Produced by Tor Martin Kristiansen, Ron Stephens, Carol
Brown and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net
[Illustration: OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.]
LIFE OF
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
BY
E.E. BROWN
Author of "LIFE OF GARFIELD," "LIFE OF WASHINGTON,"
"FROM NIGHT TO LIGHT," ETC., ETC.
CHICAGO NEW YORK
THE WERNER COMPANY
COPYRIGHT 1884
BY D. LOTHROP AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT 1895
BY THE WERNER COMPANY
Holmes
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
CONTENTS.
CHAP. PAGE.
I. ANCESTRY 9
II. BOYHOOD 20
III. EARLY RECOLLECTIONS 30
IV. OTHER REMINISCENCES 40
V. ABROAD 49
VI. CHANGE IN THE HOME 60
VII. THE PROFESSOR 67
VIII. THE LECTURER 74
IX. NAMING THE NEW MAGAZINE 83
X. ELSIE VENNER 92
XI. FURTHER ACQUAINTANCE 107
XII. FAVORITES OF SONG 114
XIII. THE MAN OF SCIENCE 136
XIV. THE HOLMES BREAKFAST 152
XV. ORATIONS AND ESSAYS 171
XVI. THE HOME CIRCLE 208
XVII. LOVE OF NATURE 227
XVIII. THE HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL 240
XIX. TOKENS OF ESTEEM 284
XX. IN LATER YEARS 302
XXI. LAST DAYS 320
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.
CHAPTER I.
ANCESTRY.
In a quaint old gambrel-roofed house that once stood on Cambridge
Common, Oliver Wendell Holmes--poet, professor, "beloved physician"--was
born, on the twenty-ninth of August, 1809. His father, the Rev. Abiel
Holmes, was the pastor of the "First Church" in Cambridge--
That ancient church whose lofty tower,
Beneath the loftier spire,
Is shadowed when the sunset hour
Clothes the tall shaft in fire.
Here, in Revolutionary times, General Washington frequently worshiped,
and the old homestead itself was the headquarters of the American army
during the siege of Boston.
"It was a great happiness," writes the _Poet at the Breakfast-Table_,
"to have been born in an old house haunted by such recollections, with
harmless ghosts walking its corridors, with fields of waving grass and
trees and singing birds, and that vast territory of four or five acres
around it, to give a child the sense that he was born to a noble
principality....
"The gambrel-roofed house was not one of those old Tory, Episcopal
church-goer's strongholds. One of its doors opens directly upon the
Green, always called the Common; the other faces the south, a few steps
from it, over a paved foot-walk on the other side of which is the
miniature front yard, bordered with lilacs and syringas.
"The honest mansion makes no pretensions. Accessible, companionable,
holding its hand out to all--comfortable, respectable, and even in its
way dignified, but not imposing; not a house for his Majesty's
Counsellor, or the Right Reverend successor of Him who had not where to
lay his head, for something like a hundred and fifty years it has stood
in its lot, and seen the generations of men come and go like the leaves
of the forest."
The house was not originally built for a parsonage. It was first the
residence of a well-to-do tailor, who sold it to Jonathan Hastings, a
prosperous farmer whom the college students used to call "Yankee Jont.,"
and whose son was the college steward in 1775. It was long known in
Cambridge as the "Hastings House," but about the year 1792 it was sold
to Eliphalet Pearson, the Hebrew Professor at Harvard, and in 1807 it
passed into the hands of the Rev. Abiel Holmes.
For forty years the father of Oliver Wendell Holmes ministered to his
Cambridge parish, revered and loved by all who knew him. He was a man of
marked literary ability, as his _Annals of America_ shows--"full of
learning," as some one has said, "but never distressing others by
showing how learned he was."
Said T.W. Higginson, at the Holmes Breakfast:
"I should like to speak of that most delightful of sunny old men, the
father of Doctor Holmes, whom I knew and loved when I was a child.... I
was brought up in Cambridge, my father's house being next door to that
of Doctor Holmes' gambrel-roofed house, and the library I most enjoyed
tumbling about in was the same in which his infant gambols had first
disturbed the repose of the books. I shall always remember a certain
winter evening, when we boys were playing before the fire, how the old
man--gray, and gentle, and kindly as any old German professor, and never
complaining of our loudest gambols--going to the frost-covered window,
sketched with his pen-knife what seemed a cluster of brambles and a
galaxy of glittering stars, and above that he wrote, _Per aspera ad
astra_: 'Through difficulties to the stars.' He explained to us what it
meant, and I have never forgotten that quiet winter evening and the
sweet talk of that old man."
The good pastor was a graduate of Yale College, and before coming to
Cambridge had taught at his _Alma Mater_, and preached in Georgia. He
was the son of Doctor David Holmes, a physician of Woodstock, Ct., who
had served as captain in the French and Indian wars, and afterward as
surgeon in the Revolutionary army. The grandfather of Doctor David
Holmes was one of the original settlers of Woodstock.[1]
The genealogy of the Holmes family of Woodstock dates from Thomas
Holmes, a lawyer of Gray's Inn, London. In 1686, John Holmes, one of his
descendants, joined a colony from Roxbury, Mass., and settled in
Woodstock, Conn. His son David married a certain "Bathsheba," who had a
remarkable reputation as nurse and doctress.
In the great storm of 1717, when the settlers' houses were almost buried
in the snow, it is said that she climbed out of an upper-story window
and travelled on snow-shoes through almost impassable drifts to Dudley,
Mass., to visit a sick woman. The son of this noble Bathsheba was "Dr.
David," the grandfather of Oliver Wendell Holmes.
In 1790, Abiel Holmes was married to the daughter of President Stiles of
Yale, who died without children. His second wife, and the mother of
Oliver Wendell Holmes, was a daughter of Hon. Oliver Wendell, an eminent
lawyer. He was descended from various Wendells, Olivers, Quinceys, and
Bradstreets--names that belonged to the best blue blood of New
England--and his wife was Mary Jackson, a daughter of Dorothy Quincy,
the "Dorothy Q." whom Doctor Holmes has immortalized in his poem. And
just here, lest some of my readers may have forgotten some parts of this
delicious bit of family portraiture, I am tempted to give the entire
poem:
Grandmother's mother, her age I guess,
Thirteen summers or something less;
Girlish bust, but womanly air,
Smooth square forehead, with uprolled hair,
Lips that lover has never kissed,
Taper fingers and slender wrist,
Hanging sleeves of stiff brocade--
So they painted the little maid.
On her hand a parrot green
Sits unmoving and broods serene;
Hold up the canvas full in view--
Look, there's a rent the light shines through.
Dark with a century's fringe of dust,
That was a Redcoat's rapier thrust!
Such is the tale the lady old,
Dorothy's daughter's daughter told.
Who the painter was none may tell--
One whose best was not over well;
Hard and dry, it must be confessed,
Flat as a rose that has long been pressed;
Yet in her cheek the hues are bright,
Dainty colors of red and white;
And in her slender shape are seen
Hint and promise of stately mien.
Look not on her with eyes of scorn--
Dorothy Q. was a lady born!
Ay, since the galloping Normans came,
England's annals have known her name;
And still to the three-hilled rebel town
Dear is that ancient name's renown,
For many a civic wreath they won,
The youthful sire and the gray-haired son.
O damsel Dorothy! Dorothy Q.,
Strange is the gift that I owe to you;
Such a gift as never a king
Save to daughter or son might bring--
All my tenure of heart and hand,
All my title to house and land;
Mother and sister, and child and wife,
And joy and sorrow, and death and life.
What if a hundred years ago
Those close-shut lips had answered, no,
When forth the tremulous question came
That cost the maiden her Norman name;
And under the folds that look so still
The bodice swelled with the bosom's thrill
Should I be I, or would it be
One tenth another to nine tenths me?
Soft is the breath of a maiden's yes;
Not the light gossamer stirs with less;
But never a cable that holds so fast,
Through all the battles of wave and blast,
And never an echo of speech or song
That lives in the babbling air so long!
There were tones in the voice that whispered then
You may hear to-day in a hundred men.
O lady and lover, how faint and far
Your images hover, and here we are,
Solid and stirring in flesh and bone,
Edward's and Dorothy's--all their own--
A goodly record for time to show
Of a syllable spoken so long ago!
Shall I bless you, Dorothy, or forgive,
For the tender whisper that bade me live?
It shall be a blessing, my little maid,
I will heal the stab of the Redcoat's blade,
And freshen the gold of the tarnished frame,
And gild with a rhyme your household name,
So you shall smile on us, brave and bright,
As first you greeted the morning's light,
And live untroubled by woes and fears,
Through a second youth of a hundred years.
This Dorothy Quincy, it is interesting to note, was the aunt of a second
Dorothy Quincy, who married Governor Hancock. The Wendells were of Dutch
descent.
Evert Jansen Wendell, who came from East Friesland in 1645, was the
original settler in Albany. From the church records, we find that he was
the _Regerendo Dijaken_ in 1656, and upon one of the windows of the old
Dutch church in Albany, the arms of the Wendells--a ship riding at two
anchors--were represented in stained glass. Very little is known of
these early ancestors, but the name is still an influential one among
the old Knickerbocker families.
Early in the eighteenth century, Abraham and Jacob Wendell left their
Albany home and came to Boston. It is said that Jacob (the
great-grandfather of Oliver Wendell Holmes) fell in love with his future
wife, the daughter of Doctor James Oliver, when she was only nine years
of age. Seeing her at play, he was so impressed by her beauty and grace
that, like the Jacob of old, he willingly waited the flight of years.
Twelve children blessed this happy union, and the youngest daughter
married William Phillips, the first mayor of Boston, and the father of
Wendell Phillips.
Fair cousin, Wendell P.,
says Doctor Holmes in his Phi Beta Kappa poem of 1881:
Our ancestors were dwellers beside the Zuyder Zee;
Both Grotius and Erasmus were countrymen of we,
And Vondel was our namesake, though he spelt it with a v.
Jacob Wendell became, eventually, one of the richest merchants of
Boston; was a member of the City Council and colonel of the Boston
regiment. His son, Oliver (the grandfather of Doctor Holmes), was born
in 1733, and after his graduation at Harvard, in 1753, he went into
business with his father. He still continued his studies, however, and
preferring a professional life to that of a business man, he afterwards
graduated at the Law School, was admitted to the bar, and soon after
appointed Judge of Probate for Suffolk County. In Drake's _Old Landmarks
of Boston_, we find that Judge Wendell was a selectman during the siege
of Boston, and was commissioned by General Washington to raise a company
of men to watch the British after the evacuation, so that no spies might
pass between the two armies.
The original Bradstreet was Simon, the old Charter Governor, who
married Governor Dudley's daughter Anne.[2] This accomplished lady,
the first New England poetess, and frequently called by her
contemporaries "The Tenth Muse," was Doctor Holmes' grandmother's
great-great-grandmother.[3]
With such an ancestry, Oliver Wendell Holmes surely fulfils all the
conditions of "a man of family," and who will not readily agree with the
_Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table_, when he writes as follows:
"I go for the man with the family portraits against the one with the
twenty-five cent daguerreotype, unless I find out that the last is the
better of the two. I go for the man that inherits family traditions and
the cumulative humanities of at least four or five generations. Above
all things, as a child, he should have tumbled about in a library. All
men are afraid of books that have not handled them from infancy."
FOOTNOTES:
[1] From notes furnished the writer by Dr. Holmes.
[2] In the Harvard College Library may be seen a copy of Anne
Bradstreet's poems, which passed through eight editions. The
extraordinary title of her world-renowned book reads as follows:
"Several poems compiled with great variety of wit and learning, full of
delight, wherein especially is contained a complete discourse and
description of the four elements, constitutions, ages of man, seasons of
the year, together with an exact epitome of the three first monarchies,
viz., the Assyrian, Persian, Grecian, and beginning of the Roman
Commonweal to the end of their last king: with diverse other pleasant
and serious poems. By a gentlewoman in New England." This talented lady
was the ancestress not only of Oliver Wendell Holmes, but also of the
Channings, Danas and Phillipses.
[3] From notes furnished by Doctor Holmes.