CHAPTER IV

CAMBRIDGE

Holmes, the poet, was born and brought up in a poetic town. The old, yellow, hip-roofed house stood close beside the grounds of Harvard College; and all around were homes of men who were famous or were to be famous. Cambridge has always been a quaint, quiet, peaceful, well-bred town. It stands at the back door of Boston, a half hour’s walk from that “hub of the solar system.” Elms and poplars line its streets, its houses look like rich old relics, and everywhere are evidences of comfort and culture. Imagine how George Washington and General Warren, and all the Revolutionary heroes walked up and down these streets! Already in the time of Washington many famous people had lived there; and after him came a whole procession of great men, one after another—Longfellow, Emerson, Sumner, Garrison, Motley—their names are too many to mention.

In the center of the town are the Harvard College buildings, of brick and stone, some old, some new, surrounded by broad green lawns, and some of them overrun with ivy. Then, running out from the college grounds as a hub, are streets like the spokes of a wheel. In one direction is Mount Auburn cemetery, where hundreds of the famous dead lie buried, and which is the most beautiful cemetery in the United States. In another direction are Lexington and Concord, while on another side the Charles River flows serenely along towards Boston Bay.

Everywhere about are to be seen college students and professors. Here is a dapper young man with a pointed beard—the new professor of English; there is a bent old man, white-haired, tottering in his gait—he is the famous professor of Greek. Some of the students are gay and always cracking jokes; others have deep-set eyes and shabby clothes—“plugs” the others call them, for they are very serious minded young fellows and never waste a moment of time. Then there are many more who go singing and shouting through the streets at late hours in the night, causing the people who are abed and asleep to be aroused from their slumbers only to stick their heads out of the windows and silently wish the young fellows were anywhere but in Cambridge.

Such is this famous college town; and a very enjoyable place it is to live in. A great many famous people come here to preach in the churches, or to lecture, or to speak at banquets and meetings. A great many pretty girls come here to see the sights and visit their brothers—and look at the crowds of handsome young men.

In this old college town, this young aristocrat, the descendant of patriots and governors and men of wealth and women of beauty, grew quietly up to manhood. He went to school, learned his lessons well, but not too well, never got into trouble, had a good time, and did not fret or worry about anything, or annoy anybody, even his teachers. There is a story of a famous feruling that he got—only one—and years afterward the teacher came to him to apologize. Holmes in a letter tells in his humorous way how the repentant master came and introduced himself to the now famous poet, how in an embarrassed manner he recalled old days, and finally the feruling, and then said he was sorry he had given it. Holmes declared he had richly deserved it; but the schoolmaster was glad to get away. Apologizing to a pupil for whipping him is indeed an embarrassing thing.

It was not at school, however, but in his father’s library that Oliver learned most. That room in the corner of the old house where were the dents of the British muskets, was the study, and it was filled from floor to ceiling, every wall, with books. He says he “bumped about among books from the time when he was hardly taller than one of his father’s or grandfather’s folios.”

Beside the library, there was the old garden, which he himself has quaintly described. “There were old lilac bushes at the right of the entrance, and in the corner at the left that remarkable moral pear tree which gave me one of my first lessons in life. Its fruit never ripened, but always rotted at the core just before it began to grow mellow. It was a vulgar specimen at best, and was set there no doubt to preach its annual sermon. But in the northern border was a high-bred Saint Michael pear tree, which taught a lesson that all of gentle blood might take to heart; for its fruit used to get hard and dark, and break into unseemly cracks, so that when the lord of the harvest came for it, it was like those rich men’s sons we see too often, who have never ripened, but only rusted, hardened, and shrunken. We had peaches, lovely nectarines, and sweet white grapes, growing and coming to kindly maturity in those days.

“As for the garden beds, they were cared for by the Jonathan or Ephraim of the household, sometimes assisted by one Rube, a little old Scotch gardener, with a stippled face and a lively temper. Nothing but old-fashioned flowers in them—hyacinths pushing their green beaks through as soon as the snow was gone, or earlier; tulips, coming up in the shapes of cornucopiæ; peonies, butting their blunt way through the loosened earth; lilies, roses—damask, white, blush, cinnamon; larkspurs, lupines, and gorgeous hollyhocks.

“The yellow-birds used to be very fond of some sunflowers that grew close to the pear tree with a moral. I remember their flitting about, golden in the golden light, over the golden flowers, as if they were flakes of curdled sunshine.”

Oliver had a younger brother John, who was as light of heart and full of fun as he; and gay times they had together in this quiet old town, and this old house with its books and its garden. He says that as a boy he was afraid of the tall masts of ships that used to come up the river, and he would hide his eyes from them. And he was afraid, too, of a great wooden hand, the sign of a glove-maker whose shop he sometimes passed.

So in happiness and comfort he dreamed his early years away, with his brothers and sisters and father and mother. He was like a fine, luscious pear in that old garden, ripening without rotting at the core, or yet getting hard and full of cracks.