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CHAP. PAGE.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.

ANCESTRY.

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

"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 all--comfortable, 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.

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

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 Bradstreets--names that belonged to the best blue blood of New England--and 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 fingers 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 One tenth another to nine tenths me?

Soft is the breath of a maiden's yes; Not the light gossamer stirs with less; But never a cable that holds so fast, Through all the battles of wave and blast, And never an echo of speech or song That lives in the babbling air so long! There were tones in the voice that whispered then You may hear to-day in a hundred men.

O lady and lover, how faint and far Your images hover, and here we are, Solid and stirring in flesh and bone, Edward's and Dorothy's--all their own-- A goodly record for time to show Of a syllable spoken so long ago! Shall I bless you, Dorothy, or forgive, For the tender whisper that bade me live?

It shall be a blessing, my little maid, I will heal the stab of the Redcoat's blade, And freshen the gold of the tarnished frame, And gild with a rhyme your household name, So you shall smile on us, brave and bright, As first you greeted the morning's light, And live untroubled by woes and fears, Through a second youth of a hundred years.

This Dorothy Quincy, it is interesting to note, was the aunt of a second Dorothy Quincy, who married Governor Hancock. The Wendells were of Dutch descent.

Early in the eighteenth century, Abraham and Jacob Wendell left their Albany home and came to Boston. It is said that Jacob fell in love with his future wife, the daughter of Doctor James Oliver, when she was only nine years of age. Seeing her at play, he was so impressed by her beauty and grace that, like the Jacob of old, he willingly waited the flight of years. Twelve children blessed this happy union, and the youngest daughter married William Phillips, the first mayor of Boston, and the father of Wendell Phillips.

Fair cousin, Wendell P.,

says Doctor Holmes in his Phi Beta Kappa poem of 1881:

Our ancestors were dwellers beside the Zuyder Zee; Both Grotius and Erasmus were countrymen of we, And Vondel was our namesake, though he spelt it with a v.

The original Bradstreet was Simon, the old Charter Governor, who married Governor Dudley's daughter Anne. This accomplished lady, the first New England poetess, and frequently called by her contemporaries "The Tenth Muse," was Doctor Holmes' grandmother's great-great-grandmother.

"I go for the man with the family portraits against the one with the twenty-five cent daguerreotype, unless I find out that the last is the better of the two. I go for the man that inherits family traditions and the cumulative humanities of at least four or five generations. Above all things, as a child, he should have tumbled about in a library. All men are afraid of books that have not handled them from infancy."

FOOTNOTES:

From notes furnished the writer by Dr. Holmes.

From notes furnished by Doctor Holmes.

BOYHOOD.

In a curious little almanac for 1809 may still be seen against the date of August 29, the simple record, "Son b." Twice before had good Parson Holmes recorded in similar manner the births of his children, for Oliver Wendell, who bore his grandfather's name, was his third child; but this was the first time he could write "son."

A few years later another son came--the "brother John" whose wit and talents have gladdened so many hearts--and, last of all, another daughter came to brighten the family circle for a few brief years.

The little Oliver was a bright, sunny-tempered child, highly imaginative and extremely sensitive. Speaking of his childhood in after years, and of certain superstitious fancies that always clung to him, he says:

What some of these fancies were, he tells us elsewhere:

"I was afraid of ships. Why, I could never tell. The masts looked frightfully tall, but they were not so tall as the steeple of our old yellow meeting-house. At any rate, I used to hide my eyes from the sloops and schooners that were wont to lie at the end of the bridge, and I confess that traces of this undefined terror lasted very long. One other source of alarm had a still more fearful significance. There was a great wooden hand, a glovemaker's sign, which used to swing and creak in the blast as it hung from a pillar before a certain shop a mile or two outside of the city. Oh, the dreadful hand! Always hanging there ready to catch up a little boy who would come home to supper no more, nor yet to bed, whose porringer would be laid away empty thenceforth, and his half-worn shoes wait until his small brother grew to fit them.

"As for all manner of superstitious observances, I used once to think I must have been peculiar in having such a list of them, but I now believe that half the children of the same age go through the same experiences. No Roman soothsayer ever had such a catalogue of omens as I found in the sibylline leaves of my childhood. That trick of throwing a stone at a tree and attaching some mighty issue to hitting or missing, which you will find mentioned in one or more biographies, I well remember. Stepping on or over certain particular things or spots--Doctor Johnson's special weakness--I got the habit of at a very early age.

"With these follies mingled sweet delusions which I loved so well I would not outgrow them, even when it required a voluntary effort to put a momentary trust in them. Here is one which I cannot help telling you.

At an early age the merry, restless little fellow was sent to a neighboring school, kept by Ma'am Prentiss, a good, motherly old dame, who ruled her little flock, not with a scourge of birches, but with a long willow rod that reached quite across the schoolroom, "reminding, rather than chastening." Among her pupils was Alfred Lee, afterwards the beloved Bishop of Delaware.

"It is by little things," says the Autocrat, "that we know ourselves; a soul would very probably mistake itself for another, when once disembodied, were it not for individual experiences which differ from those of others only in details seemingly trivial. All of us have been thirsty thousands of times, and felt with Pindar, that water was the best of things. I alone, as I think, of all mankind, remember one particular pailful of water, flavored with the white-pine of which the pail was made, and the brown mug out of which one Edmund, a red-faced and curly-haired boy, was averred to have bitten a fragment in his haste to drink; it being then high summer, and little full-blooded boys feeling very warm and porous in the low studded schoolroom where Dame Prentiss, dead and gone, ruled over young children. Thirst belongs to humanity everywhere, in all ages, but that white-pine pail and that brown mug belong to me in particular."

The next school to which the Cambridge pastor sent his little son was kept by William Biglow, a man of considerable scholarship and much native wit. Five years were spent at a school in Cambridgeport, which was kept by several successive teachers, and it was here, as schoolmates, that Oliver Wendell Holmes first met Margaret Fuller and Richard Henry Dana.

"I was moderately studious," says Doctor Holmes, "and very fond of reading stories, which I sometimes did in school hours. I was fond also of whispering, and my desk bore sad witness to my passion for whittling. For these misdemeanors I sometimes had a visitation from the ferule, and once when a Gunter's scale was used for this purpose, it flew to pieces as it came down on my palm."

"I was once equipped," he says, "in a hat of Leghorn straw, having a brim of much wider dimensions than were usual at that time, and sent to school in that portion of my native town which lies nearest to the metropolis. On my way I was met by a 'Port-Chuck,' as we used to call the young gentlemen of that locality, and the following dialogue ensued:

"These two much-respected gentlemen being the oldest inhabitants at that time, and the alleged race-course being out of the question, the Port-Chuck also winking and thrusting his tongue into his cheek, I perceived that I had been trifled with, and the effect has been to make me sensitive and observant respecting this article ever since. The hat is the vulnerable point of the artificial integument."

FOOTNOTES:

From notes furnished by Doctor Holmes.

From notes furnished by Doctor Holmes.

EARLY RECOLLECTIONS.

Of the boyhood of Doctor Holmes we have many delightful glimpses.

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