Complete Project Gutenberg Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. WorksHolmes, Oliver Wendell
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Complete Project Gutenberg Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. Works
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
American literature; Literature -- Collections
Out of all these inevitable elements the audience is generated,--a
great compound vertebrate, as much like fifty others you have seen
as any two mammals of the same species are like each other. Each
audience laughs, and each cries, in just the same places of your
lecture; that is, if you make one laugh or cry, you make all. Even
those little indescribable movements which a lecturer takes
cognizance of, just as a driver notices his horse's cocking his
ears, are sure to come in exactly the same place of your lecture
always. I declare to you, that as the monk said about the picture
in the convent,--that he sometimes thought the living tenants were
the shadows, and the painted figures the realities,--I have
sometimes felt as if I were a wandering spirit, and this great
unchanging multivertebrate which I faced night after night was one
ever-listening animal, which writhed along after me wherever I
fled, and coiled at my feet every evening, turning up to me the
same sleepless eyes which I thought I had closed with my last
drowsy incantation!
--Oh, yes! A thousand kindly and courteous acts,--a thousand faces
that melted individually out of my recollection as the April snow
melts, but only to steal away and find the beds of flowers whose
roots are memory, but which blossom in poetry and dreams. I am not
ungrateful, nor unconscious of all the good feeling and
intelligence everywhere to be met with through the vast parish to
which the lecturer ministers. But when I set forth, leading a
string of my mind's daughters to market, as the country-folk fetch
in their strings of horses--Pardon me, that was a coarse fellow who
sneered at the sympathy wasted on an unhappy lecturer, as if,
because he was decently paid for his services, he had therefore
sold his sensibilities.--Family men get dreadfully homesick. In
the remote and bleak village the heart returns to the red blaze of
the logs in one's fireplace at home.
"There are his young barbarians all at play,"--
if he owns any youthful savages.--No, the world has a million
roosts for a man, but only one nest.
--It is a fine thing to be an oracle to which an appeal is always
made in all discussions. The men of facts wait their turn in grim
silence, with that slight tension about the nostrils which the
consciousness of carrying a "settler" in the form of a fact or a
revolver gives the individual thus armed. When a person is really
full of information, and does not abuse it to crush conversation,
his part is to that of the real talkers what the instrumental
accompaniment is in a trio or quartette of vocalists.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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