A CORNER IN DOCTOR HOLMES’S STUDY.
I was curious to know about Doctor Holmes’s experience of country life, he knows all nature’s processes so well. So he told me how it happened that he went to Pittsfield. It seems that, a century and a half ago, his ancestor, Jacob Wendell, had a royal grant for the whole township there, with some small exception, perhaps. The place was at first called Pontoosoc, then Wendelltown, and only afterward got the name of Pittsfield from William Pitt. One part of the Wendell property descended to Doctor Holmes’s mother. When he had once seen it he was struck with its beauty and fitness 104 for a country home, and asked her that he might have it for his own. It was there that he built a house in which he lived for eight or nine years. He said that the Housatonic winds backwards and forwards through it, so that to go from one end of his estate to the other in a straight line required the crossing it seven times. Here his children grew up, and he and they were enlivened anew every year by long summer days there.
He was most interesting and animated as he spoke of the vigor of life and work and poetical composition which come from being in the open air and living in the country. He wrote, at the request of the neighborhood, his poem of “The Ploughman,” to be read at a cattle-show in Pittsfield. “And when I came to read it afterwards I said, ‘Here it is! Here is open air life, here is what breathing the mountain air and living in the midst of nature does for a man!’ And I want to read you now a piece of that poem, because it contained a prophecy.” And while he was looking for the verses, he said, in the vein of the Autocrat, “Nobody knows but a man’s self how many good things he has done.”
So we found the first volume of the poems, and there is “The Ploughman,” written, observe, as early as 1849.
“O gracious Mother, whose benignant breast
Wakes us to life, and lulls us all to rest,
How thy sweet features, kind to every clime,
Mock with their smile the wrinkled front of time!
We stain thy flowers,—they blossom o’er the dead;
We rend thy bosom, and it gives us bread;