Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

“ A commercial smash kills a hundred men’s houses for them, as a railroad crash kills their mortal frames and drives out the immortal tenants. Men sicken of houses until at last they quit them, as the soul leaves its body when it is tired of its infirmities. The body has been called “the house we live in”; the house is quite as much the body we live in. Shall I tell you some things the Professor said the other day? - Do! - said the schoolmistress. ”

“ Farmers, sailors, astronomers, poets, lovers, condemned criminals, all find it different, according to the eyes with which they severally look.
But our houses shape themselves palpably on our inner and outer natures. See a householder breaking up and you will be sure of it. There is a shell-fish which builds all manner of smaller shells into the walls of its own. A house is never a home until we have crusted it with the spoils of a hundred lives besides those of our own past. ”

“ I will call on her whom the dead poets believed in, whom living ones no longer worship, - the immortal maid, who, name her what you will, - Goddess, Muse, Spirit of Beauty, - sits by the pillow of every youthful poet, and bends over his pale forehead until her tresses lie upon his cheek and rain their gold into his dreams. ”

“ Before the measuring-tape the proudest tree of them all quails and shrinks into itself. All those stories of four or five men stretching their arms around it and not touching each other’s fingers, if one’s pacing the shadow at noon and making it so many hundred feet, die upon its leafy lips in the presence of the awful ribbon which has strangled so many false pretensions. ”

“ I heard some talk of a great elm a short distance from the locality just mentioned. “Let us see the great elm,” - I said, and proceeded to find it, - knowing that it was on a certain farm in a place called Johnston, if I remember rightly. I shall never forget my ride and my introduction to the great Johnston elm.
I always tremble for a celebrated tree when I approach it for the first time. Provincialism has no scale of excellence in man or vegetable; it never knows a first-rate article of either kind when it has it, and is constantly taking second and third rate ones for Nature’s best. ”

“ Pray, do not give yourself the trouble to fancy me an idiot whose conceit it is to treat himself as an exceptional being. It is because you are just like me that I talk and know that you will listen. We are all splashed and streaked with sentiments, - not with precisely the same tints, or in exactly the same patterns, but by the same hand and from the same palette. ”

“ The soul of a man has a series of concentric envelopes round it, like the core of an onion, or the innermost of a nest of boxes. First, he has his natural garment of flesh and blood. Then, his artificial integuments, with their true skin of solid stuffs, their cuticle of lighter tissues, and their variously-tinted pigments. Thirdly, his domicile, be it a single chamber or a stately mansion. And then, the whole visible world, in which Time buttons him up as in a loose outside wrapper. ”

“ I am not sure that I remember any other first-class elms in New England, but there may be many.
- What makes a first-class elm? - Why, size, in the first place, and chiefly. Anything over twenty feet of clear girth, five feet above the ground, and with a spread of branches a hundred feet across, may claim that title, according to my scale. All of them, with the questionable exception of the Springfield tree above referred to, stop, so far as my experience goes, at about twenty-two or twenty-three feet of girth and a hundred and twenty of spread. ”

“ In the crevices of Cyclopean walls, - in the dust where men lie, dust also, - on the mounds that bury huge cities, the wreck of Nineveh and the Babel-heap, - still that same sweet prayer and benediction. The Amen! of Nature is always a flower. ”

“ Take the oak, for instance, and we find it always standing as a type of strength and endurance. I wonder if you ever thought of the single mark of supremacy which distinguishes this tree from all our other forest-trees? All the rest of them shirk the work of resisting gravity; the oak alone defies it. It chooses the horizontal direction for its limbs, so that their whole weight may tell, - and then stretches them out fifty or sixty feet, so that the strain may be mighty enough to be worth resisting. ”

“ Dying would be a much more gentlemanly way of meeting the difficulty. Make a will and leave her a house or two and some stocks, and other little financial conveniences, to take away her necessity for keeping school. - I wonder what nice young man’s feet would be in my French slippers before six months were over! Well, what then? If a man really loves a woman, of course he wouldn’t marry her for the world, if he were not quite sure that he was the best person she could by any possibility marry. ”

“ John Hunter and other great men, he brings in that shall with great effect sometimes, - you shall observe that a man’s clothing or series of envelopes does after a certain time mould itself upon his individual nature. We know this of our hats, and are always reminded of it when we happen to put them on wrong side foremost. We soon find that the beaver is a hollow cast of the skull, with all its irregular bumps and depressions. Just so all that clothes a man, even to the blue sky which caps his head, - a little loosely, - shapes itself to fit each particular being beneath it. ”

“ There is nothing that happens, you know, which must not inevitably, and which does not actually, photograph itself in every conceivable aspect and in all dimensions. The infinite galleries of the Past await but one brief process and all their pictures will be called out and fixed forever. ”

“ The flowers our mothers and sisters used to love and cherish, those which grow beneath our eaves and by our doorstep, are the ones we always love best. If the Houyhnhnms should ever catch me, and, finding me particularly vicious and unmanageable, send a man-tamer to Rareyfy me, I’ll tell you what drugs he would have to take and how he would have to use them. ”

“ A man’s body, - said the Professor, - is whatever is occupied by his will and his sensibility. The small room down there, where I wrote those papers you remember reading, was much more a portion of my body than a paralytic’s senseless and motionless arm or leg is of his. ”

“ There is a parallelism without identity in the animal and vegetable life of the two continents, which favors the task of comparison in an extraordinary manner. Just as we have two trees alike in many ways, yet not the same, both elms, yet easily distinguishable, just so we have a complete flora and a fauna, which, parting from the same ideal, embody it with various modifications. Inventive power is the only quality of which the Creative Intelligence seems to be economical ”

“ You will find this tree described, with many others, in the excellent Report upon the Trees and Shrubs of Massachusetts. The author has given my friend the Professor credit for some of his measurements, but measured this tree himself, carefully. It is a grand elm for size of trunk, spread of limbs, and muscular development, - one of the first, perhaps the first, of the first class of New England elms.
The largest actual girth I have ever found at five feet from the ground is in the great elm lying a stone’s throw or two north of the main road (if my points of compass are right) in Springfield. ”

“ The schoolmistress dropped a rosebud she had in her hand, through the rails, upon the grave of Benjamin Woodbridge. That was all her comment upon what I told her. - How women love Love! said I; - but she did not speak.
We came opposite the head of a place or court running eastward from the main street. - Look down there, - I said, - My friend the Professor lived in that house at the left hand, next the further corner, for years and years. He died out of it, the other day. - Died? - said the schoolmistress. - Certainly, - said I. - We die out of houses, just as we die out of our bodies. ”

“ Who cares how many stamens or pistils that little brown flower, which comes out before the leaf, may have to classify it by? What we want is the meaning, the character, the expression of a tree, as a kind and as an individual. ”

“ Slowest of men, even of English men; yet delicious in his slowness, as is the light of a sleepy eye in woman. I always supposed “Dr. Syntax” was written to make fun of him. I have a whole set of his works, and am very proud of it, with its gray paper, and open type, and long ff, and orange-juice landscapes. The Père Gilpin had the kind of science I like in the study of Nature, - a little less observation than White of Selborne, but a little more poetry. - Just think of applying the Linnaean system to an elm! ”

“ As the same patterns have very commonly been followed, we can see which is worked out in the largest spirit, and determine the exact limitations under which the Creator places the movement of life in all its manifestations in either locality. ”

“ If my plan were carried out, and another series of a dozen English trees photographed on the same scale the comparison would be charming.
It has always been a favorite idea of mine to bring the life of the Old and the New World face to face, by an accurate comparison of their various types of organization. We should begin with man, of course ”

“ Stop before we turn away, and breathe a woman’s sigh over poor Benjamin’s dust. Love killed him, I think. Twenty years old, and out there fighting another young fellow on the Common, in the cool of that old July evening ”

“ Both, however, are pleasing vegetables. The poor old Pittsfield elm lives on its past reputation. A wig of false leaves is indispensable to make it presentable.
[I don’t doubt there may be some monster-elm or other, vegetating green, but inglorious, in some remote New England village, which only wants a sacred singer to make it celebrated. Send us your measurements, - (certified by the postmaster, to avoid possible imposition,) - circumference five feet from soil, length of line from bough-end to bough-end, and we will see what can be done for you.] ”

“ But there are iron bars to all the windows. When it is fair, some of us can stroll outside that very high fence. But I never see much life in those groups I sometimes meet; - and then the careful man watches them so closely! ”