Poor drudge of the city! how happy he feels
With the burrs on his legs and the grass at his heels!
No dodger behind, his bandannas to share,
No constable grumbling "You mustn't walk there!"
In yonder green meadow, to memory dear,
He slaps a mosquito and brushes a tear;
The dewdrops hang round him on blossoms and shoots,
He breathes but one sigh for his youth and his boots.
There stands the old schoolhouse, hard by the old church
That tree at its side had the flavor of birch;
O sweet were the days of his juvenile tricks,
Though the prairie of youth had so many "big licks."
By the side of yon river he weeps and he slumps,
The boots fill with water as if they were pumps;
Till, sated with rapture, he steals to his bed,
With a glow in his heart, and a cold in his head.
At the annual dinner of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, in 1843, Doctor Holmes read the fine poem entitled Terpsichore.
Three years later he delivered Urania, A Rhyme Lesson before the Boston Mercantile Library Association. "To save a question that is sometimes put," remarks the poet, "it is proper to say that in naming these two poems after two of the Muses, nothing more was intended than a suggestion of their general character and aim."
CHAPTER VIII.
THE LECTURER.
WHEN Doctor Warren gave up the Parkman professorship at Harvard, in 1847, Doctor Holmes was appointed to take his place as Professor of Anatomy and Physiology. For eight months of the year, four lectures are delivered each week in this department of the college, and yet Doctor Holmes still found time "between whiles," to attend to his Boston practice, and to write many charming poems and essays. He also entered the lyceum arena, "an original American contrivance," as Theodore Parker describes it in 1857, "for educating the people. The world has nothing like it. In it are combined the best things of the Church: i.e., the preaching; and of the College: i.e., the informing thought, with some of the fun of the theatre. Besides, it gives the rural districts a chance to see the men they read about—to see the lions—for the lecturer is also a show to the eyes. For ten years past six or eight of the most progressive minds in America have been lecturing fifty or a hundred times a year."