OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. I. THE MAN. "There's Holmes, who is matchless among you for wit; A Leyden-jar always full-charged, from which flit The electrical tingles of hit after hit; In long poems 't is painful sometimes, and invites In a measure so kindly, you doubt if the toes LOWELL.-A Fable for Critics. LIVER WENDELL HOLMES was born on OLIVER August 29th, 1809, in the historic town-" we called it then a village "-of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Cambridge then differed very widely from what it is to-day;1 Lowell, ten years the junior of Holmes, has described in his Fireside Travels the Cambridge of his boyhood; and from his descriptions we can easily conjure up a picture of the " country village, with its own habits and traditions," yet with "some of that cloistered quiet which characterises all university towns." Let those who are greatly interested in the early life of Oliver Wendell Holmes turn to the first pages of The Poet at the Breakfast Table and there reread the beautiful story of the "Gambrel-roofed House "" my birthplace, the home of my childhood, and earlier and later boyhood." The father of Oliver Wendell was the Reverend Abdiel Holmes, pastor of the first Congregational Church in Cambridge, who had entered into the gambrel-roofed house two years before the birth of his third child and first son in the annus Its population, which was then under 4000, in 1880 was upwards of 52,000. Literary Essays, vol. i. collected edition of his works. mirabilis of the nineteenth century. The poet's grandfather, Doctor David Holmes, had served in the French and Indian wars and as a surgeon in the American army during the struggle for independence; his grandfather was one of the original settlers of Woodstock county, and was descended from Thomas Holmes, a lawyer of Gray's Inn, London. Holmes's mother was a daughter of Oliver Wendell, a lawyer, of Dutch descent,2 and was connected with the intellectual aristocracy of New England-the Wendells, the Olivers, the Quinceys, and the Bradstreets. The last-named family included Anne Dudley Bradstreet, who 1 1809 was also the birth year of Darwin, Gladstone, Tennyson, and Lincoln, 2 In Post Prandial, a poem read before the Phi Beta Kappa Society in 1881, "Wendell Phillips, orator, and Charles Godfrey Leland, poet," being the two men specially honoured, Holmes said "The Dutch have taken Holland,'-so the schoolboys used to say; The Dutch have taken Harvard,- -no doubt of that to-day! For the Wendells were low Dutchmen, and all their vrows were Vans ; And the Breitmanns are high Dutchmen, and here is honest Hans. Mynheers, you both are welcome! Fair cousin Wendell P., And Vondel was our namesake, though he spelt it with a V."-Poems, iii. 155-6. |