A Mortal Antipathy | Page 2

Oliver Wendell Holmes
especially,
and the first thing I beg leave to introduce relates to these.
Do not throw this volume down, or turn to another page, when I tell
you that the earliest of them, that of which I now am about to speak,
was opened more than fifty years ago. This is a very dangerous
confession, for fifty years make everything hopelessly old-fashioned,
without giving it the charm of real antiquity. If I could say a hundred
years, now, my readers would accept all I had to tell them with a
curious interest; but fifty years ago,--there are too many talkative old
people who know all about that time, and at best half a century is a
half-baked bit of ware. A coin-fancier would say that your
fifty-year-old facts have just enough of antiquity to spot them with rust,
and not enough to give them--the delicate and durable patina which is
time's exquisite enamel.
When the first Portfolio was opened the coin of the realm bore for its
legend,--or might have borne if the more devout hero-worshippers
could have had their way,--Andreas Jackson, Populi Gratia, Imp.
Caesar. Aug. Div., Max., etc., etc. I never happened to see any gold or
silver with that legend, but the truth is I was not very familiarly
acquainted with the precious metals at that period of my career, and,
there might have been a good deal of such coin in circulation without
my handling it, or knowing much about it.
Permit me to indulge in a few reminiscences of that far-off time.
In those days the Athenaeum Picture Gallery was a principal centre of
attraction to young Boston people and their visitors. Many of us got our
first ideas of art, to say nothing of our first lessons in the comparatively
innocent flirtations of our city's primitive period, in that agreeable
resort of amateurs and artists.
How the pictures on those walls in Pearl Street do keep their places in
the mind's gallery! Trumbull's Sortie of Gibraltar, with red enough in it
for one of our sunset after-glows; and Neagle's full-length portrait of

the blacksmith in his shirt-sleeves; and Copley's long-waistcoated
gentlemen and satin-clad ladies,--they looked like gentlemen and ladies,
too; and Stuart's florid merchants and high-waisted matrons; and
Allston's lovely Italian scenery and dreamy, unimpassioned women, not
forgetting Florimel in full flight on her interminable
rocking-horse,--you may still see her at the Art Museum; and the rival
landscapes of Doughty and Fisher, much talked of and largely praised
in those days; and the Murillo,--not from Marshal Soup's collection;
and the portrait of Annibale Caracci by himself, which cost the
Athenaeum a hundred dollars; and Cole's allegorical pictures, and his
immense and dreary canvas, in which the prostrate shepherds and the
angel in Joseph's coat of many colors look as if they must have been
thrown in for nothing; and West's brawny Lear tearing his clothes to
pieces. But why go on with the catalogue, when most of these pictures
can be seen either at the Athenaeum building in Beacon Street or at the
Art Gallery, and admired or criticised perhaps more justly, certainly not
more generously, than in those earlier years when we looked at them
through the japanned fish-horns?
If one happened to pass through Atkinson Street on his way to the
Athenaeum, he would notice a large, square, painted, brick house, in
which lived a leading representative of old-fashioned coleopterous
Calvinism, and from which emerged one of the liveliest of literary
butterflies. The father was editor of the "Boston Recorder," a very
respectable, but very far from amusing paper, most largely patronized
by that class of the community which spoke habitually of the first day
of the week as "the Sahbuth." The son was the editor of several
different periodicals in succession, none of them over severe or serious,
and of many pleasant books, filled with lively descriptions of society,
which he studied on the outside with a quick eye for form and color,
and with a certain amount of sentiment, not very deep, but real, though
somewhat frothed over by his worldly experiences.
Nathaniel Parker Willis was in full bloom when I opened my first
Portfolio. He had made himself known by his religious poetry,
published in his father's paper, I think, and signed "Roy." He had
started the "American Magazine," afterwards merged in the "New York

Mirror." He had then left off writing scripture pieces, and taken to
lighter forms of verse. He had just written
"I'm twenty-two, I'm twenty-two, They idly give me joy, As if I should
be glad to know That I was less a boy."
He was young, therefore, and already famous. He came very near being
very handsome. He was tall; his hair, of light brown color, waved in
luxuriant abundance; his cheek was as rosy as
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