' 'Think of the Old World--that part of it
which is the seat of ancient civilisation! . . . A man cannot help
marching in step with his kind in the rear of such a procession.' 'Young
folk look on a face as a unit; children who go to school with any given
little John Smith see in his name a distinctive appellation.' And that
exquisitely sensitive passage on the nervous outward movement and the
inward tranquillity of the woods. Such things are the best this good
author gives us, whether they go gay with metaphor, or be bare thoughts
shapely with their own truth.
Part of the charm of Dr. Holmes's comment on life, and of the phrase
wherein he secures it, arises from his singular vigilance. He has
unpreoccupied and alert eyes. Strangely enough, by the way, this
watchfulness is for once as much at fault as would be the slovenly
observation of an ordinary man, in the description of a horse's gallop,
'skimming along within a yard of the ground.' Who shall trust a man's
nimble eyes after this, when habit and credulity have taught him? Not an
inch nearer the ground goes the horse of fact at a gallop than at a walk.
But Dr. Holmes's vigilance helps him to somewhat squalid purpose in his
studies of New England inland life. Much careful literature besides has
been spent, after the example of _Elsie Venner_ and the _Autocrat_,
upon the cottage worldliness, the routine of abundant and common comforts
achieved by a distressing household industry, the shrillness, the unrest,
the best-parlour emulation, the ungraceful vanity, of Americans of the
country-side and the country-town; upon their affections made vulgar by
undemonstrativeness, and their consciences made vulgar by
demonstrativeness--their kindness by reticence, and their religion by
candour.
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