Emma Elizabeth Brown - Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes

EMMA ELIZABETH BROWN

This 2012 edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

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ISBN: 978-1-4114-5820-8

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

ANCESTRY

IN a quaint old gambrel-roofed house that once stood on Cambridge Common, Oliver Wendell Holmespoet, 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 worshipped, and the old homestead itself was the headquarters of the American army during the siege of Boston.

"It was a great happiness," writes the Poet at the Breakfast-Table, "to have been born in an old house haunted by such recollections, with harmless ghosts walking its corridors, with fields of waving grass and trees and singing birds, and that vast territory of four or five acres around it, to give a child the sense that he was born to a noble principality....

"The gambrel-roofed house was not one of those old Tory, Episcopal church-goer's strongholds. One of its doors opens directly upon the Green, always called the Common; the other faces the south, a few steps from it, over a paved foot-walk on the other side of which is the miniature front yard, bordered with lilacs and syringas.

"The honest mansion makes no pretensions Accessible, companionable, holding its hand out to allcomfortable, respectable, and even in its way dignified, but not imposing; not a house for his Majesty's Counsellor, or the Right Reverend successor of Him who had not where to lay his head, for something like a hundred and fifty years it has stood in its lot, and seen the generations of men come and go like the leaves of the forest."

The house was not originally built for a parsonage. It was first the residence of a well-to-do tailor, who sold it to Jonathan Hastings, a prosperous farmer whom the college students used to call "Yankee Jont.," and whose son was the college steward in 1775. It was long known in Cambridge as the "Hastings House," but about the year 1792 it was sold to Eliphalet Pearson, the Hebrew Professor at Harvard, and in 1807 it passed into the hands of the Rev. Abiel Holmes.

For forty years the father of Oliver Wendell Holmes ministered to his Cambridge parish, revered and loved by all who knew him. He was a man of marked literary ability, as his Annals of America shows"full of learning," as some one has said, "but never distressing others by showing how learned he was."

Said T. W. Higginson, at the Holmes Breakfast:

"I should like to speak of that most delightful of sunny old men, the father of Doctor Holmes, whom I knew and loved when I was a child.

.. I was brought up in Cambridge, my father's house being next door to that of Doctor Holmes' gambrel-roofed house, and the library I most enjoyed tumbling about in was the same in which his infant gambols had first disturbed the repose of the books. I shall always remember a certain winter evening, when we boys were playing before the fire, how the old mangray, and gentle, and kindly as any old German professor, and never complaining of our loudest gambolsgoing to the frost-covered window, sketched with his pen-knife what seemed a cluster of brambles and a galaxy of glittering stars, and above that he wrote, Per aspera ad astra: 'Through difficulties to the stars.' He explained to us what it meant, and I have never forgotten that quiet winter evening and the sweet talk of that old man."

The good pastor was a graduate of Yale College, and before coming to Cambridge had taught at his Alma Mater, and preached in Georgia. He was the son of Doctor David Holmes, a physician of Woodstock, Ct., who had served as captain in the French and Indian wars, and afterward as surgeon in the Revolutionary army. The grandfather of Doctor David Holmes was one of the original settlers of Woodstock.

The genealogy of the Holmes family of Woodstock dates from Thomas Holmes, a lawyer of Gray's Inn, London. In 1686, John Holmes, one of his descendants, joined a colony from Roxbury, Mass., and settled in Woodstock, Conn. His son David married a certain "Bathsheba," who had a remarkable reputation as nurse and doctress.

In the great storm of 1717, when the settlers' houses were almost buried in the snow, it is said that she climbed out of an upper-story window and travelled on snow-shoes through almost impassable drifts to Dudley, Mass., to visit a sick woman. The son of this noble Bathsheba was "Dr. David," the grandfather of Oliver Wendell Holmes.

In 1790, Abiel Holmes was married to the daughter of President Stiles of Yale, who died without children. His second wife, and the mother of Oliver Wendell Holmes, was a daughter of Hon. Oliver Wendell, an eminent lawyer. He was descended from various Wendells, Olivers, Quinceys, and Bradstreetsnames that belonged to the best blue blood of New Englandand 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 ringers and slender wrist,

Hanging sleeves of stiff brocade

So they painted the little maid.

On her hand a parrot green

Sits unmoving and broods serene;

Hold up the canvas full in view

Look, there's a rent the light shines through.

Dark with a century's fringe of dust,

That was a Redcoat's rapier thrust!

Such is the tale the lady old,

Dorothy's daughter's daughter told.

Who the painter was none may tell

One whose best was not over well;

Hard and dry, it must be confessed,

Flat as a rose that has long been pressed;

Yet in her cheek the hues are bright,

Dainty colors of red and white;

And in her slender shape are seen

Hint and promise of stately mien.

Look not on her with eyes of scorn

Dorothy Q. was a lady born!

Ay, since the galloping Normans came,

England's annals have known her name;

And still to the three-hilled rebel town

Dear is that ancient name's renown,

For many a civic wreath they won,

The youthful sire and the gray-haired son.

O damsel Dorothy! Dorothy Q.,

Strange is the gift that I owe to you;

Such a gift as never a king

Save to daughter or son might bring

All my tenure of heart and hand,

All my title to house and land;

Mother and sister, and child and wife,

And joy and sorrow, and death and life.

What if a hundred years ago

Those close-shut lips had answered, no,

When forth the tremulous question came

That cost the maiden her Norman name;

And under the folds that look so still

The bodice swelled with the bosom's thrill

Should I be I, or would it be