The Poet at the Breakfast-TableHolmes, Oliver Wendell
General
The Poet at the Breakfast-Table
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
American fiction -- 19th century; Conversation -- Fiction; Poetry
--There is another style which does not captivate me. I recognize an
attempt at the grand manner now and then, in persons who are well enough
in their way, but of no particular importance, socially or otherwise.
Some family tradition of wealth or distinction is apt to be at the
bottom of it, and it survives all the advantages that used to set
it off. I like family pride as well as my neighbors, and respect the
high-born fellow-citizen whose progenitors have not worked in their
shirt-sleeves for the last two generations full as much as I ought
to. But grand pere oblige; a person with a known grandfather is too
distinguished to find it necessary to put on airs. The few Royal Princes
I have happened to know were very easy people to get along with, and
had not half the social knee-action I have often seen in the collapsed
dowagers who lifted their eyebrows at me in my earlier years.
--My heart does not warm as it should do towards the persons, not
intimates, who are always too glad to see me when we meet by accident,
and discover all at once that they have a vast deal to unbosom
themselves of to me.
--There is one blameless person whom I cannot love and have no excuse
for hating. It is the innocent fellow-creature, otherwise inoffensive
to me, whom I find I have involuntarily joined on turning a corner. I
suppose the Mississippi, which was flowing quietly along, minding its
own business, hates the Missouri for coming into it all at once with
its muddy stream. I suppose the Missouri in like manner hates the
Mississippi for diluting with its limpid, but insipid current the rich
reminiscences of the varied soils through which its own stream has
wandered. I will not compare myself, to the clear or the turbid current,
but I will own that my heart sinks when I find all of a sudden I am in
for a corner confluence, and I cease loving my neighbor as myself until
I can get away from him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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