Last night the sun went pale to bed,
The moon in halos hid her head.
The boding shepherd heaves a sigh,
For see! a rainbow spans the sky.
The walls are damp, the ditches smell,
Closed is the pink-ey’d pimpernel.
Hark! how the chairs and tables crack;
Old Betty’s joints are on the rack.
Loud quack the ducks, the peacocks cry;
The distant hills are looking nigh.
How restless are the snorting swine—
The busy flies disturb the kine.
Low o’er the grass the swallow wings;
The cricket, too, how loud it sings!
Puss on the hearth, with velvet paws,
Sits smoothing o’er her whiskered jaws.
Through the clear stream the fishes rise,
And nimbly catch th’ incautious flies.
The sheep were seen at early light
Cropping the meads with eager bite.
Tho’ June, the air is cold and chill;
The mellow black-bird’s voice is still.
The glow-worms, numerous and bright,
Illumed the dewy dell last night.
At dusk the squalid toad was seen
Hopping, crawling, o’er the green.
The frog has lost his yellow vest,
And in a dingy suit is dressed.
The leech, disturbed, is newly risen
Quite to the summit of his prison.
The whirling wind the dust obeys,
And in the rapid eddy plays.
My dog, so altered is his taste,
Quits mutton bones on grass to feast;
And see yon rooks, how odd their flight,
They imitate the gliding kite,
Or seem precipitate to fall,
As if they felt the piercing ball.
’Twill surely rain—I see with sorrow,
Our jaunt must be put off to-morrow.
This poem has been at many tongues’ ends in threatening weather, from that day to this. Jenner gave his whole mind to what he was about; and when he spoke or wrote on matters of surgical investigation, it might seem as if he had no interests beyond pathology; but when we look into his correspondence with his master and friend, John Hunter, we find the two great men as eager about birds, and bees, and eels, and hedgehogs, as Audubon, and Huber, and Cuvier; and their love of nature, and keenness about the habits, as well as the structure, of animals and insects has a strong infusion of poetry in it. Jenner’s name first became famous in connection with his disclosure of the peculiarity of the cuckoo, in its structure and habits. He studied the bird for years; and made so thorough an exhibition of its ways in the well-known paper published by the Royal Society that his friends advised him, many years afterwards, not to send to the same society his proposal of vaccination, lest he should thereby lose the scientific reputation he had acquired by his researches on the cuckoo. We find John Hunter dunning him for cuckoos. He wants an old one;—he wants a young one; he wants eggs in various stages; and Jenner seems to have been always able to lay his hand on any creature that his friend desired to have. It is pleasant to know that his researches were made in a great variety of places, from his custom of devoting himself so heartily to his patients when they were seriously ill, as to remain in the house, making his rounds from thence, both among his patients and in the near neighbourhood, where he soon hunted out all the animals and plants. The country people had a great opinion of him, from his being learned in common things, as well as in the secrets of his profession. He was as well known as the bearer of the mail bags, as he rode in his blue coat and yellow buttons, his buckskins and boots, with their massive silver spurs, and his silver-handled riding-whip. Of course, being born in 1749, he wore his hair in a club, with a broad-brimmed round hat above it.
With all this apparent cheerfulness, and with such a love of country life in his native district as to have declined to accompany Captain Cook in his second voyage, and refused a lucrative appointment in India, Jenner was prone to melancholy. His foreign biographers have spoken of his being a hypochondriac through life. There seems to be no evidence of such an amount of depression as this; but, with all his vivacity and capacity for mirth, it is certain that his disposition was not only reserved but melancholy. This tendency to discouragement and to disgust with life so greatly enhances his merit in his stedfast pursuit of his chief discovery as to claim thus much notice. As he was of too modest and kindly a nature to trouble his friends with his personal griefs, it is most respectful to him to say no more on this head than a due appreciation of him demands.
During his occupation with a very good practice as a surgeon, he was always searching into the causes or prior stages of everything that was obscure; and a letter of his to Dr. Heberden is considered a sufficient proof that he, and not Dr. Heberden, discovered the cause, or more properly the nature of the angina pectoris, a disease till then as obscure as almost any on the physician’s list.
During all these years he had never lost sight of an incident which had struck him while a surgeon’s apprentice at Sodbury, near Bristol. A young woman from the country called at the surgery for advice. The subject of small-pox (the commonest of all topics of conversation in those days) was mentioned; and she remarked that she was in no danger from small-pox, as she had had the cowpock. Jenner put down in his note-book whatever he heard on this subject afterwards; and, among other things, the anecdote of the Duchess of Cleveland and Moll Davis (Lady Mary Davis): that when the Duchess was warned by Moll Davis that she might any day lose her beauty by small-pox, she replied that she did not stand in that danger, as she had had a disorder which would prevent her ever having the small-pox.
The visit of the country girl took place before 1776; for that was the year when Jenner went to London to complete his professional education. He repeatedly spoke to Hunter on the prospect thus afforded of getting the mastery of the small-pox; but Hunter never gave his mind to it, nor seemed to consider it anything more than a boyish dream of his pupil’s. Other wise men were appealed to, with no better success; and Jenner had to pursue his researches alone. The date should be attended to, because attempts have been made