IV. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES: 1809-1894.

Although nearly ten years the senior of Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes survived his younger contemporary three years, and after Whittier's death in 1892 became the last member of that distinguished group which gave New England her preëminence in nineteenth-century literature. A genial humorist in verse and prose, a gracious and happy "poet of occasions," a shrewd observer of the significant commonplaces of experience, and a master in the art of easy discourse upon things in general, Dr. Holmes fairly holds his position in American letters, an original and conspicuous figure, while, perhaps, less highly gifted than any of these poets with whom he was so intimately associated.

Ancestry and Childhood.

Like Emerson and Lowell, Holmes was a typical representative of what he himself termed the "Brahmin caste" of New England. His father, a descendant of one of the early settlers of Connecticut, was Rev. Abiel Holmes, for forty years a minister in Cambridge, and an author of some note. The poet's mother, Sarah Wendell Holmes, whom he closely resembled in slightness of figure and vivacity of spirits, was a lineal descendant of Governor Bradstreet and his wife, Anne, best remembered for her poetical gifts and celebrated in her generation as the Tenth Muse. His great-grandmother was the Dorothy Quincy whose portrait is so charmingly presented in the poem Dorothy Q. Wendell Phillips was his cousin.

The poet was born at Cambridge, August 29, 1809, in a picturesque gambrel-roofed house on the edge of the Harvard campus. His earliest literary explorations were, like those of Lowell, associated with his father's study, where, as he says, he "bumped about among books," from the time when he was hardly taller than one of his father's folios.

Education.

When ten years old, Wendell was placed in a school where Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and Margaret Fuller were also pupils. Five years later, as it was in the mind of Rev. Abiel Holmes that his son should become a minister, the boy was sent to Andover to take his preparatory course in Phillips Academy, under the sober influences which dominated that orthodox community. Holmes remained but a year at the Academy, however, and returned to Cambridge to enter Harvard College in 1825, becoming a member of the famous class of 1829, for whose successive anniversaries some of his most notable poems were composed.

Early Productions.

After graduation, Holmes decided upon the legal profession and entered the Harvard Law School. It was at this period that he published his earliest verse. The first of his poems to attract attention was Old Ironsides (1830). This spirited lyric was inspired by the announcement that the frigate Constitution, then lying in the navy yard at Charlestown, was to be dismantled and broken up. Hastily writing the ringing lines which so effectively stirred the patriotic feelings of the nation, the young law student sent his verses to the editor of the Boston Advertiser, from whose columns they were immediately copied far and wide. The astonished Secretary of the Navy recalled his order; the "tattered ensign," figuratively speaking, was not torn down. A year after Old Ironsides, Holmes wrote The Last Leaf, one of his finest poems, which with its exquisite blending of humor and pathos still remains our choicest example of what is technically called "society verse." Nearly all the other poetry of this period is broadly humorous, and includes The Ballad of the Oyster-Man, The Height of the Ridiculous, My Aunt, and The Comet. In 1831, also he wrote for the New England Magazine two papers entitled The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, forerunners of the admirable series resumed twenty-six years later in the Atlantic Monthly. Thus at twenty-three, Oliver Wendell Holmes had already entered the fields of literary effort in which he was to win such happy success, and had duly registered his claim.

Medicine.

In 1832, Holmes turned from law to medicine, and the next year went abroad to study his profession. He remained in Europe, for the most part in Paris, between two and three years, but received his degree from the Harvard Medical School in 1836; at the same commencement he read before the Phi Beta Kappa society the poem entitled Poetry, a Metrical Essay. Dr. Holmes began the practice of medicine in Boston, but was called in 1839 to the professorship of anatomy in Dartmouth College. Resigning this position after a year's service, he returned to Boston in 1840, the year of his marriage to Miss Amelia Jackson. In 1847, he was appointed professor of anatomy and physiology at Harvard, a position which he filled actively for thirty-five years -- a conscientious and successful instructor, characteristically enlivening his class-room with the brightness of his own high spirits. He wrote frequently upon professional topics and produced some noted medical essays.

Literature Again.

Two volumes of Poems had appeared previous to 1850, but, with the exception of the compositions already mentioned, nothing of especial distinction had been published. In 1857, however, the Atlantic Monthly began its brilliant course, and Dr. Holmes became forthwith a conspicuous figure in the literary life of America. It was, indeed, upon condition that Holmes should be engaged as the "first contributor" that Lowell accepted the editorship of the new magazine. And accordingly the first number of the Atlantic -- a name happily chosen by Dr. Holmes himself -- contained the first installment of that work which is most closely associated with its author's literary fame, -- the new Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table.

The Autocrat.

Dr. Holmes was forty-eight years old when the sparkling pages of the Autocrat began to appear. Beginning whimsically with the sentence, "I was just going to say, when I was interrupted," the speaker resumed the thread of genial comment which had been dropped a quarter of a century before. The scene of colloquy is at the breakfast-table in a typical Boston boarding-house. The "characters" who comprise the company are lightly sketched: the landlady's sentimental daughter who is wont to receive the statements of the speaker with a rising "yes?" the ingenious youth "B.F.," the divinity student, the professor, the "old gentleman who sits opposite," the little school-mistress, and the Autocrat himself -- who presides so wisely and talks to such excellent effect. There is, too, a tiny romance, as a relish; but the charm of the volume is in the conversation, which is simple and familiar, never commonplace. Shrewd observations, witty comment, happily turned epigrams, pithy phrases, bits of wisdom, passages of fantastic humor blend inimitably. Sometimes it is an odd comparison that provokes a smile -- as when the difficulty of "winding-up" a poem suggests the analogy to a diffident caller who finds it hard to get out of a room after the visit is really over:--

"They want to be off, and you want to have them off, but they don't know how to manage it. One would think they had been built in your parlor or study, and were waiting to be launched."

Or this:--

"Writing or printing is like shooting with a rifle; you may hit your reader's mind, or miss it; but talking is like playing at a mark with the pipe of an engine; if it is within reach, and you have time enough, you can't help hitting it."

Here, too, Holmes introduced some of his best-known verse. Contentment, Parson Turell's Legacy, and the never-to-be-forgotten narrative of The Deacon's Masterpiece; or, The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay, are among the humorous poems presented in the Autocrat. It is not always understood that this last-mentioned classic is something of an allegory; the famous vehicle of ancient pattern which went to pieces all at once,--

"First of November, 'Fifty-five"
... . .
All at once, and nothing first,--
Just as bubbles do when they burst,"--

"I go to the Saturday Club quite regularly, but the company is more of ghosts than of flesh and blood for me. I carry a stranger there now and then, introduce him to the members who happen to be there, and then say: There at that end used to sit Agassiz; here at this end Longfellow; Emerson used to be there, and Lowell often next him; on such an occasion Hawthorne was with us, at another time Motley, and Sumner, and smaller constellations, -- nebulae if you will, but luminous more or less in the provincial firmament."

His poem At the Saturday Club (1884) is a noble tribute to this galaxy of friends. There are few events in the poet's later life that call for record. In 1879, a complimentary breakfast in honor of the Autocrat's seventieth birthday was given him by the publishers of the Atlantic Monthly. Together with his daughter, he visited Europe in the summer of 1886, -- just fifty years after his student days in Paris. The major part of this later visit was in England, where he was heartily welcomed and royally entertained. Honorary degrees were conferred upon him by the universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, and Oxford. At Oxford, the ceremonial dignity of the occasion was unexpectedly enlivened by the inquiry of a vociferous undergraduate in the gallery, "Did he come in the One-Hoss Shay?" at which, says Dr. Holmes, "there was a hearty laugh, joined in as heartily by myself." The volume Our Hundred Days in Europe (1887) contains the interesting record of these experiences, and is as characteristic of the author in its modesty as in its lively humor. Over the Teacups.

The reappearance of the essayist in 1890 with a new volume, appropriately entitled Over the Teacups, was hailed with delight by the readers who had sat with the Autocrat at breakfast a generation before. The writer was eighty-one years old; but the old-time shrewdness of expression, the homely directness of speech, and the mirthful spirit, always tempered by charity and good will, had not been blunted by age. It is the Dictator, now, who presides at the table; there is an appreciative tinkling of the teaspoons, as he discourses after the manner of past days. Who but Oliver Wendell Holmes would have linked the Salem witches to these new-fangled cars, and sent them scudding from end to end of Essex County over the inter-urban tracks? The Broomstick Train belongs with his best humorous poems.

The Poet.

It is inevitable that Dr. Holmes should live in the memory of readers as the Autocrat; yet it was as a poet that he was ambitious of recognition. His best humorous narratives, The Deacon's Masterpiece, Parson Turell's Legacy, How the Old Horse Won the Bet, and The Broomstick Train, are classics of their kind. As the poet of occasions -- notably in the annual gatherings of his college class -- Holmes is without a peer. In The Boys (1859) and Bill and Joe (1868) we have the class poet at his best. His patriotic verse is not to be forgotten. The note struck in the thrilling lines of Old Ironsides is heard in the war-time poems, Union and Liberty (1861) and Voyage of the Good Ship Union (1862); and again in Grandmother's Story of Bunker-Hill Battle (1875). The strong religious feeling of the poet finds expression in a number of hymns which have a cherished place in the hearts of believers. The Hymn of Trust, A Sun-Day Hymn ("Lord of all being! throned afar"), and the Parting Hymn ("Father of Mercies, Heavenly Friend") are the most familiar. But after all, there are comparatively few of Holmes's serious compositions that reach the high standards of imaginative poetry; and of these it is The Chambered Nautilus which holds the favored place among the best-known and best-loved American poems. The later volumes of his verse were published as follows: Songs in Many Keys (1861), Humorous Poems (1865), Songs of Many Seasons (1874), The Iron Gate (1880), and Before the Curfew (1888).

"And if I should live to be
The last leaf upon the tree
In the spring,"--

Holmes had written at twenty-two or twenty-three. Neither Whittier nor Longfellow had been heard from then. Poe's early poems, and Bryant's, of course, were being read. Lowell had not entered college. The author of The Last Leaf saw the flight of all. He paid his tribute of respect to the patriarch of American poets, on Bryant's seventieth birthday (1864), and thirteen years later wrote in happy phrase his greeting For Whittier's Seventieth Birthday. The Iron Gate marked his own arrival at the milepost of threescore and ten. It was for the Autocrat to pay loving tribute to the memory of Longfellow and of Emerson in well-known passages of At the Saturday Club (1884), and then, in 1891, to lament the death of Lowell in the most tender of all these personal poems:--

"Thou shouldst have sung the swan-song for the choir
That filled our groves with music till the day
Lit the last hill-top with its reddening fire,
And evening listened for thy lingering lay."

In the year following, Whittier died; and of him the surviving poet sang:--

"Best loved and saintliest of our singing train,
Earth's noblest tributes to thy name belong;
A lifelong record closed without a stain,
A blameless memory shrined in deathless song."

Finally, two years later, October 7, 1894, Holmes, too, passed away -- last of the

"choir
That filled our groves with music,"

in that long golden age of our national literature.

Authorities.

It will not be necessary to specify regarding the selection of material for reading in either the verse or prose of Holmes. The Complete Works are published in fourteen volumes by Houghton Mifflin Company. The Cambridge Edition of the Poems is in one volume. The Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes (2 vols.) by John T. Morse, Jr., is the standard biography. Mrs. Annie Fields, in Authors and Friends, T.W. Higginson, in Old Cambridge, and J.T. Trowbridge, in My Own Story (1904), have written of the Autocrat. The usual authorities on American literature may be read in general criticism.