Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes Part 1

Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes.

by E. E. Brown.

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 gra.s.s 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 n.o.ble princ.i.p.ality....

"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 pa.s.sed 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 cl.u.s.ter 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, Ma.s.s., 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 impa.s.sable drifts to Dudley, Ma.s.s., to visit a sick woman. The son of this n.o.ble 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 t.i.tle 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 Hanc.o.c.k. 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 gla.s.s. 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 pa.s.s 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 c.u.mulative 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 pa.s.sed through eight editions. The extraordinary t.i.tle 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, const.i.tutions, ages of man, seasons of the year, together with an exact epitome of the three first monarchies, viz., the a.s.syrian, 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.

CHAPTER II.

BOYHOOD.