Century Readings for a Course in American Literature

And felt the strong pulse throbbing there
Beat with low rhythm our inland air.
Meanwhile we did our nightly chores,-
Brought in the wood from out of doors,
Littered the stalls, and from the mows
Raked down the herd's-grass for the cows:
Heard the horse whinnying for his corn;
And, sharply clashing horn on horn,
Impatient down the stanchion rows
The cattle shake their walnut bows;
While, peering from his early perch
Upon the scaffold's pole of birch,
The cock his crested helmet bent
And down his querulous challenge sent. 30
Unwarmed by any sunset light

The gray day darkened into night,

I know not where His islands lift Their fronded palms in air;

So all night long the storm roared on:

I only know I cannot drift

Beyond His love and care.

With mittened hands, and caps drawn low, To guard our necks and ears from snow, We cut the solid whiteness through. And, where the drift was deepest, made A tunnel walled and overlaid With dazzling crystal: we had read Of rare Aladdin's wondrous cave, And to our own his name we gave, With many a wish the luck were ours To test his lamp's supernal powers. We reached the barn with merry din, And roused the prisoned brutes within. The old horse thrust his long head out, And grave with wonder gazed about; The cock his lusty greeting said, And forth his speckled harem led; The oxen lashed their tails, and hooked, And mild reproach of hunger looked; The horned patriarch of the sheep, Like Egypt's Amun roused from sleep, Shook his sage head with gesture mute, And emphasized with stamp of foot.

All day the gusty north-wind bore
The loosening drift its breath before;
Low circling round it southern zone,
The sun through dazzling snow-mist shone.
No church-bell lent its Christian tone
To the savage air, no social smoke

Its blown snows flashing cold and keen,
Dead white, save where some sharp ravine
Took shadow, or the somber green
Of hemlocks turned to pitchy black
Against the whiteness at their back.
For such a world and such a night
Most fitting that unwarming light,

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What matter how the night behaved?
What matter how the north-wind raved?
Blow high, blow low, not all its snow
Could quench our hearth-fire's ruddy glow.
O Time and Change! - with hair as gray
As was my sire's that winter day,
How strange it seems, with so much gone
Of life and love, to still live on!

Ah, brother! only I and thou
Are left of all that circle now,-
The dear home faces whereupon
That fitful firelight paled and shone.
Henceforward, listen as we will,
The voices of that hearth are still;
Look where we may, the wide earth o'er,
Those lighted faces smile no more.
We tread the paths their feet have worn,
We sit beneath their orchard-trees,
We hear, like them, the hum of bees
And rustle of the bladed corn;
We turn the pages that they read,

Their written words we linger o'er,
But in the sun they cast no shade,
No voice is heard, no sign is made,

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Who hath not learned, in hours of faith, The truth to flesh and sense unknown, That Life is ever lord of Death,

And Love can never lose its own!

At last the great logs, crumbling low,
Sent out a dull and duller glow,
The bull's-eye watch that hung in view,
Ticking its weary circuit through,
Pointed with mutely-warning sign
Its black hand to the hour of nine.
That sign the pleasant circle broke:
My uncle ceased his pipe to smoke,
Knocked from its bowl the refuse gray
And laid it tenderly away,

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Then roused himself to safely cover
The dull red brand with ashes over.
And while, with care, our mother laid
The work aside, her steps she stayed
One moment, seeking to express
Her grateful sense of happiness
For food and shelter, warmth and health,
And love's contentment more than wealth,
With simple wishes (not the weak,
Vain prayers which no fulfilment seek,
But such as warm the generous heart,
O'er-prompt to do with Heaven its part)
That none might lack, that bitter night,
For bread and clothing, warmth and light 235

230

Within our beds awhile we heard
The wind that round the gables roared,
With now and then a ruder shock,
Which made our very bedsteads rock.
We heard the loosened clapboards tost, 240
The board-nails snapping in the frost:
And on us, through the unplastered wall,
Felt the light-sifted snow-flakes fall;
But sleep stole on, as sleep will do
When hearts are light and life is new;
Faint and more faint the murmurs grew,
Till in the summer-land of dreams
They softened to the sound of streams,
Low stir of leaves, and dip of oars,
And lapsing waves on quiet shores

Next morn we wakened with the shout
Of merry voices high and clear;
And saw the teamsters drawing near
To break the drifted highways out.
Down the long hillside treading slow
We saw the half-buried oxen go,
Shaking the snow from heads uptost,
Their straining nostrils white with frost.
Before our door the straggling train
Drew up, an added team to gain
The elders threshed their hands a-cold,
Passed, with the cider-mug, their jokes

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Low drooping-pine-boughs winter-weighed.
From every barn a team afoot,
At every house a new recruit,
Where, drawn by Nature's subtlest law,
Haply the watchful young men saw
Sweet doorway pictures of the curls
And curious eyes of merry girls,
Lifting their hands in mock defense
Against the snow-balls' compliments,
And reading in each missive tost
The charm which Eden never lost.

Clasp, Angel of the backward look
And folded wings of ashen gray
And voice of echoes far away,
The brazen covers of thy book;
The weird palimpsest old and vast,
Wherein thou hid'st the spectral past;
Where, closely mingling, pale and glow
The characters of joy and woe;
The monographs of outlived years,
Or smile-illumed or dim with tears,

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Green hills of life that slope to death, And haunts of home, whose vistaed trees 290 Shade off to mournful cypresses

With the white, amaranths underneath. Even while I look, I can but heed

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES (1809-1894)

Had Holmes written an autobiography at forty-eight, an age when most men have taken their final place in the world, he would have said little about literary achievements. It would have been the record of a man of science, of a physician in the front rank of his profession, of the occupant of the chair of anatomy in two prominent institutions, of a specialist who had published such works as Homeopathy and its Kindred Delusions. He had sprung from a literary environment he had been born under the shadow of Harvard, into a home where authorship was no uncommon thing, and he had entered the college at sixteen as a matter of course to be graduated with what was to be the famous class of '29. Perplexed as to the profession he was best fitted to enter upon, he had, like Longfellow, at first considered the law, even spending a year in the law school, but had given it up to enter upon the study of medicine. Two years at Harvard and two more at Paris, where he seems to have been impressed only by his medical opportunities, a short period at Edinburgh, and he was back again in Boston equipped for his new work. He built up for himself a practice in Boston, he became lecturer on anatomy at Dartmouth and in 1847 was given the chair of anatomy at Harvard. For twenty-five years literature was to him a pleasing diversion not to be taken at all seriously.

For one brief period he had taken it seriously. In college he had had a poetic period during which he had contributed freely to the Collegian and to other journals such poems as The Height of the Ridiculous,' The Comet,' 'My Aunt,' "The Last Leaf,' Old Ironsides,'-remarkable work indeed, but as he had become more and more interested in his profession, he had gathered it up as Poems in 1836,- a book to be republished at intervals and had considered it in reality a closed chapter.- an old portfolio' containing the relics of his vanished boyhood. The emergence of Holmes, the man of letters who was destined to dominate completely the specialist and professor, came in 1857 with the establishment of the Atlantic Monthly. Lowell, whether by editorial intuition, or critical discernment, or by a crafty desire to make his companion share the responsibility for the new magazine of which the group had made him editor, had insisted that his Harvard colleague should contribute a serial to the first volume. Thus challenged, Holmes produced The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, which not only put the magazine upon its feet but gave its author at a bound a permanent place in American literature. Encouraged by his success, he contributed other series of Autocrat papers: The Professor at the Breakfast Table, 1860. The Professor's Story, afterwards published as Elsie Venner, 1861, The Guardian Angel, 1867, and The Poet at the Breakfast Table. 1872.

His resignation of the chair at Harvard in 1882 marks the beginning of the last period of big litopore lika He would devote himself now entirely to authorship, and the result was Pages from an Old Volume of Life, and Medical Essays, 1883, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1884, A Mortal Antirathu. 1885. Our Hundred Days in Europe. 1887, Before the Curfew (final poems). 1888, and Over the Tea-Cups, 1890. He lingered until 1894, until he was indeed the last leaf on the tree, the last prominent member of the remarkable group that we call to-day The New England School.

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