The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table - Oliver Wendell Holmes

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      A million sleepless lids, they say,

       Will be at least a warning;

       And so the flowers would watch by day,

       The stars from eve to morning.

      On hill and prairie, field and lawn,

       Their dewy eyes upturning,

       The flowers still watch from reddening dawn

       Till western skies are burning.

      Alas! each hour of daylight tells

       A tale of shame so crushing,

       That some turn white as sea-bleached shells,

       And some are always blushing.

      But when the patient stars look down

       On all their light discovers,

       The traitor’s smile, the murderer’s frown,

       The lips of lying lovers,

      They try to shut their saddening eyes,

       And in the vain endeavour

       We see them twinkling in the skies,

       And so they wink forever.

      What do you think of these verses my friends?—Is that piece an impromptu? said my landlady’s daughter. (Aet. 19 +. Tender-eyed blonde. Long ringlets. Cameo pin. Gold pencil-case on a chain. Locket. Bracelet. Album. Autograph book. Accordeon. Reads Byron, Tupper, and Sylvanus Cobb, junior, while her mother makes the puddings. Says “Yes?” when you tell her anything.)—Oui et non, ma petite—Yes and no, my child. Five of the seven verses were written off-hand; the other two took a week—that is, were hanging round the desk in a ragged, forlorn, unrhymed condition as long as that. All poets will tell you just such stories. C’est le dernier pas qui coute. Don’t you know how hard it is for some people to get out of a room after their visit is really over? They want to be off, and you want to have them off, but they don’t know how to manage it. One would think they had been built in your parlour or study, and were waiting to be launched. I have contrived a sort of ceremonial inclined plane for such visitors, which being lubricated with certain smooth phrases, I back them down, metaphorically speaking, stern-foremost, into their “native element,” the great ocean of out-doors. Well, now, there are poems as hard to get rid of as these rural visitors. They come in glibly, use up all the serviceable rhymes, day, ray, beauty, duty, skies, eyes, other, brother, mountain, fountain, and the like; and so they go on until you think it is time for the wind-up, and the wind-up won’t come on any terms. So they lie about until you get sick of the sight of them, and end by thrusting some cold scrap of a final couplet upon them, and turning them out of doors. I suspect a good many “impromptus” could tell just such a story as the above.—Here turning to our landlady, I used an illustration which pleased the company much at the time, and has since been highly commanded. “Madam,” I said, “you can pour three gills and three quarters of honey from that pint jug, if it is full, in less than one minute; but, Madam, you could not empty that last quarter of a gill, though you were turned into a marble Hebe, and held the vessel upside down for a thousand years.”

      One gets tired to death of the old, old rhymes, such as you see in that copy of verses—which I don’t mean to abuse, or to praise either. I always feel as if I were a cobbler, putting new top-leathers to an old pair of boot-soles and bodies, when I am fitting sentiments to these venerable jingles.

      … youth

      . … . morning

      . … . truth

      . … . warning

      Nine tenths of the “Juvenile Poems” written spring out of the above musical and suggestive coincidences.

      “Yes?” said our landlady’s daughter.

      I did not address the following remark to her, and I trust, from her limited range of reading, she will never see it; I said it softly to my next neighbour.

      When a young female wears a flat circular side—curl, gummed on each temple—when she walks with a male, not arm in arm, but his arm against the back of hers—and when she says “Yes?” with the note of interrogation, you are generally safe in asking her what wages she gets, and who the “feller” was you saw her with.

      “What were you whispering?” said the daughter of the house, moistening her lips, as she spoke, in a very engaging manner.

      “I was only laying down a principle of social diagnosis.”

      “Yes?”

      —It is curious to see how the same wants and tastes find the same implements and modes of expression in all times and places. The young ladies of Otaheite, as you may see in Cook’s Voyages, had a sort of crinoline arrangement fully equal in radius to the largest spread of our own lady-baskets. When I fling a Bay-State shawl over my shoulders, I am only taking a lesson from the climate that the Indian had learned before me. A blanket-shawl we call it, and not a plaid; and we wear it like the aborigines, and not like the Highlanders.

      —We are the Romans of the modern world—the great assimilating people. Conflicts and conquests are of course necessary accidents with us, as with our prototypes. And so we come to their style of weapon. Our army sword is the short, stiff, pointed gladius of the Romans; and the American bowie-knife is the same tool, modified to meet the daily wants of civil society. I announce at this table an axiom not to be found in Montesquieu or the journals of Congress:—

      The race that shortens its weapons lengthens its boundaries.

      Corollary. It was the Polish lance that left Poland at last with nothing of her own to bound.

      “Dropped from her nerveless grasp the shattered spear!”

      What business had Sarmatia to be fighting for liberty with a fifteen-foot pole between her and the breasts of her enemies? If she had but clutched the old Roman and young American weapon, and come to close quarters, there might have been a chance for her; but it would have spoiled the best passage in “The Pleasures of Hope.”

      —Self-made men?—Well, yes. Of course everybody likes and respects self-made men. It is a great deal better to be made in that way than not to be made at all. Are any of you younger people old enough to remember that Irishman’s house on the marsh at Cambridgeport, which house he built from drain to chimney-top with his own hands? It took him a good many years to build it, and one could see that it was a little out of plumb, and a little wavy in outline, and a little queer and uncertain in general aspect. A regular hand could certainly have built a better house; but it was a very good house for a “self-made” carpenter’s house, and people praised it, and said how remarkably well the Irishman had succeeded. They never thought of praising the fine blocks of houses a little farther on.

      Your self-made man, whittled into shape with his own jack-knife, deserves more credit, if that is all, than the regular engine-turned article, shaped by the most approved pattern, and French-polished by society and travel. But as to saying that one is every way the equal of the other, that is another matter. The right of strict social discrimination of all things and persons, according to their merits, native or acquired, is one of the most precious republican privileges. I take the liberty to exercise it, when I say, that, other things being equal, in most relations of life I prefer a man of family.

      What do I mean by a man of family?—O, I’ll give you a general idea of what I mean. Let us give him a first-rate fit out; it costs us nothing.

      Four or five generations of gentlemen and gentlewomen; among them a member of his Majesty’s Council for the Province, a Governor or so, one or two Doctors of Divinity, a member of Congress, not later than the time of top-boots with tassels.

      Family portraits. The member of the Council, by Smibert. The

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