before him. Certainly, he has a pensive air. Is he in doubt, or in debt? Is he, if the question be allowable, in love? Does he strive to be melancholy and gentlemanlike! Or, is he merely overcome by the heat? But I bid him farewell, for the present. The door of one of the houses, an aristocratic edifice, with curtains of purple and gold wav ing from the windows, is now opened, and down the steps come two ladies, swinging their parasols, and lightly arrayed for a summer ramble. Both are young, both are pretty; but methinks the left hand lass is the fairer of the twain; and though she be so serious at this moment, I could swear that there is a treasure of gentle fun within her. They stand talking a little while upon the steps, and finally proceed up the street. Meantime, as their faces are now turned from me, I may look elsewhere.

Upon that wharf, and down the corresponding street, is a busy contrast to the quiet scene which I have just noticed. Business evidently has its centre there, and many a man is wasting the summer afternoon in labor and anxiety, in losing riches, or in gaining them, when he would be wiser to flee away to some pleasant country village, or shaded lake in the forest, or wild and cool sea-beach. I see vessels unlading at the wharf, and precious merchandise strown upon the ground, abundantly as at the bottom of the sea, that market whence no goods return, and where there is no captain nor supercargo to render an account of sales. Here, the clerks are diligent with their paper and pencils, and sailors ply the block and tackle that hang over the hold, accompanying their toil with cries, long drawn and roughly melodious, till the bales and puncheons ascend to upper air. At a little distance, a group of gentlemen are assembled round the door of a warehouse. Grave seniors be they, and I would wager-if it were safe, in these times, to be responsible for any one-that the least eminent among them, might vie with old Vincentio, that incomparable trafficker of Pisa. I can even select the wealthiest of the company. It is the elderly personage, in somewhat rusty black, with powdered hair, the superfluous whiteness of which is visible upon the cape of his cont. His twenty ships are wafted on some of their many courses by every breeze that blows, and his name-I will venture to say, though I know it not-is a familiar sound among the far separated merchants of Europe and the Indies.

But I bestow too much of my attention in this quarter. On looking again to the long and shady walk, I perceive that the two fair girls have encountered the young man. After a sort of shyness in the recognition, he turns back with them. Moreover, he has sanctioned my taste in regard to his companions by placing himself on the inner side of the pavement, nearest the Venus to whom I-enacting, on a steepletop, the part of Paris on the top of Ida-adjudged the golden apple.

In two streets, converging at right angles towards my watchtower, I distinguish three different processions. One is a proud array of voluntary soldiers in bright uniform, resembling from the height whence I look down, the painted veterans that garrison the windows of a toyshop. And yet, it stirs my heart; their regular advance, their nodding plumes, the sunflash on their bayonets and musket-barrels, the roll of their drums ascending past me, and the fife ever and anon piercing through-these things have wakened a warlike fire, peaceful though I be. Close to their rear marches a battalion of schoolboys, ranged in crooked and irregular platoons, shouldering sticks, thumping a harsh and unripe clatter from an instrument of tin, and ridiculously aping the intricate

town.

manoeuvres of the foremost band. Nevertheless, as slight differences are scarcely perceptible from a church spire, one might be tempted to ask, Which are the boys?'-or rather, Which the men? But, leaving these, let us turn to the third procession, which, though sadder in outward show, may excite identical reflections in the thoughtful mind. It is a funeral. A hearse, drawn by a black and bony steed, and covered by a dusty pall; two or three coaches rumbling over the stones, their drivers half asleep; & dozen couple of careless mourners in their every-day attire; such was not the fashion of our fathers, when they carried a friend to his grave. There is now no doleful clang of the bell, to proclaim sorrow to the Was the King of Terrors more awful in those days than in our own, that wisdom and philosophy have been able to produce this change? Not so. Here is a proof that he retains his proper majesty. The military men, and the military boys, are wheeling round the corner, and meet the funeral full in the face. Immediately, the drum is silent, all but the tap that regulates each simultaneous footfall. The soldiers yield the path to the dusty hearse and unpretending train, and the children quit their ranks, and cluster on the sidewalks, with timorous and instinctive curr osity. The mourners enter the church-yard at the base of the steeple, and pause by an open grave among the burial-stones; the lightning glimmers on them as they lower down the coffin, and the thunder rattles heavily while they throw the earth upon its lid. Verily, the shower is near, and I tremble for the young man and the girls, who have now disappeared from the long and shady street.

How various are the situations of the people covered by the roofs beneath me, and how diversified are the events at this moment befalling them! The newborn, the aged, the dying, the strong in life, and the recent dead, are in the chambers of these many mansions. The full of hope, the happy, the miserable, and the desperate, dwell together within the circle of my glance. In some of the houses over which my eyes roam so coldly, guilt is entering into hearts that are still tenanted by a debased and trodden virtue-guilt is on the very edge of commission, and the impending deed might be averted; guilt is done, and the criminal wonders if it be irrevocable. There are broad thoughts struggling in my mind, and, were I able to give them distinctness, they would make their way in eloquence. Lo! the rain-drops are descending.

The clouds, within a little time, have gathered over all the sky, hanging heavily, as if about to drop in one unbroken mass upon the earth. At intervals, the lightning flashes from their brooding hearts, quivers, disappears, and then comes the thunder, travelling slowly after its twin-born flame. A strong wind has sprung up, howls through the darkened streets, and raises the dust in dense bodies, to rebel against the approaching storm. The disbanded soldiers fly, the funeral has already vanished like its dead, and all people hurry homeward-all that have a home; while a few lounge by the corners, or trudge on desperately, at their leisure. In a narrow lane, which communicates with the shady street, I discern the rich old merchant, putting himself to the top of his speed, lest the rain should convert his hair-powder to a paste. Unhappy gentleman! By the slow vehemence, and painful moderation wherewith he journeys, it is but too evident that Podagra has left its thrilling tenderness in his great toe. But yonder, at a far more rapid pace, come three other of my acquaintance, the two pretty girls and the young man, unseasonably interrupted in their walk. Their footsteps are supported by the risen dust, the wind lends them its velocity, they fly like three seabirds driven landward

by the tempestuous breeze. The ladies would not thus rival Atalanta, if they but knew that any one were at leisure to observe them. Ah! as they hasten onward, laughing in the angry face of nature, a sudden catastrophe has chanced. At the corner where the narrow lane enters into the street, they come plump against the old merchant, whose tortoise motion has just brought him to that point. He likes not the sweet encounter; the darkness of the whole air gathers speedily upon his visage, and there is a pause on both sides. Finally, he thrusts aside the youth with little courtesy; seizes an arm of each of the two girls, and plods onward, like a magician with a prize of captive fairies. All this is easy to be understood. How disconsolate the poor lover stands! regardless of the rain that threatens an exceeding damage to his well fashioned habiliments, till he catches a backward glance of mirth from a bright eye, and turns away with whatever comfort it conveys.

The old man and his daughters are safely housed, and now the storm lets loose its fury. In every dwelling I perceive the faces of the chambermaids as they shut down the windows, excluding the impetu us shower, and shrinking away from the quick tiery glare. The large drops descend with force upon the slated roofs, and rise again in smoke. There is a rush and roar, as of a river through the air, and muddy streams bubble majestically along the pavement, whirl their dusky foam into the kennel, and disappear beneath iron grates. Thus did Arethusa sink. I love not my station here aloft, in the midst of the tumult which I am powerless to direct or quell, with the blue lightning wrinkling on my brow, and the thunder muttering its first awful syllables in my ear. I will descend. Yet let me give another glance to the sea, where the foam breaks out in long white lines upon a broad expanse of blackness, or boils up in far distant points, like snowy mountain-tops in the eddies of a flood; and let me look once more at the green plain, and little hills of the country, over which the giant of the storm is riding in robes of mist, and at the town, whose obscured and desolate streets might beseem a city of the dead; and turning a single moment to the sky, now gloomy as an author's prospects, I prepare to resume my station on lower earth. But stay! A little speck of azure has widened in the western heavens; the sunbeams find a passage, and go rejoicing through the tempest; and on yonder darkest cloud, born, like hallowed hopes, of the glory of another world, and the trouble and tears of this, brightens forth the Rainbow!

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES,

WHOSE polished verses and playful satiric wit are the delight of his contemporaries, as they will be cherished bequests of our own day to posterity, is a son of the author of the Annals, the Doctor of Divinity at Cambridge. At that learned town of Massachusetts, he was born August 29, 1809. He was educated at the Phillips Academy at Exeter, and graduated at Harvard in 1829. He then gave a year to the law, during which time he was entertaining the good people of Cambridge with various anonymous effusions of a waggish poetical character, in the Collegian,* a periodical published by a number of undergraduates of Harvard University in 1830, in which John O. Sargent wrote the versatile papers in prose and verse, signed Charles Sherry; and the

*The Collegian. In six numbers. Cambridge: Hilliard & Brown.

accomplished William H. Simmons, a brilliant rhetorician, and one of the purest readers we have ever listened to, was "Lockfast," translating Schiller, enthusiastic on Ossian, and snapping up college jokes and trifles; and Robert Habersham, under the guise of "Mr. Airy," and Theodore Wm. Snow as "Geoffrey la Touche," brought their quotas to the literary pic-nic. Holmes struck out a new vein among them, just as Praed had done in the Etonian and Knight's Quarterly Magazine. Of the twenty-five pieces published by him, some half dozen have been collected in his "Poems." The " Meeting of the Dryads," on occasion of a Presidential thinning of the college trees; "The Spectre Pig" and "Evening by a Tailor," are among them.

66

As a lawyer, Holmes, like most of the American literati who have generally begun with that profession, was evidently falling under the poets' censure, penning a stanza when he should engross;" when he turned his attention to medicine, and forswore for a time the Muses. He was, however, guilty of some very clever anonymous contributions to a volume, the Harbinger, mainly written by himself, Park Benjamin, and Epes Sargent, and which was published for the benefit of a charitable institution.* In 1833, the year of this production, he visited Europe, residing chiefly at Paris, in the prosecution of his medical studies.

After nearly three years' residence abroad, he returned to take his medical degree at Cambridge, in 1836, when he delivered Poetry, a Metrical Essay, before the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa; which he published the same year, in the first acknowledged volume of his Poems.t In "Poetry," he describes four stages of the art, the Pastoral, Martial, Epic, and Dramatic; successfully illustrating the two former by his lines on "The Cambridge Churchyard" and "Old Ironsides," which last has become a national lyric, having first been printed in the Boston Daily Advertiser when the frigate Constitution lay at the Navy Yard in Charlestown, and the department had resolved upon breaking her up—a fate from which she was preserved by the verses, which ran through the newspapers with universal applause, and were circulated in the city of Washington in handbills.

In this poem he introduced a descriptive passage on Spring, at once literal and poetical, in a vein which he has since followed out with brilliant effect. The volume also contained "The Last Leaf," and "My Aunt," which established Holmes's reputation for humorous quaintness. In his preface he offers a vindication of the extravagant in literature; but it is only a dull or unthinking mind which would quarrel with such extravagances as his humor sometimes takes on, or deny the force of his explanation that, “as material objects in different lights repeat themselves in shadows variously elongated, contracted, or exaggerated, so our solid and sober thoughts caricature themselves in fantastic shapes, inseparable from their originals, and having a unity in their

The Harbinger; a May Gift, dedicated to the ladies who have so kindly aided the New England Institution for the Education of the Blind. Boston: Carter, Hendee & Co., 1838. 12mo. pp. 96.

+ Poems by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Boston: Otis, Broaders & Co., 1836. 12mo. pp. 163.

Benjamin's American Monthly Magazine, January, 1837.

extravagance, which proves them to have retained their proportions in certain respects, however differing in outline from their prototypes."

In 1838 Dr. Holmes became Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at Dartmouth. On his marriage in 1840, he established himself in Boston, where he acquired the position of a fashionable and successful practitioner of medicine. In 1847 he was made Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology, in the Medical School at Harvard.

His chief professional publications are his Boylston Prize Dissertations for 1836-7, on Indigenous Intermittent Ferer in New England, Nature and Treatment of Neuralgia, and Utility and Importance of Direct Exploration in Medical Practice; Lectures on Homeopathy and other Delusions in 1841; Report on Medical Literature to the American Association, 1848; and occasional articles in the journals, of which the most important is "the Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever," in the New England Journal of Medicine and Surgery, April, 1843.

Dr. Holmes is celebrated for his vers d'occasion, cleverly introduced with impromptu graces (of course, entirely unpremeditated) at medical feasts and Phi Beta Kappa Festivals, and other social gatherings, which are pretty sure to have some fanciful descriptions of nature, and laugh loudly at the quackeries, both the properly professional, and the literary and social of the day. His Terpsichore was pronounced on one of these opportunities, in 1843. His Stethoscope Song was one of these effusions; his Modest Request at Everett's inauguration at Harvard another, and many more will be remembered.

Urania, a Rhymed Lesson, with some shrewd hits at the absurd, and suggestions of the practical in the social economy of the day, was delivered before the Boston Mercantile Library Association, in 1846. Astrea is a Phi Beta Kappa poem, pronounced by the author at Yale College in 1850.

In 1852 Dr. Holmes delivered a course of lectures on the English Poets of the Nineteenth Century, a portion of which he subsequently repeated in New York. The style was precise and animated; the illustrations, sharp and cleanly cut. In the criticism, there was a leaning rather to the bold and dashing bravura of Scott and Byron, than the calm philosophical mood of Wordsworth. Where there was any game on the wing, when the "servile herd" of imitators and the poetasters came in view, they were dropped at once by a felicitous shot. Each lecture closed with a copy of verses humorous or sentimental, growing out of the prevalent mood of the hour's discussion.

In look and manners, Dr. Holmes is the vivacious sparkling personage his poems would indicate. His smile is easily invoked; he is fond of pun and inevitable at repartee, and his conversation runs on copiously, supplied with choice discriminating words laden with the best stores of picked fact from the whole range of science and society; and of ingenious reflection in a certain vein of optimism. As a medical lecturer, his style must be admirable, at once clear and subtle, popular and refined.

In the winter season he resides at Boston; latterly amusing himself with the profitable varie

Oliver Wendell Homes

ty of visiting the towns and cities of the Northern and Middle States in the delivery of lectures, of which he has a good working stock on hand. The anatomy of the popular lecture he understands perfectly-how large a proportion of wit he may safely associate with the least quantity of dulness; and thus he carries pleasure and refinement from the charmed salons of Beacon street to towns and villages in the back districts, suddenly opened to light and civilization by the straight cut of the railroad. In summer, or rather in spring, summer, and autumn, the Doctor is at his home on the Housatonic, at Pittsfield, with acres around him, inherited from his maternal ancestors, the Wendells, in whom the whole township was once vested. In 1735, the Hon. Jacob Wendell bought the township of Pontoosue, and his grandson now resides on the remnant of twentyfour thousand ancestral acres.*

In remembrance of one of the ancient Indian deeds he calls his residence Canoe Place. He has described the river scenery of the vicinity in a poem which has been lately printed.t

The muse of Holmes is a foe to humbug. There is among his poems "A professional ballad-the Stethoscope Song," descriptive of the practices of a young physician from Paris, who went about knocking the wind out of old ladies, and terrifying young ones, mistaking, all the while, a buzzing fly in the instrument for a frightful array of diseases expressed in a variety of terrible French appellations. The exposure of this young man is a hint of the author's process with the social grievances and absurdities of the day. He clears the moral atmosphere of the morbid literary and other pretences afloat. People breathe freer for his verses. They shake the cobwebs out of the system, and keep up in the world that brisk healthy current of common sense, which is to the mind what circulation is to the body. A tincture of the Epicurean Philosophy is not a bad corrective of ultraism, Fourierism, transcendentalism, and

other morbidities. Dr. Holmes sees a thing objectively in the open air, and understands what is due to nature, and to the inevitable conventionalisms of society. He is a lover of the fields, trees, and streams, and out-of-door life; but we question whether his muse is ever clearer in its metaphysics than when on some convivial occasion it ranges a row of happy faces, reflected in the wax-illuminated plateau of the dining table.

OUR YANKEE GIRLS.

Let greener lands and bluer skies,
If such the wide earth shows,
With fairer cheeks and brighter eyes,
Match us the star and rose;

The winds that lift the Georgian's veil
Or wave Circassia's curls,

Waft to their shores the sultan's sail,-
Who buys our Yankee girls?

The gay grisette, whose fingers touch
Love's thousand chords so well;

The dark Italian, loving much,

But more than one can tell;

And England's fair-haired, blue-eyed dame,
Who binds her brow with pearls;-
Ye who have seen them, can they shame
Our own sweet Yankee girls?

And what if court and castle vaunt
Its children loftier born?-

Who heeds the silken tassel's flaunt
Beside the golden corn?
They ask not for the dainty toil

Of ribboned knights and earls,
The daughters of the virgin soil,
Our freeborn Yankee girls!

By every hill whose stately pines
Wave their dark arms above

The home where some fair being shines,
To warm the wilds with love,

From barest rock to bleakest shore

Where farthest sail unfurls,

That stars and stripes are streaming o'er,God bless our Yankee girls!

OLD IRONSIDES.

Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
That banner in the sky;
Beneath it rung the battle shout,

And burst the cannon's roar;—

The meteor of the ocean air

Shall sweep the clouds no more! Her deck, once red with heroes' blood Where knelt the vanquished foe, When winds were hurrying o'er the flood And waves were white below, No more shall feel the victor's tread, Or know the conquered knee;The harpies of the shore shall pluck The eagle of the sea!

O better that her shattered hulk

Should sink beneath the wave;
Her thunders shook the mighty deep,
And there should be her grave;
Nail to the mast her holy flag,
Set every threadbare sail,

And give her to the god of storms,―
The lightning and the gale!
VOL. II.--33

THE CHURCH-YARD AT CAMBRIDGE.

Our ancient church! its lowly tower,
Beneath the loftier spire,

Is shadowed when the sunset hour
Clothes the tall shaft in fire;
It sinks beyond the distant eye,
Long ere the glittering vane,
High wheeling in the western sky,
Has faded o'er the plain.

Like Sentinel and Nun, they keep
Their vigil on the green;

One seems to guard, and one to weep,
The dead that lie between;

And both roll out, so full and near,
Their music's mingling waves,

They shake the grass, whose pennoned spear
Leans on the narrow graves.

The stranger parts the flaunting weeds,
Whose seeds the winds have strown
So thick beneath the line he reads,
They shade the sculptured stone;
The child unveils his clustered brow,
And ponders for a while

The graven willow's pendent bough,

Or rudest cherub's smile.

But what to them the dirge, the knell?
These were the mourner's share;-
The sullen clang, whose heavy swell
Throbbed through the beating air;-
The rattling cord,-the rolling stone,-
The shelving sand that slid,

And, far beneath, with hollow tone
Rung on the coffin's lid.

The slumberer's mound grows fresh and green,
Then slowly disappears;

The mosses creep, the gray stones lean

Earth hides his date and years;
But long before the once-loved name
Is sunk or worn away,

No lip the silent dust may claim,
That pressed the breathing clay.

Go where the ancient pathway guides,
See where our sires laid down
Their smiling babes, their cherished brides,
The patriarchs of the town;

Hast thou a tear for buried love?
A sigh for transient power?
All that a century left above,
Go, read it in an hour!

The Indian's shaft, the Briton's ball,
The sabre's thirsting edge,

The hot shell shattering in its fall,
The bayonet's rending wedge,-
Here scattered death; yet seek the spot,
No trace thine eye can see,
No altar, and they need it not
Who leave their children free!

Look where the turbid rain-drops stand
In many a chiselled square,
The knightly crest, the shield, the brand
Of honored names were there;-
Alas! for every tear is dried

Those blazoned tablets knew,
Save when the icy marble's side
Drips with the evening dew.

Or gaze upon yon pillared stone,
The empty urn of pride;

There stand the Goblet and the Sun,-
What need of more beside?

Where lives the memory of the dead,
Who made their tomb á toy?

Whose ashes press that nameless bed?

Go, ask the village boy!

Lean o'er the slender western wall,

Ye ever-roaming girls;

The breath that bids the blossom fall
May lift your floating curls,
To sweep the simple lines that tell
An exile's date and doom;

And sigh, for where his daughters dwell,
They wreathe the stranger's tomb.
And one amid these shades was born,
Beneath this turf who lies,
Once beaming as the summer's morn,
That closed her gentle eyes;—
If sinless angels love as we,

Who stood thy grave beside,
Three seraph welcomes waited thee,
The daughter, sister, bride!

I wandered to thy buried mound
When earth was hid below
The level of the glaring ground,
Choked to its gates with snow,

And when with summer's flowery waves
The lake of verdure rolled,

As if a Sultan's white-robed slaves
Had scattered pearls and gold.

Nay, the soft pinions of the air,
That lift this trembling tone,
Its breath of love may almost bear,
To kiss thy funeral stone;-
And, now thy smiles have past away,
For all the joy they gave,
May sweetest dews and warmest ray
Lie on thine early grave!

When damps beneath, and storms above,
Have bowed these fragile towers,
Still o'er the graves yon locust-grove
Shall swing its Orient flowers;—
And I would ask no mouldering bust,
If e'er this humble line,

Which breathed a sigh o'er others' dust,
Might call a tear on mine.

L'INCONNUE.

Is thy name Mary, maiden fair?

Such should, methinks, its music be
The sweetest name that mortals bear,
Were best befitting thee;

And she, to whom it once was given,
Was half of earth and half of heaven.

I hear thy voice, I see thy smile,

I look upon thy folded hair; Ah! while we dream not they beguile, Our hearts are in the snare;

And she, who chains a wild bird's wing, Must start not if her captive sing.

So, lady, take the leaf that falls, unknown;

To all but thee unseen,
When evening shades thy silent walls,
Then read it all alone;

In stillness read, in darkness seal,
Forget, despise, but not reveal:

My aunt! my dear unmarried aunt!
Long years have o'er her flown;
Yet still she strains the aching clasp
That binds her virgin zone;

I know it hurts her,-though she looks
As cheerful as she can;
Her waist is ampler than her life,
For life is but a span.

My aunt, my poor deluded aunt!
Her hair is almost gray;
Why will she train that winter curl
In such a spring-like way?
How can she lay her glasses down,
And say she reads as well
When, through a double convex lens,
She just makes out to spell?
Her father, grandpapa! forgive
This erring lip its smiles,-
Vowed she should make the finest girl
Within a hundred miles.

He sent her to a stylish school;

"Twas in her thirteenth June; And with her, as the rules required, "Two towels and a spoon."

They braced my aunt against a board,
To make her straight and tall;

They laced her up, they starved her down,
To make her light and small;