"Dr. Holmes was highly talkative and agreeable; he converses very much like the Autocrat at the Breakfast Table,—wittily, and in a literary way, but perhaps with too great an infusion of physiological and medical metaphor. He is a little deaf, and has a mouth like the beak of a bird; indeed, he is, with his small body and quick movements, very like a bird in his general aspect."
When Charles Kingsley was in Boston he met Holmes, who came in, frisked about, and talked incessantly, Kingsley intervening with a few words only occasionally. At last Holmes whisked himself away, saying, "And now I must go." "He is an insp-sp-sp-ired j-j-j-h-ack-daw," said Kingsley.
Mr. Kennedy, in his life of the poet, thus describes him:—
"In person Holmes is a little under the medium height, though it does not strike you so when you see him, especially on the street, where he wears a tall silk hat and carries a cane. As a young man, he was, like Longfellow, a good deal of an exquisite in dress; and he has always been very neat and careful in his attire. He is quick and nervous in his movements, and conveys, in speaking, the impression of energy and intense vitality; and yet he has a poet's sensitiveness to noises, and a dread of persons of superabundant vitality and aggressiveness. When the fountain of laughter and smiles is stirred within him his face lights up with a winning expression, and a laughing, kindly glance of the eye. When he warms up to a subject in conversation he is a very rapid, vivacious speaker."
Dr. Holmes has been accused of being an egotist, and he undoubtedly does like to talk of himself; but he talks always in such charming fashion that nobody regrets the subject of his discourse, but would fain have him go on and on without pause or limit. He is a hearty, happy man, who is a good deal in love with life, and seldom dwells upon its darker side. But he has a very earnest and serious side to his nature, and is far from being a mere laughing philosopher. He enjoys out-of-door life, as every poet must, and though he likes best to live in the city, he takes great delight in the country also. He spent seven summers upon a farm of his own in the enchanting Berkshire region, near Pittsfield, and he says these seven summers stand in his memory like the seven golden candlesticks seen in the beatific vision of the holy dreamer. He loves rowing, racing, and walking through green country lanes. The New England wild-flowers are especially dear to him, and he has all a poet's love for that shyest and most beautiful of all, the trailing arbutus. He is very fond also of perfumes, and likes the odorous blossoms best. He has always had his dream of fair women, and he is a great favorite with women of all ages. He is not averse to the pleasures of the table, and likes plenty of friends around him, with mirth and good cheer, at his dinner hour.
He has been accused of being somewhat aristocratic in his feelings, and is doubtless a lover of the best society, as he interprets that word,—not mere wealth or fashion, but good blood, generous culture through more than one generation, and a general refinement in manners and in thought. What he calls the Brahmin caste of New England is doubtless very good society indeed; and who shall blame the good Autocrat if he visits in that circle by choice? He would not, perhaps, like the old scholar of whom he tells, give as his toast "to all the people who on the earth do dwell," but he would select some very choice and rare little coterie of those people, and toast them with the most contagious enthusiasm.
That he is a man of fastidious tastes goes without saying, and rather critical of men and women, in manners as well as morals. An acute observer of small social phenomena, he does not deem it beneath his dignity to criticise the man who cannot pronounce "view," and the woman, even if it be Margaret Fuller, who says "nawvels." That he is a sensitive man he told us long ago, and that—
"There are times
When all this fret and tumult that we hear
Do seem more stale than to the sexton's ear
His own dull chimes.
"From crib to shroud!
Nurse o'er our cradle screameth lullaby,
And friends in boots tramp round us as we die,
Snuffling aloud.
"Children with drums
Strapped round them by the fond paternal ass,
Peripatetics with a blade of grass
Between their thumbs.
"Cockneys that kill
Thin horses of a Sunday,—men with clams,
Hoarse as young bisons roaring for their dams,
From hill to hill.
"Soldiers with guns,
Making a nuisance of the blessed air,
Child-crying bellmen, children in despair,
Screeching for buns.
"Storms, thunders, waves!
Howl, crash, and bellow, till ye get your fill.
Ye sometimes rest; men never can be still
But in their graves."
Sometimes these daily trials are exaggerated to a quite unbearable point, as in the case of Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle, who suffered intense tortures in later life from the ordinary every-day noises; but in the case of Dr. Holmes, as with most people with healthy nerves, these things only give a whimsical annoyance. The battles of Mrs. Carlyle with Chanticleer, as she depicts them, have all the interest of a new Iliad, and the days before Troy have not been studied with more breathless interest than some of her encounters with the makers of the many noises with which London is filled. Dr. Holmes, too, has had his battle with the music-grinders, as who has not? Do we not all know "these crusaders sent from some infernal clime"? and have we not all felt with him the relief when "silence like a poultice comes to heal the blows of sound"? Do we not all know the "Treadmill Song," also, in practical life? and are we not intensely weary of it sometimes? Not many of us can say with him, at the close of one of our "treadmill" days,—
"It's pretty sport; suppose we take
A round or two for fun."