Remarks, and centennial poem by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes

Delivered at the Centennial Celebration of the Academy1
Held at Old South Church, Boston, May 26, 1880

[After the opening remarks of Robert C. Winthrop, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes delivered the following remarks and poem.]

I feel... as I felt some twenty or thirty years ago, when I was caught on the midnight New York train in a heavy snow storm between Framingham and Natick. All night we seesawed back and forward between those two towns. We naturally became somewhat hungry, and some of us, perhaps, a little thirsty. Search was made for provender, and one lady produced a bag of crackers, and one gentleman a small flask containing a fluid – it was cold, I remember, and I think it must have been cold tea; but whatever it was, it was very welcome, and they dispensed it in very small quantities. In place of the supper which we expected, that was the fare we got. Now, I did not come prepared with anything for an assembly like this. I expected to be called up at the table of the Academy, after the gastric exercises had put the audience in a pleasant state of mind, and there to read a few verses to which I had been able to devote but a very little time. To read them to an audience like this is somewhat trying to my sensibilities, but I will trust implicitly to its good nature.

As a basis for my theme I took up the first volume of the records of the Academy2 and ran over a list of papers to see what the members were thinking and talking about in those times. I found that Manasseh Cutler wrote on a transit of Mercury, in addition to his able botanical article, that President Willard shed his light in an account of a recent eclipse, that Benjamin West – not the great painter, but perhaps a great mathematician – gave some rules about the extraction of roots, that Bowdoin contributed an elaborate article on an orb which surrounds the whole visible material system, that Williams wrote on the darkness of May 19, 1780, another member on the effects of lightning on a rock in Gloucester, and that many others discussed articles of a kindred nature. The result of this search furnishes the argument of these verses.

Sire, son and grandson; so the century glides;
     Three lives, three strides, three footprints in the sand;
Silent as midnight’s falling meteor slides
     Into the stillness of the far-off land;
     How dim the space its little arc has spanned!

See on this opening page the names renowned
     Tombed in these records on our dusty shelves,
Scarce on the scroll of living memory found,
     Save where the wan-eyed antiquarian delves;
     Shadows they seem; ah, what are we ourselves?

Pale ghosts of Bowdoin, Winthrop, Willard, West,
     Sages of busy brain and wrinkled brow,
Searchers of Nature’s secrets unconfessed,
     Asking of all things Whence and Why and How –
     What problems meet your larger vision now?

Has Gannett tracked the wild Aurora’s path?
     Has Bowdoin found his all-surrounding sphere?
What question puzzles ciphering Philomath?
     Could Williams make the hidden causes clear
     Of the Dark Day that filled the land with fear?

Dear ancient schoolboys! Nature taught to them
     The simple lessons of the star and flower,
Showed them strange sights; how on a single stem –
     Admire the marvels of Creative Power! —
     Twin apples grew, one sweet, the other sour;

How from the hilltop where our eyes behold
     In even ranks the plumed and bannered maize
Range its long columns, in the days of old
     The live volcano shot its angry blaze,?—
     Dead since the showers of Noah’s watery days;

How when the lightning split the mighty rock,
     The spreading fury of the shaft was spent;
How the young scion joined the alien stock,
     And when and where the homeless swallows went
     To pass the winter of their discontent.

Scant were the gleanings in those years of dearth;
     No Cuvier yet had clothed the fossil bones
That slumbered, waiting for their second birth;
     No Lyell read the legend of the stones;
     Science still pointed to her empty thrones.

Dreaming of orbs to eyes of earth unknown,
     Herschel looked heavenwards in the starlight pale;
Lost in those awful depths he trod alone.
     Laplace stood mute before the lifted veil;
     While home-bred Humboldt trimmed his toy-ship’s sail.

No mortal feet these loftier heights had gained
     Whence the wide realms of Nature we descry;
In vain their eyes our longing fathers strained
     To scan with wondering gaze the summits high
     That far beneath their children’s footpaths lie.

Smile at their first small ventures as we may,
     The schoolboy’s copy shapes the scholar’s hand,
Their grateful memory fills our hearts to-day :
     Brave, hopeful, wise, this bower of peace they planned,
     While war’s dread ploughshare scarred the suffering land.

Child of our children’s children yet unborn,
     When on this yellow page you turn your eyes,
Where the brief record of this Mayday morn
     In phrase antique and faded letters lies,
     How vague, how pale, our flitting ghosts will rise!

Yet in our veins the blood ran warm and red,
     For us the fields were green, the skies were blue,
Though from our dust the spirit long has fled,
     We lived, we loved, we toiled, we dreamed like you,
     Smiled at our sires and thought how much we knew.

Oh might our spirits for one hour return,
     When the next century rounds its hundredth ring,
All the strange secrets it shall teach to learn,
     To hear the larger truths its years shall bring,
     Its wiser sages talk, its sweeter minstrels sing!