Chapter I: His Life

Holmes invented a phrase which became celebrated--‘the Brahmin caste of New England,’ that is to say, an aristocracy of culture. The inventor of the phrase belonged to the class. He was a son of the Reverend Abiel Holmes, minister of the First Church of Cambridge and author of that ‘painstaking and careful work,’ the _American Annals_.

Abiel Holmes (a great-grandson of John Holmes, one of the settlers of Woodstock, Connecticut) was twice married. His first wife was Mary Stiles, daughter of President Ezra Stiles of Yale College. Five years after her death he married Sarah Wendell of Boston, who became the mother of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Through the Wendells, Holmes was related by one line of descent to Anne Bradstreet; by another to Evert Jansen Wendell of Albany.

The author of _The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table_ was born at Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Harvard Commencement Day, August 29, 1809. After a preliminary training at the Cambridgeport Academy (where he had for schoolmates Margaret Fuller and Richard Henry Dana) Holmes completed his college preparation at Phillips Academy, Andover, entered Harvard in the class of 1829, and in due time was graduated.

He had, or thought he had, an inclination to carry the ‘green bag,’ and to this end spent a year at the Dane (now Harvard) Law School, in Cambridge. He soon discovered a greater inclination towards medicine and entered the private medical school of Doctor James Jackson, in Boston. In 1833 he became a student at the École de Médecine in Paris, and during two busy winters heard the lectures of Broussais, Andral, Louis, and other teachers.

In 1836 he began the practice of medicine in Boston. During the two following years he competed for and won four of the Boylston Prizes. Enthusiastic in his profession, he found the life of a general practitioner not to his liking, and when, in 1838, the professorship of anatomy and physiology at Dartmouth College was offered him, he was ‘mightily pleased.’ He held the position for two years (1839–40); residence at Hanover was required for three months of each year.

Some time before going to Hanover, Holmes was writing to his friend Phineas Barnes, congratulating him on having entered into ‘the beatific state of duality,’ and wishing himself in like case. ‘I have flirted and written poetry long enough,’ he said, ‘and I feel that I am growing domestic and tabby-ish.’ On June 15, 1840, he married Miss Amelia Jackson, a daughter of Judge Charles Jackson of Boston. She was a young woman of rare endowments. ‘Every estimable and attractive quality of mind and character seemed to be hers.’[45]

In 1847 Holmes was appointed Parkman professor of anatomy and physiology in the Harvard Medical School. The multifarious extra cares involved led him to say that in those early days he occupied not a chair in the college but a settee. He held the position for thirty-five consecutive years.

The reputation which Holmes began early to build up through his writings was partly literary, partly scientific, partly a compound of both. Lovers of well-turned and witty verse knew him through his _Poems_ (1836) and his metrical essays, _Urania_ (1846) and _Astræa_ (1850). The public, always solicitous about its health, heard or read the two lectures on _Homœopathy and its kindred Delusions_ (1842). Physicians made his acquaintance through the _Boylston Prize Dissertations_ (1836–37), and the _Essay on the Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever_ (1843).

Fame came to Holmes in 1857 when he began printing in the newly founded ‘Atlantic Monthly’ a series of papers entitled _The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table_. Reprinted as a book, it at once took its proper place as an American classic, and now after forty-eight years its popularity seems in no degree lessened.

The following list contains the principal works upon which Holmes’s reputation as a man of letters rests. A full bibliography must be consulted if one would know the extent of his literary and scientific activity: _The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table_, 1858; _The Professor at the Breakfast-Table_, 1860; _Currents and Counter-Currents, with Other Addresses_, 1861; _Elsie Venner_, 1861; _Songs in Many Keys_, 1862; _Soundings from the Atlantic_, 1864; _The Guardian Angel_, 1867; _The Poet at the Breakfast-Table_, 1872; _Songs of Many Seasons_, 1875; _Memoir of John Lothrop Motley_, 1879; _The Iron Gate and Other Poems_, 1880; _Pages from an Old Volume of Life_, 1883; _A Mortal Antipathy_, 1885; _Ralph Waldo Emerson_, 1885; _Our Hundred Days in Europe_, 1887; _Before the Curfew and Other Poems_, 1888; _Over the Teacups_, 1891.

Holmes’s life was without marked incident. His work at the Medical School, his public lectures, social engagements, the normal and agreeable responsibilities of home and society, filled the measure of his days. The visit to England in 1886, when he was made a D. C. L. by Oxford, a Litt. D. by Cambridge, and an LL. D. by Edinburgh, was something like apotheosis, if the term be not too extravagant.

He endured the evils consequent on old age with philosophic composure, and it became at the last a matter of scientific curiosity with him to see how long he could maintain life. He was spared a tedious illness, and died an almost painless death on October 7, 1894.