DOROTHY Q’S HOUSE IN QUINCY, MASS.[1]
So we fell to talking of his own Phi Beta poem. A good Phi Beta poem is an impossibility; but it is the business of genius to work the miracles, and Holmes’s is one of the few successful Phi Beta poems in the dreary catalogue of more than a century. The custom of having “the poem,” as people used to say, as if it were always the same, is now almost abandoned.
DOCTOR O. W. HOLMES DELIVERING HIS FAREWELL ADDRESS AS PARKMAN PROFESSOR OF ANATOMY IN THE MEDICAL SCHOOL OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY, NOVEMBER 28, 1882. FROM A PROOF PRINT IN THE POSSESSION OF DOCTOR JAMES R. CHADWICK.
Fortunately for us both, a tap was heard at the door, and Mr. John Holmes appeared, his brother. Mr. John Holmes has not chosen to publish the bright things which he has undoubtedly written, but in all circles where he favors people with his presence he is known as one of the most agreeable of men. Everybody is glad to set him on the lines of reminiscences. The two brothers, with great good humor, began telling of a dinner party which Doctor Holmes had given, within a few days, to a number of gentlemen whose average ages, according to them, exceeded eighty. One has to make allowance for the exaggeration of their fun, but I think, from the facts which they dropped, that the average must have been maintained. One would have given a good deal to be old enough to 106 be permitted to be at that dinner. This led to talk of the Harvard class of 1829, for whose meetings Holmes has written so many of his charming poems. He said that they are now to have a dinner within a few days, and named the gentlemen who were to be there. Among them, of course, is Doctor Samuel F. Smith, the author of “America.” I noticed that Doctor Holmes always called him “My country ’tis of thee,” and so did all of us. And then these two critics began analyzing that magnificent song. “It will not do to laugh at it. People show that they do not know what they are talking about when they speak lightly of it. Did you ever think how much is gained by making the first verse begin with the singular number? Not our country, but ‘My country,’ ‘I sing of thee’? There is not an American citizen but can make it his own, and does make it his own, as he sings it. And it rises to a Psalm-like grandeur at the end.” “It is a magnificent hold to have upon fame to have sixty million people sing the verses that you have written.” John Holmes said: “How good ‘templed hills’ is, and that is not alone in the poem.” Both John Holmes and I plead to be permitted to come to the class dinner, but Doctor Holmes was very funny. He pooh-poohed us both; we were only children, and we were not to be present at so rare a solemnity. For me, I already felt that I had been wicked in wasting so much of his time. But he has the gift of making you think that you are the only person in the world, and that he is only living for your pleasure. Still I knew, as a matter of 107 fact, that this was not so, and very unwillingly I took myself away.
As I walked home I meditated on the fate of a first-rate book in our time. Holmes had expressed unaffected surprise that I spoke with the gratitude which I felt about his “Life of Emerson.” The book must have cost him the hard work of a year. It is as remarkable a study as one poet ever made of another. Yet I think he said to me that no one had seemed to understand the care and effort which he had given to it.