Holmes, Oliver Wendell, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, August 29, 1809, was the son of Rev. Abiel and Sarah (Wendell) Holmes. His father was a Congregational minister, the author of Annals of America and other works; his
Copyright 1890 in U.S.
by J. B. Lippincott Company. mother, descended from a Dutch ancestor, was related to many well-known families in New England and New York. He entered Harvard College at the age of sixteen, and graduated, in what became a famous class, in 1829. He began the study of law, but after a year gave it up, and entered upon the study of medicine. After the customary course at the medical school of Harvard he spent over two years in the hospitals and schools of Europe, chiefly in Paris; and on his return home took the degree of M.D. in 1836. Three years later he was professor of Anatomy and Physiology at Dartmouth College, but after two years' service he resigned and engaged in general practice in Boston. He married in 1840 Amelia Lee Jackson, daughter of a justice of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts. (Three children were born of the marriage, of whom one, O. W. Holmes, jun., served as a captain in the civil war, and is a judge and an eminent writer upon legal subjects.) In 1847 he was appointed professor of Anatomy at Harvard, which place he held until 1882. He was highly respected as a man of science, and beloved as an instructor; but as time went on his literary genius quite overbore his professional zeal, and it is as a poet and essayist that he will be remembered.
He began writing verse while an undergraduate, but his first efforts were not remarkable. While in the law school he contributed to the Collegian a few poems of a light and humorous character which first gave indications of his future power; among these are 'Evening, by a Tailor' and 'The Height of the Ridiculous.' There is a reminiscence of his life in Paris in the tender poem beginning 'Ah, Clemence! when I saw thee last.' A little later was written 'The Last Leaf,' which contains one perfect stanza, and which from the blending of quaintness and pathos is perhaps the most fortunate and characteristic of his minor poems. For some years the muse visited him by stealth, the votary fearing for his professional reputation in a town so noted for propriety. A small volume of these early poems was published in 1836. Twenty years passed with desultory efforts and a slowly-growing power, when by the publication of The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1857-58) he became suddenly famous. No literary event since the Noctes had more strongly affected the reading world. The success was due to its fresh, unconventional tone, its playful wit and wisdom, and to the lovely vignettes of verse. Apart from the merits of thought and style, the pages have the charm of personal confidences; the reader becomes at once a pupil and an intimate friend. The tone assumed is egotistical, but the force and the comedy (as every man with imagination sees) are bound up in that assumption. The Professor at the Breakfast Table (1858-59) was written upon the same lines and has qualities equal to those of its predecessor, but it deals with deeper questions and in a less familiar way. The Poet at the Breakfast Table (1872) takes the reader into the region of religious and philosophical ideas. 'God is Love' is the keynote of its doctrine. His first effort in fiction was Elsie Venner (1859-60), a study of hereditary impressions and tendencies. The Guardian Angel (1867) is a picture of rural New England. A Mortal Antipathy was written in 1885. It is scarcely a novel as the term is generally understood, but there is a thread of story on which the author hangs his observations, as he had done before in the Autocrat. The introduction to this book is autobiographical and historical, and gives a delightful view of Cambridge as it was in the author's boyhood, and a sadly amusing account of early American literature. The works before named appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, of which he was one of the founders. He wrote for it also many occasional essays and poems. Besides the early volume (1836), he published Songs in Many Keys (1862), Songs of Many Seasons (1875), The Iron Gate (1880), and Before the Curfew (1888). His other (prose) works are Currents and Counter-currents (1861), Soundings from the Atlantic (1864), Border Lines of Knowledge (1862), Mechanism in Thought and Morals (1871), and Memoirs of Motley (1879) and Emerson (1885). Our Hundred Days in Europe (1887) is an account of a visit made in 1886, during which he received honours from the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, and Edinburgh. The article EMERSON in this work is from his pen. Universally beloved, he died peacefully in his armchair in his library overlooking Cambridge, on the 7th October 1894.
It is difficult to make a summary of the traits of a writer so versatile. By his own generation he will be remembered as a great talker, in the highest sense. His intellect was keen and powerful; his observation instinctive; and his enthusiasm and energy would have carried through a man of less brilliant parts. His verse is melodious, compact, and rounded by art; its Gallic liveliness tempered by the even measure, and enforced by the point, of the 18th century. There is not in it a trace of the manner of recent English poets. Still, in its thought, its humanity, and its suggestions of science, it is seen that he is a man of his own century, and among the most advanced. Among specimens of his varied powers may be cited 'The Last Leaf,' already mentioned, 'The Chambered Nautilus,' 'Grandmother's Story' (of the battle of Bunker's Hill), 'Sun and Shadow,' 'For the Burns Centennial,' 'On lending a Punch-bowl,' and 'The One-hoss Shay.' He is especially happy in his tributes to brother poets—as to Longfellow and Lowell, and to Whittier on his seventieth birthday. During the civil war he wrote many impassioned lyrics in defence of the Union—probably the best patriotic songs of the time. Of his prose it may be said that, whatever may be the subject, it always engages attention, and is always sui generis. The reader feels himself in contact with a strong mind, full of the fruit of reading, and with a character that is full of surprises. The choice of words is directed by a poet's inevitable instinct, and the general treatment is both precise and delicate. In the essay upon Mechanism in Thought and Morals there is an acuteness and subtlety which might have made a metaphysician; only that might have deprived the world of one of its most original and delightful essayists. There are degrees of value in his works, but it appears that his fame will rest chiefly upon The Autocrat, The Professor, and certain of his poems. Of his writings in general it should be said that, though his sparkling wit and flowing humour are evident to the most casual reader, a closer study reveals other qualities which give him a place among the great writers of the time.
The collected ('Riverside') edition of his works extends to 13 vols. (1891-92). There are Lives by W. S. Kennedy (1883), Emma E. Brown (1884), and J. T. Morse, jun. (2 vols. 1896).