CHAPTER V

SCHOOL LIFE

When young Oliver was ten, he was sent about a mile away to a school where one of the pupils was Margaret Fuller, who afterwards became a famous writer. As a girl, says Holmes, she had the reputation of being “smart.” Once she wrote a school essay which was shown to the father of Oliver. It began, “It is a _trite_ remark.” But Oliver didn’t know what _trite_ meant. It was to him a crushing discovery of her superiority. She was stately and distant, as if she had great thoughts of her own; she was a diligent student, and read a great many of what she called “naw-vels.” “A remarkable point about her,” says Holmes, “was that long, flexile neck, arching and undulating in strange sinuous movements, which one who loved her compared to those of a swan, and one who loved her not to the serpent that tempted Eve.”

After five years at this school, Oliver was taken to Andover, and left at the house of a professor in the theological seminary. He went to Phillips Academy, where he studied a year preparatory to entering Harvard College. There he met a rosy-faced boy named Phineas Barnes, and the two became great friends. Phineas did not go to Harvard College, and they were soon separated; but they always remained friends, and kept up a correspondence as long as they lived.

At this time, says one of his biographers, he was an energetic and lively youngster, full of fun and mischief, with tendencies in the way of flageolets and flutes, and with a weakness for pistols and guns and cigars, which latter he would hide in the barrel of the pistol, where his mother’s eyes would never care to look for them.

One of the objects of most interest to the boys at this school was a tutor who had had a dream that he would fall dead while he was praying. He regarded the dream as a warning, and asked the boys to come in turn to see him before he died. Says Holmes, “More than one boy kept his eye on him during his devotions, possessed by the same feeling the man had who followed Van Amburgh about with the expectation, let us not say hope, of seeing the lion bite his head off sooner or later.”

Years later he revisited these scenes. He says that the ghost of a boy was at his side as he wandered among the places he knew so well: “‘Two tickets for Boston,’ I said to the man at the station.

“But the little ghost whispered, ‘When you leave this place you will leave me behind you.’

“‘One ticket for Boston, if you please. Goodbye, little ghost.’”

At last Holmes returned to Cambridge and immediately entered Harvard College, in “the famous class of ’29.” He had many well-known classmates, among them the Rev. Samuel Francis Smith, the Rev. Dr. James Freeman Clarke, and others. Smith was afterwards famous as the author of “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” and Dr. Holmes, in one of his poems, thus writes about him:

And there’s a nice youngster of excellent pith,— Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith; But he shouted a song for the brave and the free,— Just read on his medal, ‘My country’ ‘of thee!’

Charles Sumner was in the next class below, and the famous historian Motley two classes below. Though Motley was the youngest student in the college, he and Holmes afterward became the most intimate of friends, and so remained through life; and when Motley was dead Holmes wrote his biography.

Holmes said Motley looked the ideal of a young poet, and he goes on to describe him: “His finely shaped and expressive features, his large, luminous eyes, his dark waving hair, the singularly spirited set of his head, his well outlined figure, gave promise of manly beauty.”

After this description of Motley, read the following which Holmes gives of himself in a letter to Phineas Barnes:

“I, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Junior in Harvard University, am a plumeless biped of exactly five feet three inches when standing in a pair of substantial boots made by Mr. Russell of this town, having eyes which I call blue, and hair which I do not know what to call.

“Secondly, with regard to my moral qualities, I am rather lazy than otherwise, and certainly do not study as hard as I ought to. I am not dissipated and I am not sedate, and when I last ascertained my college rank I stood in the humble situation of seventeenth scholar.”

In another letter written when in college to his friend Phineas he says:

“‘What do I do?’ I read a little, study a little, smoke a little, and eat a good deal. ‘What do I think?’ I think that’s a deuced hard question. ‘What have I been doing these three years?’ Why, I have been growing a little in body, and I hope in mind; I have been learning a little of almost everything, and a good deal of some things.”

And in still another letter, he says: “I have been writing poetry like a madman, and then I have been talking sentiment like a turtle-dove, and gadding about among the sweet faces, and doing all such silly things that spoil you for everything else. This month of May is too good for anything but love.”