A composition of Margaret's was one day taken up by the boy Oliver.
"It is a trite remark," she began.
Alas! the embryo-poet did not know the meaning of the word trite.
"How could I ever judge Margaret fairly," he exclaims, "after such a crushing discovery of her superiority?"
Of his instructors and schoolmates at Andover, Doctor Holmes has given us numerous pen portraits. The old Academy building had a dreary look to the homesick boy, but he soon recovered from his "slightly nostalgic" state, and found not a few congenial spirits in his new surroundings.
One fine, rosy-faced boy with whom he had a school discussion upon Mary, Queen of Scots, and for whom he has always cherished a lasting friendship, is now the well-known Phinehas Barnes. Another little fellow, with black hair and very black eyes, studying with head between his hands, and eyes fastened to his book as if reading a will that made him heir to a million, was the future professor, Greek scholar and Bible Commentator, Horatio Balch Hackett. One of the masters was the late Rev. Samuel Horatio Stearns, "an excellent and lovable man," says Doctor Holmes, "who looked kindly on me, and for whom I always cherished a sincere regard." Professor Moses Stuart he describes as "tall, lean, with strong, bold features, a keen, scholarly, accipitrine nose, thin, expressive lips, and great solemnity and impressiveness of voice and manner. His air was Roman, his neck long and bare, like Cicero's, and his toga,—that is, his broadcloth cloak,—was carried on his arm, whatever might have been the weather, with such a statue-like, rigid grace that he might have been turned into marble as he stood, and looked noble by the side of the antiques of the Vatican." Then, there was Doctor Porter, an invalid, with the prophetic handkerchief bundling his throat; and Doctor Woods, who looked his creed decidedly, and had the firm fibre of a theological athlete. But none of the preceptors, it may be presumed, was so closely watched as the one to whom a dream had come that he should drop dead when praying. "More than one boy kept his eye on him during his public devotions, possessed by the same feeling the man had who followed Van Amburgh about, with the expectation, let us not say hope, of seeing the lion bite his head off sooner or later."
In Mechanism in Thought and Morals, we find a deal of psychology as well as science.
"It is in the moral world," says Doctor Holmes, "that materialism has worked the strangest confusion. In various forms, under imposing names and aspects, it has thrust itself into the moral relations, until one hardly knows where to look for any first principles without upsetting everything in searching for them.
"The moral universe includes nothing but the exercise of choice: all else is machinery. What we can help and what we cannot help are on two sides of a line which separates the sphere of human responsibility from that of the Being who has arranged and controls the order of things.
"The question of the freedom of the will has been an open one, from the days of Milton's demons in conclave to the noteworthy essay of Mr. Hazard, our Rhode Island neighbor. It still hangs suspended between the seemingly exhaustive strongest motive argument and certain residual convictions. The sense that we are, to a limited extent, self-determining; the sense of effort in willing; the sense of responsibility in view of the future, and the verdict of conscience in review of the past,—all of these are open to the accusation of fallacy; but they all leave a certain undischarged balance in most minds. We can invoke the strong arm of the Deus in machina, as Mr. Hazard, and Kant and others, before him have done. Our will may be a primary initiating cause or force, as unexplainable, as unreducible, as indecomposable, as impossible if you choose, but as real to our belief as the œternitas a parte ante. The divine foreknowledge is no more in the way of delegated choice than the divine omnipotence is in the way of delegated power. The Infinite can surely slip the cable of the finite if it choose so to do."