Search -
The Poet at the Breatfast-Table; He Talks With His Fellow-Boarders and the Reader
The Poet at the BreatfastTable He Talks With His FellowBoarders and the Reader Author:Oliver Wendell Holmes General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1891 Original Publisher: Printed at the Riverside Press Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.co... more »m where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: THE GAMBREL-ROOFED HOUSE AND ITS OUTLOOK. A PANORAMA, WITH SIDE-SHOWS. My birthplace, the home of my childhood and earlier and later boyhood, has within a few months passed out of the ownership of my family into the hands of that venerable Alma Mater who seems to have renewed her youth, and has certainly repainted her dormitories. In truth, when I last revisited that familiar scene and looked upon the flammantia mcenia of the old halls, "Massachusetts" with the dummy clock-dial, "Harvard" with the garrulous belfry, little " Holden " with the sculptured unpunishable cherub over its portal, and the rest of my early brick-and- mortar acquaintances, I could not help saying to myself that I had lived to see the peaceable establishment of the Red Republic of Letters. Many of the things I shall put down I have no doubt told before in a fragmentary way, how many I cannot be quite sure, as I do not very often read my own prose works. But when a man dies a great deal is said of him which has often been said in other forms, and now this dear old house is dead to me in one sense, and I want to gather up my recollections and wind a string of narrative round them, tying them up like a nosegay for the last tribute: the same blossoms in it I have often laid on its threshold while it was still living for me. We Americans are all cuckoos, -- we make our homes in the nests of other birds. I have read somewhere that the lineal descendants of the man who carted off the body of William Rufus, with WalterTyrrel's arrow sticking in it, have driven a cart (not absolutel...« less