OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
1809-1894
Among the boys most familiar with the scenes described in Lowell's
recollections of his youth was Oliver Wendell Holmes, the son of the
pastor of the First Congregational Church at Cambridge. Holmes was
ten years older than Lowell, but Cambridge altered little between the
birthtimes of the two poets, and in the writings of both are embalmed
many loving memories of the old village.
In his reminiscence of the famous Commencement week, so faithfully
described by Lowell, Holmes says, "I remember that week well, for
something happened to me once at that time, namely, I was born." Many
after-touches show us how the great week possessed for Holmes the same
magic charm it held for Lowell. The wonders of the menagerie where he
beheld for the first time a live tiger, the side-show where he enjoyed
the delights of Punch and Judy, and gazed with awe at the biggest live
fat boy known to showmen, and the marvels of the toy-counter, over
which hung the inscription,
"Look, but handle not,"
shared honors with the Governor's parade, and Commencement exercises,
and in fact far out-ranked them with Holmes, who confessed that he
would willingly have stayed from morning till night viewing their
delights, and declared that the sound of the tent-raising on the
Common the night before the show began could be compared to nothing
but the evening before Agincourt!
Holmes was born in August, when, he tells us in one of his charming
essays, the meadows around Cambridge were brilliant with the cardinal
flower, and blossoming buckwheat covered the fields, while the
bayberry, barberry, sweetfern, and huckleberry made delightful
retreats for the small boy of the neighborhood. In the same essay
he describes the old garden of the parsonage, with its lilac-bushes,
hyacinths, tulips, peonies, and hollyhocks, its peaches, nectarines,
and white grapes, growing in friendly companionship with the beets,
carrots, onions, and squashes, while the old pear-tree in the corner,
called by Holmes "the moral pear-tree," because its fruit never
ripened, taught him one of his earliest lessons. Bits of reminiscence
like this scattered throughout the pages of Holmes enable us to
reconstruct the scenes of his youth and to follow him from the time
he was afraid of the masts of the sloops down by the bridge, "being a
very young child," through all the years of his boyhood. The parsonage
was an old-fashioned gambrel-roofed house, which Holmes recurs to
again and again with loving remembrance. The rooms were large and
light and had been the scenes of stirring events in other days.
On the study floor could still be seen the dents of the muskets
stacked there in Revolutionary times, and an old family portrait in
one of the upper rooms still bore the sword-thrusts of the British
soldiers. A certain dark store-room contained a pile of tables and
chairs, which to the child's fancy seemed to have rushed in there to
hide, and tumbled against one another as people do when frightened.
Another store-room held an array of preserve-jars containing delicious
sweets; before the door of this room he would stand with one eye
glued to the keyhole while his childish imagination revelled in the
forbidden luxuries.
The house had also a ghostly garret about which clustered many
legends, and these in connection with certain patches of sand bare of
grass and vine and called the Devil's Footsteps, which might have been
seen around the neighborhood, tended to make the bedtime hour a season
of dread to the imaginative boy, who saw shadowy red-coats in every
dark corner, and with every unfamiliar noise expected even more
uncanny visitors.
Outside was the old garden, sweet and sunny, and close to it the
friendly wall of a neighbor's house, up which climbed a honeysuckle
which stretched so far back into memory that the child thought it
had been there always, "like the sky and stars," and on the whole the
atmosphere of the old home was most wholesome.
When Holmes was but a little child he was sent to Dame Prentice's
school, where he studied the primer and spent his leisure moments
in falling in love with his pretty girl schoolmates or playing with
certain boyish toys which were always confiscated sooner or later by
the school-mistress, and went to help fill a large basket which
stood ready to receive such treasures. At ten years of age he began
attendance at the Cambridgeport school, where he had for schoolmates
Margaret Fuller and Richard Henry Dana, and where he remained for some
years.
Holmes says that in these years of his childhood every possible
occasion for getting a crowd together was made the most of--school
anniversaries and town centennials; Election Day, which came in
May, when everyone carried a bunch of lilacs and the small boys ate
"election buns" of such size that the three regular meals had to
be omitted; Fourth of July, a very grand holiday indeed, when the
festivities were opened by the Governor; Commencement Week, with its
glories of shows and dancing on the Common, were each in turn made
seasons of joy for the youthful denizens of Cambridge and Boston.
Perhaps the most gratifying of all the holidays was the old-fashioned
Thanksgiving, when even the sermon, though of greater length than
usual, "had a subdued cheerfulness running through it," which
kept reminding the children of the turkey and oyster-sauce, the
plum-pudding, pumpkin-pie, oranges, almonds, and shagbarks awaiting
them at home, and the chink of the coin in the contribution-boxes was
but a joyous prelude to the music of roasting apples and nuts.
Holmes left the Cambridgeport school to enter Phillips Academy, and
has left us a charming account of this first visit to Andover,
whither he went in a carriage with his parents, becoming more and more
homesick as the time came for parting, until finally he quite broke
down and for a few days was utterly miserable. But he had happy days
at Andover, and revisiting the place in after years he describes
himself as followed by the little ghost of himself, who went with him
to the banks of the Showshine and Merrimac; to the old meeting-house,
the door of which was bullet-riddled by the Indians; to the
school-rooms where he had recited Euclid and Virgil; to the base-ball
field, and to the great bowlder upon which the boys cracked nuts,
proving such a faithful guide that when the day was over Holmes almost
committed the folly of asking at the railroad office for two tickets
back to Boston. Perhaps of all the celebrated men who have been pupils
at the famous school no one held it more lovingly in his heart than
he who turned back after so many years of success to pay this loving
tribute to its memory.
The stay at Andover lasted but a year, during which time Holmes
discovered that he could write verse, and gained a little reputation
thereby, which led to his being made class-poet when he left school to
enter Harvard, in his sixteenth year. Throughout his college life he
kept his reputation as a maker of humorous verse, and was perhaps
the most popular member of the various societies and clubs for which
Harvard was noted. He was graduated in his twentieth year, and within
a year of this time had decided to study medicine, and after a two
years' course in Boston went abroad to attend lectures in Paris and
Edinburgh.
But the practice of medicine included but a few years of Holmes's
life, as in 1847 he accepted the chair of anatomy and physiology at
Harvard, holding the position for thirty-five years.
During his years of study and practice, Holmes had gained gradually
the reputation of a clever literary man whose name was familiar to the
readers of the best periodicals of the day. This reputation began with
the publication of a poem, _Old Ironsides_, which was inspired by
the proposition to destroy, as of no further use, the old frigate
Constitution, which had done such glorious service during the war of
1812. These verses, which begin the literary life of Holmes, ring with
a noble patriotism which flashed its fire into the hearts of thousands
of his countrymen and made the author's name almost a household word.
They were published originally in the Boston _Advertiser_, but so
furious was the storm aroused that within a short time they had been
copied in newspapers all over the land, printed on handbills that
placarded the walls, and circulated in the streets from hand to hand.
It was a satisfaction to the young patriot to know that his appeal
had not been made in vain, and that the old ship was allowed to rest
secure in the keeping of a grateful nation. A few years later
Holmes published his first volume of poems, collected from various
periodicals, and gained medals for some essays on medical subjects.
For many years after this his literary work consisted chiefly of
fugitive poems, written very often for special occasions, such as
class anniversaries and dinners.
It was, however, by the publication of a series of essays in the
_Atlantic Monthly_, which was started in 1857, with James Russell
Lowell as editor, that Holmes began his career as the household
intimate of every lover of reading in America. These essays, which
are now collected in four volumes, appeared in the _Atlantic_, at
intervals between the series, between 1857 and 1859, and thus cover
almost the entire period of the author's life as a man of letters.
The first series--_The Autocrat at the Breakfast-Table_--struck the
key-note for the rest, a note which showed the author's heart attuned
in its broad yet subtle sympathy to the heart of his race, and created
such a friendship as rarely exists between author and reader. In the
Autocrat Holmes introduces a variety of characters which at intervals
flit throughout the rest of the series.
The papers are thrown into the form of talks at the breakfast-table
between the author and his fellow-boarders, and so strong is the
personal flavor that they seem to the reader like the home-letters
of an absent member of the family. The landlady and her son, Benjamin
Franklin, the sharp-eyed spinster in black, the young fellow "whose
name seems to be John and nothing else," and the school-teacher,
appear and disappear side by side with Little Boston, Iris, and the
characters of the other series, and emphasize the life-likeness of
the whole. It never seems in reading these papers that the _dramatis
personae_ are anything else than living human beings, with whom Holmes
actually converses around the boarding-house table or at his own
fireside. The series, besides _The Autocrat at the Breakfast-Table_,
includes _The Professor at the Breakfast-Table_, _The Poet at the
Breakfast-Table_, and _Over the Teacups_, the last being separated
from the others by an interval of thirty years.
One of the chief charms of these essays is found in the bits of
biography which stamp them in so many cases as personal history. One
may read here the nature of the man who could thus step back into the
realm of childhood, appreciate the delicate grace of girlhood, enjoy
the robust enthusiasm of young manhood, and pause with reverent
sympathy before the afflicted. Behind each character portrayed one
feels the healthful, generous throb of a humanity to which no ambition
of soul could seem foreign or no defect appeal in vain. Scattered
throughout the volumes are many charming verses, to some of
which Holmes owes his fame as a poet. In _The Autocrat at the
Breakfast-Table_ occurs, among others, the celebrated poem, _The
Chambered Nautilus_, which shows perhaps the highest point to which
Holmes's art as a poet has reached. This poem, founded upon the
many-chambered shell of the pearly nautilus, is made by the poet to
illustrate the progress of the soul in its journey through life; the
spiritual beauty of the verse shows it a genuine reflection of
that soul illumination which made of the poet's Puritan ancestors
a peculiar people. Many other poems bear the mark of this spiritual
insight, and stamp the author as possessing the highest poetic sense.
But it is perhaps in his humorous poems that Holmes has appealed to
the greatest number of readers. Throughout the verse of this class
runs the genuine Yankee humor, allied to high scholarship and the
finest literary art.
Many of the verses seem but an echo in rhyme of the half-serious,
half-whimsical utterances of the Breakfast-Table Series. Who but
the Autocrat himself could have given literary form to the exquisite
pathos of The _Last Leaf_, the delicious quaintness of _Dorothy Q_, or
the solemn drollery of _The Katy Did_?
Many of the more popular poems are simply _vers d'occasion_, written
for some class reunion, college anniversary, or state dinner. These
poems, collected under the title _Poems of the Class of '29_, show
Holmes in his most charming mood of reminiscence. Through all his
poetry shines here and there an intense sympathy with nature, for
running side by side with his appreciation of human interests we see
ever that deep love of nature which is the mark of the true poet.
Trees and flowers, the seasons, the meadows, rivers, clouds, and
the enchanting mysteries of twilight touch his heart to sympathetic
vibrations, and their beauty enters into and becomes a part of
himself. In this sense some of his most charming recollections cease
to be merely remembrance; they are the very air and sunlight which he
breathed and which became incorporated into his being. Thus the
old garden whose fragrance lingers so loving in his memory and is
enshrined with such tender grace in his pages is not a description,
but a breath of that far-away childhood which still shines for him
immortally beautiful; and the fire-flies flitting across the darkened
meadows bring once again to his mind the first flash of insight into
the wonder and meaning of the night.
In some charming pages he has told us of his love for trees,
particularly of the old elms which are the pride of the New England
villages, and in equally poetic vein he has emphasized the beauty of
the pond-lily, the cardinal flower, the huckleberry pasture, and the
fields of Indian corn.
Dr. Holmes is also known as a novelist as well as essayist and poet.
His three novels, _Elsie Venner_, _The Guardian Angel_, and _A
Mortal Antipathy_, are undoubtedly the results of his experience as
a physician, for each in turn is founded upon some mental trait
which sets the hero or heroine apart from the rest of mankind. In
the treatment of these characteristics Holmes has made apparent the
powerful effect of heredity upon the life of the human being. These
novels are chiefly valuable as character-studies by an earnest student
of moral science whose literary bias tempted him to throw them into
the form of fiction. While touched with the true Holmes flavor, they
cannot be called fiction of the highest order nor do they emphasize
Holmes's place in literature. They seem rather to show his versatility
as a writer and to illustrate his familiarity with those subtle
problems of character that have always puzzled mankind.
Holmes's medical and literary essays, poems, novels, and other
miscellany have been collected in thirteen volumes, the last of which,
_Over the Teacups_, appeared but a short time before his death.
He spent most of his life in Boston, his home there being the favorite
meeting-place for the most distinguished of his countrymen and a
recognized rallying-point for foreign guests. He was the last of that
brilliant circle which made New England famous as the literary centre
of America; in many senses he combined the excellences which have
given American letters their place in the literature of the world.
* * * * *
Beside the writers who founded American literature must be placed
many others whose work belongs to the same period. In history
and biography, besides the work of the great historians, we have
Hildreth's _History of the United States_, Lossing's _Field Book of
the Revolution_, Schoolcraft's studies and researches among the Indian
tribes, the carefully written biographies of Sparks, the Peter Parley
and Abbott stories for the young, and numerous other contributions
which throw valuable light upon the early history of the United
States.
In fiction the pictures of Southern life by Sims, and the romances of
Dutch life in New York by Hoffman, preserve the colonial traditions,
and with many other writers of lesser note supplement the work of the
great novelists.
The philosophy of Emerson has found expression in the writings of
Bronson Alcott, Theodore Parker, and Margaret Fuller. In poetry,
the still honored names of Fitz-Greene Halleck, Joseph Rodman Drake,
Elizabeth Kinney, Alice and Phoebe Cary illustrate the place that they
held in the popular heart. Chief among these minor singers stands John
Howard Payne, whose immortal song has found a home in nearly every
land.