear it like the aborigines, and not like the Highlanders.

      —We are the Romans of the modern world—the great assimilating people. Conflicts and conquests are of course necessary accidents with us, as with our prototypes. And so we come to their style of weapon. Our army sword is the short, stiff, pointed gladius of the Romans; and the American bowie-knife is the same tool, modified to meet the daily wants of civil society. I announce at this table an axiom not to be found in Montesquieu or the journals of Congress:—

      The race that shortens its weapons lengthens its boundaries.

      Corollary. It was the Polish lance that СКАЧАТЬ