The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. Oliver Wendell Holmes

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СКАЧАТЬ Such dimples as would hold your fist—

      When publishers no longer steal,

       And pay for what they stole before—

       When the first locomotive’s wheel

       Rolls through the Hoosac tunnel’s bore;—

      Till then let Cumming a blaze away, And Miller’s saints blow up the globe; But when you see that blessed day, Then order your ascension robe!

      The company seemed to like the verses, and I promised them to read others occasionally, if they had a mind to hear them. Of course they would not expect it every morning. Neither must the reader suppose that all these things I have reported were said at any one breakfast-time. I have not taken the trouble to date them, as Raspail, père, used to date every proof he sent to the printer; but they were scattered over several breakfasts; and I have said a good many more things since, which I shall very possibly print some time or other, if I am urged to do it by judicious friends.

      I finished off with reading some verses of my friend the Professor, of whom you may perhaps hear more by and by. The Professor read them, he told me, at a farewell meeting, where the youngest of our great Historians met a few of his many friends at their invitation.

      Yes, we knew we must lose him—though friendship may claim

       To blend her green leaves with the laurels of fame;

       Though fondly, at parting, we call him our own,

       ’Tis the whisper of love when the bugle has blown.

      As the rider that rests with the spur on his heel—

       As the guardsman that sleeps in his corselet of steel—

       As the archer that stands with his shaft on the string,

       He stoops from his toil to the garland we bring.

      What pictures yet slumber unborn in his loom

       Till their warriors shall breathe and their beauties shall bloom,

       While the tapestry lengthens the life-glowing dyes

       That caught from our sunsets the stain of their skies!

      In the alcoves of death, in the charnels of time,

       Where flit the gaunt spectres of passion and crime,

       There are triumphs untold, there are martyrs unsung,

       There are heroes yet silent to speak with his tongue!

      Let us hear the proud story which time has bequeathed

       From lips that are warm with the freedom they breathed!

       Let him summon its tyrants, and tell us their doom,

       Though he sweep the black past like Van Tromp with his broom!

      * * * * *

      The dream flashes by, for the west-winds awake

       On pampas, on prairie, o’er mountain and lake,

       To bathe the swift bark, like a sea-girdled shrine,

       With incense they stole from the rose and the pine.

      So fill a bright cup with the sunlight that gushed

       When the dead summer’s jewels were trampled and crushed:

       The true Knight of Learning—the world holds him dear—

       Love bless him, Joy crown him, God speed his career!

CHAPTER II

       Table of Contents

      I really believe some people save their bright thoughts, as being too precious for conversation. What do you think an admiring friend said the other day to one that was talking good things—good enough to print? “Why,” said he, “you are wasting mechantable literature, a cash article, at the rate, as nearly as I can tell, of fifty dollars an hour.” The talker took him to the window and asked him to look out and tell what he saw.

      “Nothing but a very dusty street,” he said, “and a man driving a sprinkling-machine through it.”

      “Why don’t you tell the man he is wasting that water? What would be the state of the highways of life, if we did not drive our thought-sprinklers through them with the valves open, sometimes?

      “Besides, there is another thing about this talking, which you forget. It shapes our thoughts for us;—the waves of conversation roll them as the surf rolls the pebbles on the shore. Let me modify the image a little. I rough out my thoughts in talk as an artist models in clay. Spoken language is so plastic—you can pat and coax, and spread and shave, and rub out, and fill up, and stick on so easily when you work that soft material, that there is nothing like it for modelling. Out of it come the shapes which you turn into marble or bronze in your immortal books, if you happen to write such. Or, to use another illustration, writing or printing is like shooting with a rifle; you may hit your reader’s mind, or miss it;—but talking is like playing at a mark with the pipe of an engine; if it is within reach, and you have time enough, you can’t help hitting it.”

      The company agreed that this last illustration was of superior excellence, or, in the phrase used by them, “Fust-rate.” I acknowledged the compliment, but gently rebuked the expression. “Fust-rate,” “prime,” “a prime article,” “a superior piece of goods,” “a handsome garment,” “a gent in a flowered vest,”—all such expressions are final. They blast the lineage of him or her who utters them, for generations up and down. There is one other phrase which will soon come to be decisive of a man’s social status, if it is not already: “That tells the whole story.” It is an expression which vulgar and conceited people particularly affect, and which well-meaning ones, who know better, catch from them. It is intended to stop all debate, like the previous question in the General Court. Only it doesn’t; simply because “that” does not usually tell the whole, nor one half of the whole story.

      —It is an odd idea, that almost all our people have had a professional education. To become a doctor a man must study some three years and hear a thousand lectures, more or less. Just how much study it takes to make a lawyer I cannot say, but probably not more than this. Now most decent people hear one hundred lectures or sermons (discourses) on theology every year—and this, twenty, thirty, fifty years together. They read a great many religious books besides. The clergy, however, rarely hear any sermons except what they preach themselves. A dull preacher might be conceived, therefore, to lapse into a state of quasi heathenism, simply for want of religious instruction. And on the other hand, an attentive and intelligent hearer, listening to a succession of wise teachers, might become actually better educated in theology than any one of them. We are all theological students, and more of us qualified as doctors of divinity than have received degrees at any of the universities.

      It is not strange, therefore, that very good people should often find it difficult, if not impossible, to keep their attention fixed upon a sermon treating feebly a subject which they have thought vigorously about for years, and heard able men discuss scores СКАЧАТЬ