Yankee From Olympus: The Story of Justice Holmes

by CATHERINE DRINKER BOWEN

FOREWORD. — The story of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes is the story of his country. The narrative cannot begin with the flat date of his birth —1841. This was a man whose presence carried tradition; over his shoulder one catches sight of his ancestors. His roots reached deep into American earth; it was the strength of these roots that permitted so splendid a flowering.

To know Judge Holmes at eighty — courtly, witty, scholarly, kind — it is well to have acquaintance with hi.’ Calvinist grandfather, Abiel Holmes, with his handsome, worldly great-grandfather, Judge Wendell, with his mother from whom he inherited, he said, “a trace of melancholy.’ Above all, it is well to know his fat tier, the sturdv \ankee who wrote had verse and good books — professor of anatomy, talkative five-foot-three Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table who lived on applause ami said so with engaging frankness.

9

A BIEL the annalist was eager with his news. Extraordinary mechanical inventions were appearing in factories and on farms; news of them tempted men into wild financial speculation. Had Oliver heard of McCormick’s new machine, drawn by horses, which reaped a field in a third the time it used to take? The screw propeller and iron were now used in ships. One of the strangest things of all had been the sending of a shipload of ice to Calcutta. Tee! Loaded from the Long Wharf in the heat of August, Abiel said wonderingiy. Sam Eliot’s new house on Beacon Street actually had a box constructed to hold ice; it kept the meat in warm weather. The house had a bathtub too, with running water. Everyone in town went calling on the Eliots, pretending they came to see the fine English furniture and European paintings. But it was the icebox and bathtub they really talked about.

His own church, Abiel said, was prospering. But the country at large seemed in the grip of a feverish excitement; it was like a body that had grown too fast for its heart. Men blamed it on Andrew Jackson. Jackson had been too long in llic White House. Power was dangerous; there was rumor he might accept a third term and the Whigs were busy organizing for the 183G election.

It was a pity Oliver had missed Jackson’s visit to Cambridge in June of ‘3d. The University had given him a degree over the protest of half the Corporation. Abiel had gone to the ceremony; in spite of himself lie must confess the man had something about him that inspired respect. He was lean as a greyhound and held himsell like a soldier; his long white hair streamed in the breeze like a flag of battle. He had answered President Quincy’s oration briefly; Cambridge had been surprised there was no backwoods accent. The cheering afterward had been tremendous. Abiel had caught himself shouting with the rest although he approved none of Jackson’s policies, domestic or foreign.

People sought stimulation as drunkards seek liquor; Abiel suspected they even came to church to hear theatrical preaching rather than to attain calm and humility before the Lord. Crazy sects were making converts. Had Oliver heard the latest on the Groaners, the Camphellites, the Shakers? Out West they had huge camp meetings, orgies of excitement, and dared to call it religion.

Oliver had not heard these things, nor was he abashed by the recital. All his life, humility had been preached to him; since his return home his younger brother-in-law, the Reverend Charles Wentworth Upham, had joined his voice to the chorus. But to Oliver, his father’s news meant merely that the world was moving. Oliver desired not to censure or impede, but to move with it.

What he immediately sought was a medical degree from Harvard. With six months in which to win it, he decided on a local subject for his dissertation: “Intermittent Fever in New England.”Page by page he examined the works of old Colonial writers, recording their every mention of fever, omitting only the moralistic treatises of the Reverend Cotton Mathei-which, Oliver observed, were more likely to cause a fever than to cure one.

He handed in his essay and a few days later announced the result to the brother-in-law who had cautioned against the sin of pride: —

To CHARLES W. UPHAM
BOSTON, August 4, 1836
MY VERY DEAR SIR, The lesson of humility which you were anxious I should receive has found some other customers. The Boylston prize was almost unanimously awarded to my dissertation. ... It is somewhat pleasant to have cut out a fifty-dollar prize under the guns of two old blazers |Dr. Haxall, of Virginia, and Dr. Bell, of New Hampshire], who have each of them swamped their competitors in preceding trials.
Oliver had a wonderful time that Commencement season. It was Harvard’s twro hundredth anniversary and the festivities were memorable. At the alumni dinner Oliver, standing on a chair, was immensely surprised to find himself singing a solo. And at the Phi Beta Kappa celebration, Oliver recited a poem he had written for the occasion. It was no mean feat; the recital took an hour and ten minutes. Oliver declaimed the whole from memory, standing on the platform, stretched to his full height of five feet three. The audience loved it. When Oliver mentioned a local name — Dr. Jackson’s for instance — they clapped loudly, and when he said something funny they cheered.
Abiel Holmes, hearing of all this, was disturbed. Oliver’s Boylston Prize had not won for him half the applause these foolish performances were receiving. To be known as a wit could be of no possible advantage to a physician; it might even militate against him. This frivolity of Oliver’s seemed not to decrease with age but rather to tlaunt itself. Moreover, people seemed unable to resist it.
Abiel determined to speak to his son, caution him against being too free with his quips and his puns. But when he told his wife, she shook her head doubtfully, reminding Abiel that his son was no longer a boy. to be advised, scolded, protected. Oliver was twenty-seven. He was a grown man. and must followhis nature.

10

OLIVER moved across the river to Boston, rented a room, and set himself up as a physician. A lamp burned behind his office door, plainly to be seen through the glass, signifying that night and day the smallest favors — or fevers, said young Dr. Holmes — were welcome. A drunken young man put his fist through the door one night and broke the light, but beyond this nobody noticed either light or doctor’s sign.

Dr. Holmes was not humbled by this neglect of the public. Attendance on the sick distressed him; he felt sorry for them. He busied himself writing medical essays; as if one Boylston Prize were not enough, he decided to

try for another. He wrote on neuralgia and on direct exploration in medical practice. It seemed to him the profession was too wrapped In theory and the dusty prestige of learning. Why could not the doctors recount what they saw in the hospitals, what they felt with their hands and smelled with their noses, rather than what some long-dead medico had thought about?

Before the New Year of 1837 Oliver had the satisfaction of seeing his poems in print, published in Boston in a small volume. His verses had been printed before, in college Annuals and various modest collections, but unsigned, “in order that,” Oliver wrote a classmate, “nobody might supposed was ambitious of being considered a regular scribbler.” Now with a Boylston Prize to his credit and a physician’s sign on his door, he risked recognition and the obloquy of being called a w it. In the contents of the little volume was “Old Ironsides”; there was a poem on the Cambridge Churchyard, there was one on the September Gale of 1815, when Oliver’s Sunday breeches had been torn from the line in the parsonage yard.

And there was a poem about an old man Oliver had often seen in the street, a venerable relic of the Revolu tion, who had helped throw the tea overboard in Boston Harbor. Major Melville, his name w^as, and the poem was vailed “The Last Leaf.’ It described the old man, tottering about —

... a crook is in his back,
\nd a melancholy crack
In his laugh.

Of the whole volume, Abiel Holmes preferred this poem. It was like himself, he said, smiling. A relie of the past, of times and ways that were vanishing. “Nonsense!” his sons replied stoutly. “Father, you will five to be a hundred.”

Abiel shook his head. He still preached occasionally. In January, 1837, Abiel preached a sermon that touched his congregation deeply. Its subject was: “The vanity of life, a reason for seeking a portion in Heaven. ” Abiel did not say it was his farewell. Perhaps he did not himself realize it. But all who heard it felt a prophetic note.

They were not mistaken. It was Abiel’s last sermon. That very week he was taken ill. It was not an illness Abiel’s son could diagnose or cure. It was more a weakness, a fading away. Abiel Holmes, at seventy-three, w*as preparing for his departure. He was not bedridden; he walked slowly about the house, sitting in the evenings before the fire while his wife or sons read aloud from the Bible, from Saurin’s Sermons, or sometimes, to Abiel’s great pleasure, from The Annals of America,

Late in the spring of 1837, Abiel had a stroke. If left him helpless; he could speak only with difficulty. Sally Holmes, strong, competent, tended him, her sons helping when a man’s arm was needed. Sally was sixty-eight; she seemed not a day over fifty. Her gray hair curled crisply at the edges, her brown eyes were bright as ever, her skin pink. Wien Nellie, carrying basins and trays up from the kitchen, wept audibly at the sickroom door, her mistress rebuked her: “Have you forgotten lhat Dr. Holmes loves a cheerful face?”

Sitting by her husband’s side. Sally waited through the long hours. When Abiel roused, she seemed to know by a touch of the hand what he wanted. Once Oliver, coining in the door, stood while she finished singing softly Abiel’s own hymn that he had written long ago about his Meetinghouse: —

On Sunday morning. June 4, I he watchers round the bedside noticed a change. Abiel was restless, his tips moved. Oliver, leaning over the bed, caught the words his father was trying to articulate. “If any have injured me, let the injuries . , , let the injuries . .

Oliver repeated the words aloud, looking at his mother with a puzzled face. Sally Holmes did not hesitate. She stood up and spoke clearly to her husband: “If any have ’injured me, let their injuries hr written in sand.”

Abiel s eyes opened, his lips moved in acquiescence. On the dark plank floor the sun made a pattern by the window; outside, maple leaves stirred in the breeze. A church bell sounded, then another. Sally Holmes, her eyes on her husband’s face, waiter! for the hell from bis old Meetinghouse. Among many voices she would know it. anrl so, she was aware, would her husband.

The Dell spoke. Abiel turned his lace tow ard the sound, and Hied.

After his father s funeral, Oliver Holmes returned to Boston. All that winter of 1837-1838, Dr. Oliver Holmes waited for patients in his Boston office with the plate-glass floor. When patients did not come lie wrrote poetry and more medical essays and spent long hours at the Massachusetts General Hospital, following his beloved Dr. Jackson on his rounds, asking questions ami refusing to bo satisfied with the answers. Why did so many women die of childbed fever? Dr. Bigelow, a splendid surgeon, went Irom bed to bed in his workmanlike, bloodstained frock ( oat, using his instruments skillfully, then wiping them on an old towel and returning them to his bag. Why, out of a dozen strong young women, did six die? Oliver made himself a nuisance with his questions. lie filled whole notebooks with details of these deaths and still his questions haunted him, unanswered.

In the evenings when he was not working, Oliver was restless. He supped out whenever he was invited. Boston had supper at six and called it “tea.” It was natural that Oliver should go often to the Jacksons’, both to the Doctor s and to his brother the Judge’s on Bedford Place. Amelia Jackson was as charming as ever. Phineas Barnes married and Oliver wrote him a long letter: “And so you are married. I wish I wore, too. I have flirted and written poetry long enough. ... I have several very nice young women in my eye. . . .”

It was a year or two before the several very nice young women were narrowed down to one and Oliver’s ambition was gratified. On the fifteenth of June. Boston enjoyed a delighttul wedding. Miss Amelia Jackson married Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. The guests, leaving their carriages up the hill on Beacon Street, walked down a narrow, cobbled street to the pillared granite portico of King s Chapel. Everybody was cousin to someone in the next pew, or if they were not related their grandparents had been intimately acquainted. The Jackson connection was enormous; the church could barely hold the Wendells. Olivers, Quineys.

At Judge Jackson’s after the ceremony, Ihc collation was magnificent. Jellies and sillabubs, iced cream in molds, fruits and meats of every description — and wine of course in abundance. Replete with food, wine. love, and the good will of their friends and relations. Oliver and his bride drove gayly off in the Judge’s carriage.

It was autumn when they returned to Boston; on the Common the trees were bare of leaves, the cobbles glh tened with a hard November rain. They went straight to their own house on Montgomery Place. Amelia had discovered it months ago; her father had bought it and given it to her. a three-story brick house just off the Common to the cast, with ample room to raise a family. It had gaslight, running water in the kitchen sink, and it was set in a pleasant, quiet spot, a sort of dead-end court with a brick wall around it. a gate in front that gave down three steps into the street. Number 8 Montgomery Place, the address was.

Amelia plunged happily into housekeeping. She had a talent for domesticity, for making a man comfortable. Tn all her duties, she displayed exemplary promptness. Eight months and twenty-three days after her marriagethe date was March 8, 1841 — she gave birth to a son. Dr. Holmes sat down and wrote to everyone he knew, varying his announcement with a skill that pleased him quite as much as it pleased the recipients of the letters.

There was no hesitancy over the name; what could it be but Oliver Wendell Holmes? They would cal! him Wendell, his father decided; he himself had always preferred it to Oliver. Looking into the cradle upon the son that bore his name, young Dr. Holmes was content.

The months passed; as Christmas approached, Holmes remembered his friend Phineas Barnes. “I believe you learned, when you were here,” he wrote Barnes, “that there was a second edition of your old acquaintance, an o.w.h. ...

He was developing a virtuosity in these announcements. Holmes told himself with satisfaction. Much neater than his own father s announcement of his Oliver Holmes’s — birth in the old almanac: “Aug. 29 . . . son b” — with nothing but an — to emphasize the importance of the event.

o.w.h. Small print and no capital letters. In Ins cradle o.w.h. lay quiet and noisy by turns, as a healthy baby should, o.w.h., a second edition. There was none to prophesy that the letters might grow until the wdiole country might see them, and countries beyond the water:

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, Chief Justice of Massachusetts, author of The Common Law, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

11

o.w.h. was born into a Union of twenty-seven states, presided over by the Whig, General William Henry Harrison. Daniel Webster was Secretary of State. Settled outside of town in his country place, Marshfield, he was Boston’s hero more than ever. Shipowners and millowners could count on his shrewd, eloquent support, ihe China trade flourished; clippers, slim and beautiful, raced from Minot’s Light eastward to Liverpool.

In Lawrence and Lowell, spindles whirled. Every sound businessman knew the twelve-hour day was an excellent thing for workers. “The morals of the operatives,” one of them told the Massachusetts Legislature,

'‘ will necessarily suffer if longer absent from the wholesome discipline of factory life.”

In the middle states the working day had been reduced to ten hours — a dangerous move. Had not man long ago been commanded to eat bread in the sweat of his face? The five Lawrence brothers, all rich, all philanthropic, were sure of it. They themselves had never shirked hard work. Hard work was a Puritan principle, a Calvinistie inheritance. “In Adam’s fall. We sinned all. Adam’s fall could be expiated not alone by prayer and churchgoing but by hard, continuous labor. II the lahor resulted in money, so much the better.

Money, w ork, and God. A reasonable trinity, one that America could worship with enthusiasm. Work, money, God: a new religion took hold of the American Lin ion, to rule a hundred years and more.

And yet — voices rose in protest. In New England, in Boston, the very hold and center of the new worship, voices cried Nay. Combat this new materialism not with prayer but with good works! Reform the prisons, the insane asylums. Give rights to women. Abolish debtors prisons, drunkenness, pauperism. Be merciful to the deal aud dumb, teach the blind to live. Samuel Gridley Howe, the mantle of his Greek adventures still upon him, took over his father’s house in South Boston and, with his spirited young wife Julia Ward, taught the blind until the whole country talked of sightless, deaf, speechless Laura Bridgman.

Reform, reform! And if reform move too slowly for the winged spirit, withdraw from wickedness to Brook Farm and dig the soil, to Fruitlands and read Goethe, enjoying the perfect life. “Not a reading man but has a draft of a new’ community in his waistcoat pocket,” Emerson wrote to Carlyle. “I am gently mad myself, and am resolved to live cleanly.” Dr. Holmes’s schoolmate of the sinuous neck, Margaret Fuller, translated the Conversations with Goethe, wrote midnight letters to Beethoven, and held her own Conversations in West Street. It was her mission to GROW, she said, and she hastened to fulfill it.

It was all mad, foolish, inspired — and to Dr. Holmes it held no appeal whatever. Of all the literary group about to burst into flower — Emerson, Lowell, Longfellow, Motley, and the rest — Dr. Holmes was the only one with a scientific training. It removed him from these others, leaving him neither time nor faith for fancy new remedies, spiritual or social. It seemed to Holmes that the great men were not in the reformer’s pulpit — they wrere at Harvard. Dr. Bigelow in medicine, Dr. Warren in anatomy, Asa Gray in natural history. All over the East, scientists were organizing into groups for closer intercourse and the exchange of ideas; in Boston the American Society of Geologists held its first meeting, the Lowell Institute its first forum.

In the hospital, the sight of people dying left Dr. Holmes no heart to reform the living; first of all a way must be found to make men stay alive. Every autumn, scores of people died in Boston from typhoid fever. Charles Sumner had it. When he recovered, people were surprised to see him looking quite plump. “Almost human,” Julia Howe said. In summer Asiatic cholera came to town. The deaths from puerperal fever continued to distress Holmes. These mothers were young and strong. Why should they die?

People said homeopathy would cure puerperal fever. Holmes loathed homeopathy. He gave two lectures against it, angry, witty lectures, called it a pseudo-science, and all the while continued his studies of puerperal fever. In England, Scotland, Vienna, doctors had already suspected the fever was contagious. But American doctors did not read German and there was little scientific exchange with England. Lister was a boy in bis teens, the germ theory was unknown, contagiousness was proved only by the observations of common sense and the deductions of what was called medical logic.

Common sense happened to be the quality Dr. Holmes possessed perhaps beyond all other qualities. Slowly, painstakingly, he collected his evidence. Puerperal fever was carried from bed to bed by doctors, nurses, midwives. No one knew whether the physician carried infection in the atmosphere about him or by direct application of hand to surface. The fact remained that the physician who came to a delivery direct from the autopsy room brought death to his patient. Even a change of clothes was not sufficient safeguard. Physicians whose maternity patients showed a high mortality rate confessed that even though they left their coats in the autopsy room, the mother died after they had attended her.

Only the courage of a few physicians had brought this to light. Dr. Gordon of Scotland had confessed the disease was as communicable as smallpox, and that he had himself “ been the disagreeable means of carrying it to a great number of women.” One midwife lost sixteen mothers in a month; others in the same district had none infected with the fever. A doctor in England, after seven patients died from the fever, changed his clothes, underwent “a thorough purification.” Yet his next patient died. Could the contagion be carried in his gloves? The doctor discarded them. Could it be in the instruments with which he had given enemas to the w omen, using the same instruments from bed to bed?

But behind those physicians who dared make public their failures lay a dark regiment of unpublished deaths. A doctor whose patients die by the half dozen soon loses his practice. Better for the doctor to say the deaths were unavoidable.

It was a terrible body of evidence. Case by case, citing name, date, place, circumstance, Dr. Holmes put it all down. He called his paper “The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever,” and read it in Boston before the Society for Medical Improvement. In April, 1843, he published it in the NevEngland Quarterly Journal of Medicine and Surgery.

The profession rose up in arms, hurling angry refutation. Dr. Holmes had trod on too many toes. Reputations were at stake; the controversy would rage for years. Now and again Holmes answered his critics. “1 am too much in earnest for either humility or vanity, but I do entreat those who hold the keys of life and death to listen to me also for this once. I ask no personal favor; but I beg to be heard in behalf of those women whose lives are at stake, until some stronger voice shall plead for them.”

Holmes knew well enough it was dangerous for him to make fun of doctors, but he could not resist it. In 18.55 his beloved Dr. Jackson was compiling a book, Letters to a Young Physician. “Enter the sick room with grave demeanor,”w’rote Jackson. “Then your patient will know’ you feel for him. But leave with a cheerful countenance, so the sick man will think his case is not too serious.”

Holmes thought it over; how wise Dr. Jackson was! Would he himself ever reach this point of experience? He himself had written some advice to young physicians. The result w as so far from serious that it w ould have made Abiel Holmes turn in his grave: —

Boston read the verses and rocked with mirth. Was it any wonder Dr. Holmes was not sent for by the solvent sick? The insolvent he treated daily in the wards on Grove Street; they did not read books. But the ladies of Chauncy Street and Bedford Square, enjoying the vapors or something more serious, did not relish the advent into their sickroom of a small, sprightly man who might at any moment break out wdth a pun. Even anatomy, in which Holmes was deeply, seriously interested, tempted him to farce;—

With it all, no one could possibly have said Dr. Holmes lacked seriousness of purpose. No one did say it. Wit bubbled from him; he could no more stop it than he could stop the blood flowing in his veins. He hated solemnity; he had seen too much of it in his youth and the reaction was lasting. Sanctimonious people made him sneeze, he said, and go home w ith a violent cold.

But these W’ere times of reform, of an evaugelicism that was very vocal in high places. On the front page of Garrison’s Liberator the ugly word “secession” was flaunted. Dr. Holmes shook his head; he was too much the scientist to have faith in extreme measures. Moreover the emotionalism of the Abolitionists made him suspect their sincerity—Burleigh wdth his long hair, Wright wdth his wild gesticulations. When Holmes did not come out openly for antislavery and temperance reform, James Russell Lowell, ten years his junior and as yet only an acquaintance, wrote him a long, severe letter, charging him wdth light-mindedness, wdth making frivolous poems in a time of national stress: —

I listen to your suggestions with great respect [Holmes replied]. 1 mean to reflect upon them, and 1 hope to gain something from them. But I must say, with regard to art and the management of my own powers, I think I shall in the main follow my own judgment and taste rather than mould myself upon those of others. ... As years creep over me . . . J shall not be afraid of gayety more than of old, but I shall have more courage to be serious. . . . Let me try to improve and pleasemy fellow-men after my own fashion at present. . . .

Holmes did not lack the capacity for indignation. Bui at the moment he w as occupied w ith men’s physical rather than their moral ills. The sufferings of the sick, both men and animals, had always affected him strongly. When he needed a freshly killed rabbit for dissection he ran out of the room, asked Dr. Cheever to kill it, and begged him not to let the rabbit squeak. The operating room, the surgeon’s knife, still filled him with horror.

It was natural lie should become intensely interested in experiments being carried on in Boston by a dentist, Dr. Morton, to produce insensibility by inhaling ether. Dr. Morton had tried ether on himself, sealing himself in a room and falling unconscious. In September of 1846, Morton used ether while pulling a patient’s tooth. Shortly afterward, Dr. Warren of the Harvard Medical School asked Morton to give ether to a patient about to undergo an operation in the hospital.

The experiment was successful. Dr. Holmes was as happy as though it had been made on himself. After the drunken screams of former patients, wrhat heavenly mercy was this! If only he could have helped! He could not but he could suggest, words for the men who made the discovery. He sat down and wrote to Dr. Morton: —

BOSTON, NOV. 41, 1846
MY HEAR SIR: Everybody wants to have a hand in a great discovery. All I will do is to give you a hint or two as to names - - or the name — to be applied to the state produced, and the agent.
The state should, I think, be called “Anaesthesia.” Tin. signifies insensibility — more particularly (as used by Linnaeus and Cullen) to objects of touch. , . .
The adjective will be Anaesthetic. . . .
The words antineiiric, aneuric, neuro-leptic, neurolepsia, neurostasis, etc., seem too anatomical; whereas the change is a physiological one. I throw them out for consideration.
I would have a name pretty soon, and consult some accomplished scholar, such as President Everett or Dr. Bigelow, senior, before fixing upon the terms, which icill he repented by the tongues of every civilized race of mankind. A on could mention these words which l suggest, for their consideration; but there may be others more appropriate and agreeable.
You rs respect fill ly,
O. V HOLMES.

“Consult the president of Harvard,” It was the sovereign remedy. How many of Or. Holmes’s family belonged to Harvard 1’niversity! Before lie was born. 11is great-uncle, Jonathan Jackson, had been treasurer of Harvard—a position much honored in Boston. Judge Wendell had been a Fellow and Judge Jackson — Holmes’s father-in-law - - was an Overseer. President Josiah Quincy had been a Holmes cousin.

In the spring of 1847. President Everett and the Corporation named Dr. Holmes Professor of Anatomy and Physiology in the Medical School. It was an enormous satisfaction. Holmes’s father-in-law had thrown out hints that he might expect the appointment; so had the doctors Jackson and Bigelow. Now it was accomplished. Ilis life was laid out as he would have chosen. The path stretched ahead, broad and brisk, filled with honorable business that a man must bestir himself daily, hourly, to fulfill.

12

BOOKING at his family. Dr. Holmes felt a fervent satisfaction. He had two hoys now, to enroll as future Sons of Harvard. Wendell had a brother: Edward Jackson Holmes, born October 7, 1846.

Two boys and a girl; the family was complete. The household grew and prospered. When Wendell Holmes was ten he was taken from Mr. Sullivan’s classes in the basement of Park Street Church and sent across the Common to Mr. Dixwell’s new school on Boylston Place. Epes Sargent Dixwell had been a master at the Latin School. Everyone knew the Dixwells. They live*! in Cambridge in a big house on Garden Street. Mrs. Dixwell was a Bowditch, granddaughter of that great navigator whose name Dr. Holmes had long ago said was such a powerful introduction on the continent of Europe. Epes Dixwell himself had been two classes ahead of Dr. Holmes at Harvard and had carried away all the honors availaide.

The doctor was delighted to send his son to school under his old friend who was such a splendid classical scholar. Wendell Holmes himself did not care much where he went to school. He was a sturdy boy, tall and strong, with clear, alert blue-gray eyes, high color, and dark shiny hair that never kept its part but fell over his high forehead. Absently his mother would push it back; in two minutes it was down again. In the mornings, W endell had not far to walk. Up to the Granary Burying Ground, past the Paddock elms, turning left at Park Street Church, then down along the Common to Boylston Street. Beyond that were farm land, marsh, and slum. All winter he took his sled to school, and in the afternoons raced jus friends down the long coast through the Common.

In spring when the weather opened, things happened on Boston Common. Tukey was City Marshal then, and Chief of Police. A large, handsome, sportive man, graduate of Harvard, he was addressed as Esquire. Boston loved him because he gave it plenty of shows. The Light Guard paraded the Common, Flagg’s Boston Brass Band blew their shining horns.

W lien the line was opened connecting Boston with railroads to Canada and the W est, Tukey put on a Hailroad Jubilee that lasted three whole days. Boston had never seen such an affair; it put the Water Festival in the shade entirely. Why, said Boston citizens, the Great Exhibition over in London, Queen Victoria’s Glass Palace itself, could not compete with the Railroad Jubilee! Whole books were written about it. The parades were endless; floats illustrated every means of transportation from oxcart and prairie schooner to the newest, shiniest steam engine. On the Common there was a huge dinner tent where speech followed speech. How Dr. Holmes missed writing a poem for the occasion was a simple mystery. England, said the citizens of Boston, would hear of this Festival. “AA’e shall soon see.” local newssheets said proudly, “in English journals, the speeches delivered at our State House.”

Just west of the Common was the Public Garden. Here the visiting circuses camped; the Dig tent could be entered at the corner of Beacon and Charles Streets. The great drawing card was the announcement that the elephants would bathe in the Frog Pond. It was a delirious business to stand and watch the huge beasts wade in to the end of their chains, fill their trunks with water, and then solemnly spray themselves down the backbone.

Two months of the summer the Holmes family spent in the Berkshire Hills, near Pittsfield. Grandmother Holmes had inherited two hundred and eighty acres from her father, Judge Wendell, who had bought thousands of acres from the Province of Massachusetts. Dr. Holmes built a house there, called Canoe Meadow. The children loved it. Wendell, starting off for an afternoon’s fishing or going out. with his pail to gather blueberries, met his mother and his little sister Amelia trundling the red wheelbarrow with soil for their little garden. “Great A and Little A” his father called the two.

Dr. Holmes still worked in the hospital wards on Grove Street, still fought his battle against puerperal fever. From Philadelphia, the doctors Meigs and Hodge continned their diatribes against him. Holmes did not reply. He was a professor in the Harvard Medical School; his main business was to lecture to his students — and he did it more than well. Harvard had two chairs of anatomy; the second, in Cambridge, was held by Jeffries Wyman, the brilliant mieroscopist and research man. Holmes admired Wyman enormously, and said so. The university had duplicated the chair, so that there existed almost side by side, as the Anatomical Record has it, “Wyman, the scientific anatomist with but few students, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, the poet anatomist, with many of them.”

Holmes, a born talker, could have lectured successfully on anything. In the early fifties he had gone on the Lyceum Circuit all over New England, but he had given it up as a waste of time and strength. He had been appointed lecturer one winter at the Lowell Institute. An old trouper, Dr. Holmes knew all the tricks and loved his trade. In the Medical School the students called him Uncle Oliver and flocked to his one o’clock lecture — the worst hour of the day. Other professors avoided it. By then the students had already listened to successive lectures on materia medica, chemistry, practice, and obstetrics — an hour to a lecture. They were weary to the bone. But they climbed the steep steps to Holmes’s classroom door, pounded on it till the janitor unlocked it. Shouting and shoving, they stumbled down the steep steps to get the best seats in front.

On a table lay the cadaver, carried in on a board, often the worse for wear. Eliot’s house on Beacon Street may have boasted an icebox, but the Medical School did not. Holmes stood by the table — tiny, sometimes gasping with asthma. He spoke without notes and believed in speaking simply. “We don’t ligate arteries,” he said. “We tie them.” He was deeply in earnest; he loved anatomy. Moreover, the students knew that sooner or later, if they stayed awake, Uncle Oliver would be funny. One day, pointing to that part of the corpse which, if it had sat up, would undoubtedly have cushioned its owner against the table, “These, gentlemen,” said Holmes, “are the tuberosities of the ischia, on which man was designed to sit and survey the works of Creation.”

When men are old, and their teeth fall out, their faces seem to shorten. “No doubt,” Holmes told his students, “you have noticed the extraordinary way in which elderly people will suddenly shut up their faces like an accordion. ” Dental plates had been invented some years before in Boston; Holmes was much interested in the marvels of dentistry. “Had the art been thus perfected in the last century, ” he said, “we should not now see the Father of his Country, in Stuart’s portrait, his attention divided between the cares of the State and the sustaining of his uppers in position. ”

Holmes made his pictures and comparisons purposely, to fix the objects in the student’s mind. But there was about his figures and metaphors a kind of enchantment, a gentle surprise that woke the student, did not make him laugh aloud but made him smile and remember the words forever. The microscopical coiled tube of a sweat gland Holmes compared to an elf’s intestine. The mesentery reminded him of his Grandfather Wendell’s shirt rutiles.

When he said something good, Dr. Holmes was as pleased as his students. He took it home, repeated it at the evening tea table. He still loved to quote Dr. Louis; —

Wendell, sitting halfway down the table, knew the words by heart. He tried to ignore them — but he could not; they became part of him. “The difference between green and seasoned knowledge,” the doctor propounded, his cup halfway to his lips, “is great. Our American atmosphere is vocal with the flippant loquacity of half knowledge.”

That was good, and Dr. Holmes knew it. He set his cup down. “The difference —” he began again. Wendell, closing his mind automatically, retreated to a world of his own. When his father stopped talking, he would tell what had happened this morning when Mr. Dixwell asked Henry Bowditch to scan six lines of Virgil — that is, he would tell it if Amelia did not start talking first. Wendell talked fluently, once he got started, but shyness held him back, sometimes, from starting. Not so Amelia. Nothing held her back. Neddy was just as bad, but Neddy had inherited his father’s asthma and wheezed when he began to speak. During the wheezing it was possible sometimes to step in. One thing was certain; whoever got the floor held it through the meal — and usually this person was Dr. Holmes. Mrs. Holmes listened, smiling, trying to stem the flood and give place to the children. No one knew who it was that started the custom of giving au extra helping of marmalade to the person who made the cleverest remark. But Wendell, watching his mother’s face as she heaped jam on his plate, knew somehow that it was she who had split the conversation open, had given him his chance.

13

IN THE autumn of 18o7, Wendell Holmes entered Harvard. The transition from Dixwell’s Latin School to Harvard College was for him no revolution. He crossed the Charles River it was true; also, he lived no longer at home, being a boarder in Cambridge at the house of a Mr. Danforth. But he was doing what his father had done, what his uncles and cousins had done and were doing. Not to go to Harvard would have been eccentric; to go at sixteen was the rule. Wendell Phillips wrote a credo, called “Five Points of Massachusetts Decency.” Cousin Phillips’s Abolitionism made him almost an outlaw from the conventional world; yet in his credo, Point Number Two was expressed with simple comprehensiveness : —

The Cambridge scene was little changed since Dr. Holmes’s day. The horsecars rolled along Cambridge Street now, and there were three or four new college buildings. But Harvard Square was still unpaved; you walked on the hard mud under the trees. Across a field the Gambrel-roofed House still stood, benign and weathored under its elms; in the old paneled library Uncle John and Grandmother Holmes were there to give tea to a freshman and his friends. In Holworthy Hall lived old Professor Sophocles, cooking his own meals and keeping his hens in a yard near-by. Persons favored with the present of an egg found on it in purple ink the name of the hen that laid it.

It was all very rural and neighborly. The University numbered about four hundred students, presided over by the Reverend Walker — a kindly, easy-going divine, reminiscent of President Kirkland, loving religion and his Sunday pulpit, loving Greek and Latin. To President Walker, education meant what it meant to Epes Dixwell; in the Harvard curriculum the classics maintained verv definitely the place of honor. Young Professor Child tried desperately to interest the boys in Chaucer. But Cambridge, while recognizing vaguely that Child was a great scholar, considered his passion for Anglo-Saxon poets and old English ballads not only unnecessary but a little queer.

There was no choice of subjects; the elective system so laboriously inaugurated by Ticknor had been swept away during the administration of the Reverend Jared Sparks. President Walker followed Sparks, and where the curriculum was concerned, Walker desired above all to maintain a safe status quo ante not difficult now that the elective system had been dispensed with.

There were dangerous new men on the teaching staff it was true; on Thursday mornings, Louis Agassiz strolled through the College Yard, smoking his cigar in sublime disregard of law and order. Covered with the honors ot European scholarship, Agassiz had come to Har\aid in 1S48, every hair on his magnificent head bristling with energy, charm, genius. He talked with a strong Swiss accent and he did not care two straws for courses on Christian morals or the harmony of science and revealed religion. He was trying to find a place to house his zoological specimens, and had even opened a girls’ school in Cambridge to raise money for the project.

Agassiz, however, spent little time at the college, being far more interested in scientific research than in his lectures. It was the same with Professor Asa Gray, the natural-history man. Gray talked much of a botanist he had met in England, named Charles Darwin, who had a theory concerning the origin and development of plant life. The two were in correspondence; Gray said Darwin’s book would be out before long. Neither Giay s nor Agassiz’s lectures were compulsory; students recei\ed no academic credits for attending. From President Walker’s point of view this was a definite safeguard; the younger students were not exposed to dangerous ideas and the older ones got no credits for the lectures and stayed away in droves.

People said Professor Peirce, the mathematician and asI ronomer, had a kind of spiritual affinity with Agassiz. Benjamin Peirce W’as bearded like a lion; his dark e\es wrre fiery and within him one felt the same fury, the same exuberance, that was Agassiz’s. Two years before Wendell entered college, Peirce had published his great volume, Analytic Mechanics; Europe and America acclaimed him. The Peirces had always lived in Cambridge, up on Quincy Street; the neighbors said mathematics was as natural to the professor as eating.

President Walker sometimes wondered how these three men — Agassiz, Gray, and Peirce — had drifted into pro fessorships in a college that was designed to turn out ministers of the gospel or Educated Gentlemen. None of the three men was an atheist—yet everything they said and the way they said it was upsetting to boys reared in good Orthodox surroundings.

It was an extraordinary situation. A more brilliant, group of scientists, scholars, and creative writers had never congregated about, a university yet Harvard clung to her ancient rules, doing all she could, apparently, to prevent these professors from functioning full\ . The new spirit of science wTas abroad — but so far, there was no real tie-up with education. .losiah Cooke, the new chemistry professor, used “laboratory in his course. The leaven was beginning to work. But in Wendell Holmes’s college years it was only just beginning.

For him, contact with these men of science was inspiring, but it was by no means a revelation. All three were members of the Saturday Club that dined each month at Parker’s. Meeting Wendell on Cambridge lanes, they greeted him genially in the name of his father. So did Professor Lowell and Mr. Longfellow. Longfellow had resigned his professorship; it gave him no time to write, he said. He had recently married Tom Appleton’s sister; his father-in-law had given him Craigie House. It was Longfellow House now. Wendell Holmes could have gone there — could have gone indeed to all these Cambridge houses and been w-elcomed in his father’s name. But he did not go. Except for the Dixwells on Garden Street, he avoided his father’s friends, preferring to think of himself as a college man, pleasantly divorced from the family fold.

Where studies were concerned, he most certainly did not overtax himself. At the end of his freshman year Wendell Holmes stood twenty-second in a class of ninetyfive. He was having a good time, and a good time was important. He was becoming acquainted with the world about him. He did not pick his friends for their intellectual brilliance. Well down in the second half of the class stood a boy from Philadelphia named Norwood Penrose Hallowed — a tall, brown-haired, good-natured boy whom Wendell liked at sight. Hallowell’s younger brother appeared in the autumn of ‘58, a freshman; when Norwood addressed him as “ thee,” Wendell was enchanted. Wendell’s cousin, John Morse, was a year ahead but the two saw much of each other. Then there was Henry Bow’ditch who had gone to school at Dixwell’s. Henry worked hard; he was headed for Medical School.

Lodging at Mr. Danforth’s, Wendell was not subject to quite as strict rules as the boys in the dormitory but he was subject to almost the same discomforts. His room, bleak and uncarpeted, was nearly filled with a large feather bed and w armed only by the open fire. The dormitory boys heated a cannon ball on extra-cold days and placed it over the fire in a skillet. It gave out a pleasant round red glow. As soon as the weather got warm, it was highly rewarding to roll the cannon hall downstairs; it made the proctors angry and the noise was superb. A large pari of every student’s time was spent trying to keep warm. Ben Crowninshield stuffed lampwicks in his keyhole to keep out the draft, and poured water round his window frames. Ice makes excellent insulation. He caught colds and the colds hung on. “Awful hard time, ” the boy once wrote in his diary after he had sent for the leech woman. “Fainted — bled like a pig.”

It upset Dr. Holmes that the boys at college did no! show more interest in athletics. As usual when he felt strongly about something, he said so in the public prints. At the moment he had a superb vehicle in “The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table.” “Such a set of black-coated, stiff-jointed, soft-muscled, paste-complexioned youth,” he wrrote, “as we can boast in our Atlantic cities never before sprang from loins of Anglo-Saxon lineage. . . . We have a few good boatmen, — no good horsemen that 1 hear of, — I cannot speak for cricketing — but as for any great athletic feat performed by a gentleman in these latitudes, society would drop a man who should run round the Common in five minutes.”

A few good boatmen? Wendell Holmes was challenged furiously in his father’s name. Yet what the doctor wrote was essentially true. Collegiate sport was an individual matter. You wTent out and ran to “get up a good swett.” If you wTere interested in developing your physique you “dumb-belled” in between classes. Or you went over to the Tremont Gymnasium in Boston and lifted weights or worked on the horizontal bar under the “professor’s” direction — often straining yourself for life in the process.

Wendell Holmes would have none of it. What he liked in the way of exercise was an hour’s skating on Fresh Pond with plenty of beer and oysters afterward with his friends. Sometimes on Saturdays he started out with Henry Bowditch, Hallowell, and John Morse, and walked to Boston along frozen rutted roads, or through the snow around by Mount Auburn, Watertown, Newton, Brighton, and Cambridge Crossing. Some of the more sportive spirits went down to the pit on Federal Street to watch Grip John’s dogs kill rats, thence to Parker’s for an evening of drinking, thence to Cambridge in a hired sleigh, hurling snowballs at the new gas globes on the way.

If Wendell Holmes was with these uproarious spirits, on the Faculty Books his name does not appear for “private admonishing.” He was by nature convivial, a member of the Hasty Pudding Club and of the Porcellian like his father before him. But Wendell was essentially independent. He did as he pleased, exercised when he pleased, or went without exercise if he happened to prefer a stroll up to Garden Street for tea with the Dixwells or across the Square to talk to Uncle John. Most certainly he did not embrace exercise because the Autocrat recommended it.

Mr. Lowell stopped Wendell on Kirkland Street to tell him in high glee that the Germans were going to publish the “Autocrat” under the grandiose and humorless title of Dor Tisch-Despot. In France, where the family breakfast table was a thing unknown, the whole affair was a mystery. “L’Autocrate a la table du dejeuner!” exclaimed a French reviewer. “Titre bizarre!”

The more famous the “Autocrat” became, the more Wendell distrusted his father in this new guise of town prophet and interpreter. There was no telling what he would expose next. Wendell was afraid to talk at home, to tell about the class dinner, the club elections. Were all writers so conscienceless? Everything, everything was grist to the Autocrat’s mill. Wendell suffered agonies concerning this indecent lack of privacy. He went gloomily to Uncle John Holmes. “Father loves it,” he said. “At home last Sunday he showed me a whole desk full of letters from admirers. The rumor is that Father not only named the Atlantic but he made it with this Autocrat. Father says the Autocrat is unburdening him of what he was born to say.”

I ncle John grinned. His private opinion was that it would take more than one “Autocrat” to do that. “Don’t take it so hard, Wendell,” he said. “You will get used to your father. I did, long ago.”

W endell was grateful. How well Uncle John understood the feelings of a college man! No sooner was the “Autocrat in print than Dr. Holmes commenced a novel for serialization in the Atlantic. At home on Sundays Wendell heard of nothing else. It was about a girl named Elsie Venner ivhose mother had been bitten by a snake just before Elsie’s birthday. Elsie was born with the mark of the beast upon her. Studying the habits of reptiles so as to make Elsie more deadly as well as more beautiful. Dr. Holmes procured a long, very active garter snake and kept it in a cage in his study. He got a stuffed rattlesnake too, and hung it over his books. The parlous worm, he called it. The pizen sarpent.

“Father is nothing if not thorough,” Wendell told his Uncle John one evening, staring grimly into the fire.

Uncle John laughed. “I was actually asked for my autograph the other night, W7cndell,” he said. “It was at the party for Pere Hyacinthe. Hyacinthe’s little boy was collecting signatures. I heard him ask who I was, and then he pushed a piece of paper in my hand and I signed it.”

Uncle John paused, pulling at his cigar. It was a large cigar and smelled awful. Uncle John always smoked five cent cigars so that his taste would not become too refined. He said he hated people whose taste was too refined.

W endell waited. Uncle John’s pauses were enough to kill a person from curiosity. Signed the paper - what could he possibly have signed it but “John Holmes"?

“Well?” W’endell said.

“I signed it ” Uncle John said slowly, “I signed it, ‘John Holmes, frere de mon frere.' ”

14

DECEMBER, 1858. W’endell Holmes was a sophomore at Harvard, The panie of ‘57 was almost forgotten; at evening parties, people served wine and meat again instead of hot chocolate and crackers. But at Pittsfield the Holmes house wras gone — sold in the hard times when the Wendell stocks yielded no profit.

Around Montgomery Place, houses were going up; shops were creeping onto Tremont Street. Dr. Holmes decided to lake his family across the Common to the new part of town that had lately been filled in from the BackBay swamp. He rented a house on the river side of Charles Street. The back rooms had a beautiful view across the water to the northern hills. Wendell’s room was on the third floor. As a sophomore, Wendell was no longer permitted every week-end at home, but he came for the six weeks’ vacation after Christmas.

Climbing the stairs late one January afternoon, Wendell wished the house were even higher. His father was practicing the violin downstairs in the little room to the left of the front door. Last summer at Nahant the doctor had been suddenly seized with a desire to play the fiddle. Learning the violin was a mere matter of application, he said cheerfully. Application and persistence. He had persisted — and the result was dreadful.

Wendell flung his hat on the rack by the door. Cigar smoke drifted down from the upstairs sitting room. Wendell took the stairs two at a time. Uncle John was sitting in the big leather chair by the fire, his head in his hands, his whole attitude one of extreme dejection. Wendell roared with laughter. “Uncle John, lie said, groping in his pockets for his tobacco pouch, “do people often burst into musicality at fifty?”

John Holmes shook his head. “It’s not music. Its manual dexterity. Don’t you remember the stereoscope at Pittsfield? Before that it was the microscope, and before that it was whittling with a penknife.”

“But the stereoscope didn’t make a noise,” Wendell said.

Uncle John sighed. “At Agassiz’s the other night they asked me if it was true, about your father playing the violin. 1 said, ‘ Unfortunately, yes. My brother has often fiddled me out of the house. Like Orpheus harping Lurydice out of the infernal regions.’”

Wendell grinned and was silent. Once he had asked Uncle John whether his father did all these things for fun or for self-improvement and Uncle John had replied with a whole lecture on the New England mind. Grandfather Abiel Holmes, it seems, had raised his hoys to believe in the Devil. Then things changed around New England, and the Devil disappeared. People were lost without the Devil to fight. So they stood on platforms, like Cousin Wendell Phillips, and denounced slavery. Or they frequented hospitals and fought puerperal fever.

From downstairs the fiddle screeched like a thing in pain. It was a battle, plainly, between Dr. Holmes and the violin. Plainly, also, the doctor was losing. Wendell took a long pull on his pipe. “But you, Uncle John, he

said. “You aren’t always striving and sweating after something you can’t have.”

John Holmes leaned toward the fire, rubbing his bad knee. “Striving?” he said. “Me? Why no, Wendy. I gave up the law twenty years ago. I just stay rouud aud look after your grandmother over in the Gambrel-roofed House. I like it that way.”

He smiled up at the long figure slouching by the fire. “You have to know the answers to things, don’t you, Wendell? ”

By the end of his sophomore year at Harvard, Wendell Holmes had fallen from twenty-second in his class to thirtieth. The indefatigable James Kent Stone, grandson of the great New7 York Chancellor, was first. Henry Bowditch was eighth. Dr. Holmes grumbled to his wife. “Thirtieth! What kind of position in the class is that?”

Amelia Holmes shook her head. “The boy is just eighteen. He’s thin as a fence rail. I measured him yesterday on the pantry wall. Six feet three and a little over. I don’t believe he has his growth even yet. It takes energy to grow.”

Dr. Holmes, observing bis own five feet three in the mirror over the bureau, remarked that that was something he didn’t know much about. But the boy seemed so lazy. Spent hours mooning on the window seat in the library, with a book in his hand. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t a good brain, either, and a kind of natural aptitude for books. He wanted application, that was all.

Amelia, sitting in the bedroom rocker darning a sock, remarked to herself that her husband was growing more like his father every day. The things he expected from the boys! Neddy was half dead trying to be first in his class at Dixwell’s. It was a good thing, perhaps, that Wendell didn’t seem to hear half of what his father said to him. One night long ago, when she aud Oliver Holmes w ere engaged, Oliver’s father had given him a long lecture about something, she had forgotten what. Oliver, furious, had burst into the house on Bedford Place complaining that fathers ought not to let themselves become too steeped in virtue.

Amelia reminded her husband of it now. Dr. Holmes laughed. “Did 1 say that, ‘Melia?” He looked pleased. “Too steeped in virtue! Graphic kind of phrase. I must have said it. Not at all the phrase a woman would invent.”

Amelia Holmes went on with her darning. A sigh escaped her. Were all men so in love with the word and the sound of the word? One quoted phrase of his own, and already her husband had forgotten everything she had said about his sons. Things she had been planning to say for months, and had waited for the right moment. On the landing outside, the big clock struck six. Tea time. Amelia rose. It would be useless to pursue the subject. Something was wrong between father aud sou, and nothing she said could right it.

(To br continued)

Wifii pcir/i twelve months of the Atlantic

THIIEE GHEAT BOOHS OF THE YEAH