Like all poets, Doctor Holmes had a passionate love for flowers, and with a delight that is most heartily shared by the sympathetic reader, he thus recalls the old garden belonging to the gambrel-roofed house in Cambridge.
"There were old lilac bushes, at the right of the entrance, and in the corner at the left that remarkable moral pear-tree, which gave me one of my first lessons in life. Its fruit never ripened but always rotted at the core just before it began to grow mellow. It was a vulgar plebeian specimen, at best, and was set there, no doubt, only to preach its annual sermon, a sort of 'Dudleian Lecture' by a country preacher of small parts. But in the northern border was a high-bred Saint Michael pear-tree, which taught a lesson that all of gentle blood might take to heart; for its fruit used to get hard and dark, and break into unseemly cracks, so that when the lord of the harvest came for it, it was like those rich men's sons we see too often, who have never ripened, but only rusted, hardened and shrunken. We had peaches, lovely nectarines, and sweet, white grapes, growing and coming to kindly maturity in those days; we should hardly expect them now, and yet there is no obvious change of climate. As for the garden-beds, they were cared for by the Jonathan or Ephraim of the household, sometimes assisted by one Rule, a little old Scotch gardener, with a stippled face and a lively temper. Nothing but old-fashioned flowers in them—hyacinths, pushing their green beaks through as soon as the snow was gone, or earlier tulips, coming up in the shape of sugar 'cockles,' or cornucopiæ, one was almost tempted to look to see whether nature had not packed one of those two-line 'sentiments,' we remember so well in each of them; peonies, butting their way bluntly through the loosened earth; flower-de-luces (so I will call them, not otherwise); lilies; roses, damask, white, blush, cinnamon (these names served us then); larkspurs, lupins, and gorgeous holyhocks.
"With these upper-class plants were blended, in republican fellowship, the useful vegetables of the working sort;—beets, handsome with dark-red leaves; carrots, with their elegant filigree foliage, parsnips that cling to the earth like mandrakes; radishes, illustrations of total depravity, a prey to every evil underground emissary of the powers of darkness; onions, never easy until they are out of bed, so to speak, a communicative and companionable vegetable, with a real genius for soups; squash vines with their generous fruits, the winter ones that will hang up 'ag'in the chimbly' by and by—the summer ones, vase like, as Hawthorne described them, with skins so white and delicate, when they are yet new-born, that one thinks of little sucking pigs turned vegetables, like Daphne into a laurel, and then of tender human infancy, which Charles Lamb's favorite so calls to mind;—these, with melons, promising as 'first scholars,' but apt to put off ripening until the frost came and blasted their vines and leaves, as if it had been a shower of boiling water, were among the customary growths of the Garden."
Then follows, in these charming reminiscences, an account of the reconstruction of the dear old Garden.
"Consuls Madisonius and Monrovious left the seat of office, and Consuls Johannes Quincius, and Andreas, and Martinus, and the rest, followed in their turn, until the good Abraham sat in the curule chair. In the meantime changes had been going on under our old gambrel roof, and the Garden had been suffered to relapse slowly into a state of wild nature. The haughty flower-de-luces, the curled hyacinths, the perfumed roses, had yielded their place to suckers from locust-trees, to milkweed, burdock, plantain, sorrel, purslane; the gravel walks, which were to nature as rents in her green garment, had been gradually darned over with the million threaded needles of her grasses until nothing was left to show that a garden had been there.
"But the Garden still existed in my memory; the walks were all mapped out there, and the place of every herb and flower was laid down as if on a chart.
"By that pattern I reconstructed the Garden, lost for a whole generation as much as Pompeii was lost, and in the consulate of our good Abraham it was once more as it had been in the days of my childhood. It was not much to look upon for a stranger; but when the flowers came up in their old places, the effect on me was something like what the widow of Nain may have felt when her dead son rose on his bier and smiled upon her.
"Nature behaved admirably, and sent me back all the little tokens of her affection she had kept so long. The same delegates from the underground fauna ate up my early radishes; I think I should have been disappointed if they had not. The same buff-colored bugs devoured my roses that I remembered of old. The aphids and the caterpillar and the squash-bug were cordial as ever; just as if nothing had happened to produce a coolness or entire forgetfulness between us. But the butterflies came back too, and the bees and the birds."
Says a well-known writer:
"Though born and reared beneath the shadow of the great city, yet Doctor Holmes has ever found great delight in spending a portion of each year in the country. The last few summers he has made his home at Beverly Farms, but from 1849 to 1856, inclusive, his summer home was in Pittsfield, in Berkshire County. His recollections of the scenes and people in that charming town are pleasant and abundant. The villa which he built was upon a round knoll, commanding a fine view of the whole circle of Berkshire mountains, and of the Housatonic, winding in its serpentine way through the fertile meadows and valleys to the sound of Long Island. Yielding to his own good nature and the soft persuasion of a committee of Pittsfield ladies, Doctor Holmes once contributed a couple of poems to a fancy fair which was being held in the town during his residence there. They do not appear in any of the published collections, which is the one reason, above all others, why we print them now. Each of the poems was inclosed in an envelope bearing a motto; and the right to a second choice, guided by these, was disposed of in a raffle, to the no small emolument of the objects of the fair. The two pieces are even to this day represented by at least a square yard of the quaint ecclesiastical heraldry which illuminates the gorgeous chancel window of the St. Stephen's church in Pittsfield. The motto of the first envelope ran thus: