During the Civil War my father and Doctor Holmes were among the medical men appointed to examine those who sought to escape the draft on the ground of physical disability. Among them was one very large young man who had evidently outgrown his strength. The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table was short and slight. There was such a contrast in the size of the two that the witty doctor thought it would be amusing if he, the little man, should examine the big one. So he called out, “Let me examine him, Doctor, let me examine him!” He accordingly proceeded to percuss the young giant.
Doctor Holmes liked better to talk than to listen, as the title which he assumed, “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,” plainly shows. When my mother decided to give a course of talks on philosophical subjects, in the parlors of our house, she invited Doctor Holmes to be one of the guests. Meeting her in the street one rainy day, he explained to her at length why he was not interested in hearing other people lecture, the pair meanwhile walking up and down under their umbrellas.
On another occasion, when both had been listening to an uninteresting lecture, Doctor Holmes said he would as lief hear potatoes poured from one barrel into another!
Ralph Waldo Emerson was from time to time a visitor at our house. He was of the tall, slender New England type, with blue eyes and the large nose which is thought to indicate force. At the time of the execution of John Brown he compared the gallows on which the old man perished to the cross. A little later he was in the company of some conservative people who were shocked at this comparison. They asked Mr. Emerson if he had made it, and, without attempting to palliate or explain, he replied that he had said something of the sort.
In my youth the following remarks were attributed to him.
“Church? What is church? I do not see church, I do not hear church, I do not smell church!” It is very possible that he did make them, yet he was a man essentially devout, the descendant of a line of clergymen. When a distinguished clergyman of the Church of England came to America, some years later, he declared that, whoever occupied the pulpit, Emerson was always the preacher! Time thus brought to the latter a splendid revenge for the small satires of earlier days.
His table talk was fresh, quaint and delightful. Yet he was, on the whole, rather silent than talkative in company, as became the author of this passage:
“When people come to see us, we foolishly prattle, lest we be inhospitable. But things said for conversation are chalk eggs. Don’t say things. What you are stands over you the while and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.”
If this saying bears too hard upon women, we may comfort ourselves with another dictum of his, “Woman, if not the queen, is the lawgiver of conversation.” While great men like Mr. Emerson may sit serenely silent, the feminine instinct bids us try, at least, to be agreeable!
The Sage of Concord, as he was called, staying one night at a hotel in Boston, received a long visit from a literary man who, rising to go at a late hour, said, “I am to give a lecture on Plato to-morrow and I haven’t written the first word of it yet.” To which Mr. Emerson, horrified at such carelessness, replied, “Good God!” This gentleman was Emanuel Scherb, a habitué of our house at one time. His negligence perhaps arose from the fact that he had once been insane. He then imagined that he was a monkey. A knowledge of this lingered in my mother’s subconscious mind. She once talked with him about monkeys, until she suddenly remembered his former delusion!