Oliver Wendell Holmes | Page 6

heart could not withhold itself from any chance of
response, but he did wish always to be fully understood, and to be liked
by those he liked. He gave his liking cautiously, though, for the
affluence of his sympathies left him without the reserves of colder
natures, and he had to make up for these with careful circumspection.
He wished to know the character of the person who made overtures to
his acquaintance, for he was aware that his friendship lay close to it; he
wanted to be sure that he was a nice person, and though I think he
preferred social quality in his fellow-man, he did not refuse himself to
those who had merely a sweet and wholesome humanity. He did not
like anything that tasted or smelt of Bohemianism in the personnel of
literature, but he did not mind the scent of the new-ploughed earth, or
even of the barn-yard. I recall his telling me once that after two
younger brothers-in-letters had called upon him in the odor of an
habitual beeriness and smokiness, he opened the window; and the very
last time I saw him he remembered at eighty-five the offence he had
found on his first visit to New York, when a metropolitan poet had
asked him to lunch in a basement restaurant.

III.
He seemed not to mind, however, climbing to the little apartment we
had in Boston when we came there in 1866, and he made this call upon
us in due form, bringing Mrs. Holmes with him as if to accent the
recognition socially. We were then incredibly young, much younger
than I find people ever are nowadays, and in the consciousness of our
youth we felt, to the last exquisite value of the fact, what it was to have
the Autocrat come to see us; and I believe he was not displeased to
perceive this; he liked to know that you felt his quality in every way.
That first winter, however, I did not see him often, and in the spring we
went to live in Cambridge, and thereafter I met him chiefly at
Longfellow's, or when I came in to dine at the Fieldses', in Boston. It
was at certain meetings of the Dante Club, when Longfellow read aloud
his translation for criticism, and there was supper later, that one saw the
doctor; and his voice was heard at the supper rather than at the criticism,
for he was no Italianate. He always seemed to like a certain turn of the
talk toward the mystical, but with space for the feet on a firm ground of
fact this side of the shadows; when it came to going over among them,
and laying hold of them with the band of faith, as if they were
substance, he was not of the excursion. It is well known how fervent, I
cannot say devout, a spiritualist Longfellow's brother-in-law, Appleton,
was; and when he was at the table too, it took all the poet's delicate skill
to keep him and the Autocrat from involving themselves in a
cataclysmal controversy upon the matter of manifestations. With
Doctor Holmes the inquiry was inquiry, to the last, I believe, and the
burden of proof was left to the ghosts and their friends. His attitude was
strictly scientific; he denied nothing, but he expected the supernatural
to be at least as convincing as the natural.
There was a time in his history when the popular ignorance classed him
with those who were once rudely called infidels; but the world has
since gone so fast and so far that the mind he was of concerning
religious belief would now be thought religious by a good half of the
religious world. It is true that he had and always kept a grudge against
the ancestral Calvinism which afflicted his youth; and he was through
all rises and lapses of opinion essentially Unitarian; but of the honest
belief of any one, I am sure he never felt or spoke otherwise than most

tolerantly, most tenderly. As often as he spoke of religion, and his talk
tended to it very often, I never heard an irreligious word from him, far
less a scoff or sneer at religion; and I am certain that this was not
merely because he would have thought it bad taste, though undoubtedly
he would have thought it bad taste; I think it annoyed, it hurt him, to be
counted among the iconoclasts, and he would have been profoundly
grieved if he could have known how widely this false notion of him
once prevailed. It can do no harm at this late day to impart from the
secrets of the publishing house the fact that a supposed infidelity in the
tone of his story The Guardian Angel cost the Atlantic Monthly