His days grew gradually shorter, as the days of late October dwindle into golden noons. During the few hours when he was at his best he was wonderfully active, driving to his publisher's or to make an occasional visit, besides a daily walk. If to those who saw him continually the circle of his subjects of conversation began to appear somewhat circumscribed, upon those who met him only occasionally the old fascination still exerted itself. He set his door wide open when he made up his mind to receive and converse with any human being.
There is nothing left to say of him which he did not cheerfully and truthfully say of himself. "I am intensely interested in my own personality," he began one day; "but we are all interesting to ourselves, or ought to be. I know I am, and I see why. We take, as it were, a mold of our own thought. Now let us compare it with the mold of another man on the same subject. His mold is either too large or too small, or the veins and reticulations are altogether different. No one mold fits another man's thought. It is our own, and as such has especial interest and value."
It was really amazing to see his intellectual vigor in society even at this late period. When the conditions were satisfactory, at a small luncheon for instance, he would soon grow warm with excitement, his eyes would glow, and he would talk with his accustomed fire. He was like an old war-horse hearing the trumpet that called to battle. His activity and versatility of mind could still distance many a clever man in the prime of life.
He responded in the most generous way to the expectations of strangers and foreigners who came to visit him as if on pilgrimage. He always found some entertainment for them. Sometimes he would read them one of his poems; sometimes he would have a pretty scientific toy for their amusement; or again he would write his autograph in a volume of his works for them to carry away in remembrance. Such guests could not help feeling that they had seen more than the Dr. Holmes of their imagination. He entered into their curiosity regarding himself with such charming sympathy that they came away thinking the half-hour they had passed in his study was one always to be remembered.
As I think of those latest days, I recall what he himself wrote once, long ago, about old age: "One that remains walking," he says, "while others have dropped asleep, and keeps a little night-lamp flame of life burning year after year, if the lamp is not upset and there is only a careful hand held round it to prevent the puffs of wind from blowing the flame out. That's what I call an old man."
"Now," said the professor, "you don't mean to tell me that I have got to that yet? Why, bless you, I am several years short of the time!"
Dr. Holmes left this world, which he had found pleasant and had filled with pleasantness for others, after an illness that was happily brief. He passed, in the words of that great physician, Sir Thomas Browne, "in drowsy approaches of sleep;… believing with those resolved Christians who, looking on the death of this world but as a nativity of another, do contentedly submit unto the common necessity, and envy not Enoch or Elias."
DAYS WITH MRS. STOWE
In recalling Mrs. Stowe's life, with the remembrance of what she has been to her friends, to her country, and to the world, I am overborne by the sense of a soul instinct from its early consciousness with power working in her beyond her own thought or knowledge or will. Her attitude seemed by nature to be that of contemplation. Her heart was like a burning coal laid upon the altar of humanity; and when she stole up, as it were, in the night and laid it down for the slave with tears and supplications, it awakened neither alarm nor wonder in her spirit that in the morning she saw a bright fire burning there and lighting the whole earth.
Mrs. Stowe had already passed through this great experience when I saw her for the first time in Italy. It was only a few weeks before the war against slavery was openly declared, and she was like one who having "done all" must now "stand." This year indeed was one of the happiest of her life. She did not yet see the terrible feet of War already close upon us, yet she was convinced that the end of slavery was at hand. She was released at last from the toils which poverty had laid upon her overtasked body. Her children were with her, and she was enjoying, as few persons know how to enjoy, the loveliness of Italy. She delighted, too, in the congenial society of Mr. and Mrs. Browning and the agreeable friends who were that winter grouped around them. After her long trial and her years of suffering she was to have "her day" in the world of beauty and love which lay about her.