Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

“ It is such a sad thing to be born a sneaking fellow, so much worse than to inherit a hump-back or a couple of club-feet, that I sometimes feel as if we ought to love the crippled souls, if I may use this expression, with a certain tenderness which we need not waste on noble natures. One who is born with such congenital incapacity that nothing can make a gentleman of him is entitled, not to our wrath, but to our profoundest sympathy. ”

“ I understood that we were speaking of love at sight, - I remarked, mildly. - Now, as all a man knows about a woman whom he looks at is just what a picture as big as a copper, or a “nickel,” rather, at the bottom of his eye can teach him, I think I am right in saying we are talking about the pictures of women. - Well, now, the reason why a man is not desperately in love with ten thousand women at once is just that which prevents all our portraits being distinctly seen upon that wall. ”

“ Of course, there is something audible to us when we speak; but that something is not our own voice as it is known to all our acquaintances. I think, if an image spoke to us in our own tones, we should not know them in the least. - How pleasant it would be, if in another state of being we could have shapes like our former selves for playthings, - we standing outside or inside of them, as we liked, and they being to us just what we used to be to others!
- I wonder if there will be nothing like what we call “play,” after our earthly toys are broken, - said the schoolmistress. ”

“ Ah! long illness is the real vampyrism; think of living a year or two after one is dead, by sucking the life-blood out of a frail young creature at one’s bedside! Well, souls grow white, as well as cheeks, in these holy duties one that goes in a nurse may come out an angel. - God bless all good women! - to their soft hands and pitying hearts we must all come at last! - The schoolmistress has a better color than when she came. ”

“ There are sweet voices among us, we all know, and voices not musical, it may be, to those who hear them for the first time, yet sweeter to us than any we shall hear until we listen to some warbling angel in the overture to that eternity of blissful harmonies we hope to enjoy. ”

“ I warned all young people off the premises when I began my notes referring to old age. I must be equally fair with old people now. They are earnestly requested to leave this paper to young persons from the age of twelve to that of fourscore years and ten, at which latter period of life I am sure that I shall have at least one youthful reader. You know well enough what I mean by youth and age; - something in the soul, which has no more to do with the color of the hair than the vein of gold in a rock has to do with the grass a thousand feet above it. ”

“ But darken a chamber and let a single pencil of rays in through a key-hole, then you have a picture on the wall. We never fall in love with a woman in distinction from women, until we can get an image of her through a pin-hole; and then we can see nothing else, and nobody but ourselves can see the image in our mental camera-obscura.
- My friend, the Poet, tells me he has to leave town whenever the anniversaries come round. ”

“ Not the less is it true that he is bound by duty and inclined by nature to love each and every woman. Therefore it is that each woman virtually summons every man to show cause why he doth not love her. This is not by written document, or direct speech, for the most part, but by certain signs of silk, gold, and other materials, which say to all men, - Look on me and love, as in duty bound. Then the man pleadeth his special incapacity, whatsoever that may be, - as, for instance, impecuniosity, or that he hath one or many wives in his household, or that he is of mean figure, or small capacity ”

“ And yet - and yet - it is something better than flowers; it is a seed-capsule. Many a gardener will cut you a bouquet of his choicest blossoms for small fee, but he does not love to let the seeds of his rarest varieties go out of his own hands. ”

“ Let me make a clean breast of it now, and say, that, so late as to have outgrown childhood, perhaps to have got far on towards manhood, when the roar of the cannon has struck suddenly on my ear, I have started with a thrill of vague expectation and tremulous delight, and the long-unspoken words have articulated themselves in the mind’s dumb whisper, The Wasp has come! ”

“ I never thought mine was anything, - said the schoolmistress.
How should you know? - said I. - People never hear their own voices, - any more than they see their own faces. There is not even a looking-glass for the voice. ”

“ I don’t deny that I hate the sight of certain people; but the qualities which make me tend to hate the man himself are such as I am so much disposed to pity, that, except under immediate aggravation, I feel kindly enough to the worst of them. ”

“ But as we cannot help hating the sight of these people, just as we do that of physical deformities, we gradually eliminate them from our society, - we love them, but open the window and let them go. By the time decent people reach middle age they have weeded their circle pretty well of these unfortunates, unless they have a taste for such animals; in which case, no matter what their position may be, there is something, you may be sure, in their natures akin to that of their wretched parasites.
- The divinity-student wished to know what I thought of affinities, as well as of antipathies ”

“ As the large, round disk of day declined, a stillness, a solemnity, a somewhat melancholy hush came over us all. It was time for work to cease, and for playthings to be put away. The world of active life passed into the shadow of an eclipse, not to emerge until the sun should sink again beneath the horizon. ”

“ It is by little things that we know ourselves; a soul would very probably mistake itself for another, when once disembodied, were it not for individual experiences which differ from those of others only in details seemingly trifling. ”

“ If mankind generally are the shipwrecked survivors of some pre-Adamitic cataclysm, set adrift in these little open boats of humanity to make one more trial to reach the shore, - as some grave theologians have maintained, - if, in plain English, men are the ghosts of dead devils who have “died into life,” (to borrow an expression from Keats,) and walk the earth in a suit of living rags which lasts three or four score summers, - why, there must have been a few good spirits sent to keep them company, and these sweet voices I speak of must belong to them. ”

“ But there is a note from an older authority, saying that every woman doth also love each and every man, except there be some good reason to the contrary; and a very observing friend of mine, a young unmarried clergyman, tells me, that, so far as his experience goes, he has reason to think the ancient author had fact to justify his statement.
I’ll tell you how it is with the pictures of women we fall in love with at first sight.
- We a’n’t talking about pictures, - said the landlady’s daughter, - we’re talking about women. ”

“ It did demand a certain amount of memory, and such command of the English tongue as is given by a common school education. So much I do claim. But here I have related, at length, a string of trivialities. You must have the imagination of a poet to transfigure them. These little colored patches are stains upon the windows of a human soul; stand on the outside, they are but dull and meaningless spots of color ”

“ Still, you hear noble voices among us, - I have known families famous for them, - but ask the first person you meet a question, and ten to one there is a hard, sharp, metallic, matter-of-business clink in the accents of the answer, that produces the effect of one of those bells which small trades-people connect with their shop-doors, and which spring upon your ear with such vivacity, as you enter, that your first impulse is to retire at once from the precincts. ”

“ I say, then, most of the boarders had left the table about the time when I began telling some of these secrets of mine, - all of them, in fact, but the old gentleman opposite and the schoolmistress. I understand why a young woman should like to hear these simple but genuine experiences of early life, which are, as I have said, the little brown seeds of what may yet grow to be poems with leaves of azure and gold ”

“ The marrowy organisms, with skins that shed water like the backs of ducks, with smooth surfaces neatly padded beneath, and velvet linings to their singing-pipes, are not so common among us as that other pattern of humanity with angular outlines and plane surfaces, and integuments, hair like the fibrous covering of a cocoa-nut in gloss and suppleness as well as color, and voices at once thin and strenuous, - acidulous enough to produce effervescence with alkalis, and stridulous enough to sing duets with the katydids. ”

“ For Lake Erie was close by, and it is so much better to accept asphyxia, which takes only three minutes by the watch, than a mésalliance, that lasts fifty years to begin with, and then passes along down the line of descent, (breaking out in all manner of boorish manifestations of feature and manner, which, if men were only as short-lived as horses, could be readily traced back through the square-roots and the cube-roots of the family stem on which you have hung the armorial bearings of the De Champignons or the De la Morues, until one came to beings that ate with knives and said “Haow?”) ”

“ The old gentleman had left his chair opposite and taken a seat by the schoolmistress and myself, a little way from the table. - It’s true, it’s true, - said the old gentleman. - He took hold of a steel watch-chain, which carried a large, square gold key at one end and was supposed to have some kind of time-keeper at the other. With some trouble he dragged up an ancient-looking, thick, silver, bull’s-eye watch. ”

“ These verses I am going to read you, he tells me, were pulled up by the roots just in that way, the other day. - Beautiful entertainment, - names there on the plates that flow from all English-speaking tongues as familiarly as and or the; entertainers known wherever good poetry and fair title-pages are held in esteem; guest a kind-hearted, modest, genial, hopeful poet, who sings to the hearts of his countrymen, the British people, the songs of good cheer which the better days to come, as all honest souls trust and believe, will turn into the prose of common life. ”

“ The fact is, the young fellow is a good-hearted creature enough, only too fond of his jokes, - and if it were not for those heat-lightning winks on one side of his face, I should not mind his fun much. ”

“ Our landlady’s daughter said, the other evening, that she was going to “retire”; whereupon the young fellow called John took up a lamp and insisted on lighting her to the foot of the staircase. Nothing would induce her to pass by him, until the schoolmistress, saying in good plain English that it was her bed-time, walked straight by them both, not seeming to trouble herself about either of them. ”

“ There are times, though, he says, when it is a pleasure, before going to some agreeable meeting, to rush out into one’s garden and clutch up a handful of what grows there, - weeds and violets together, - not cutting them off, but pulling them up by the roots with the brown earth they grow in sticking to them. ”

“ If you want to hear my confessions, the next thing - I said - is to know whether I can trust you with them. It is only fair to say that there are a great many people in the world that laugh at such things. ”

“ Keeps a first-rate school, according to accounts, - said he, - teaches all sorts of things, - Latin and Italian and music. Folks rich once, - smashed up. She went right ahead as smart as if she’d been born to work. ”

“ This little speck the British Isles? ”