556 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 



eventual construction, it is precisely because he differs from any of 

 his progenitors that he is noteworthy. It is the combination he em- 

 bodies, to say nothing of the advance, that singles him out as a man 

 of mark. 



Special stress, therefore, need not be laid on the fact that Holmes 

 was the lineal descendant of " The Tenth Muse, lately sprung up in 

 America," as Anne Bradstreet called her book of poems, since that 

 lady was the poet's great-great-great-great-grandmother. Nor must 

 we chronicle all the Dutchmen who appear with such safe wisdom in 

 the middle of his name. Yet is it pleasing to note that his father was 

 the Rev. Abiel Holmes, " a sunny old man," from whom, if from any 

 one, he inherited his own sunny disposition. 



It is sufficient here to begin with the dame to whom Holmes early 

 went to school, whose Prentiss hand, armed with an enormous birch, 

 seems rarely or never to have been tried on the youngsters she under- 

 took to form, — a pleasing exception to the spirit of the times. From 

 this almost fossiliferous educational period it gives one something of a 

 start to find the subject of it five years later in all modernity at Phil- 

 lips Academy, Andover. It was there that Holmes began to write, 

 poetry of course and heroics, a translation of the first book of the 

 ^ueid. In 1825 he entered Harvard, and started on that career of 

 verse for which we remember him, — verse called occasional; in 

 Holmes's case with certainly double-edged humor, as the occasions 

 were substantially continuous from the start. 



He began very early to write well; some of his best pieces being 

 written for the Collegian, the college paper of the day, — among oth- 

 ers "The Height of the Ridiculous" and "The Spectre Pig." In 

 due course he became a member of the $ B K. On graduating he 

 coquetted with law, but soon gave it up for medicine, to which he 

 remained faithful for the rest of his life, non sine gloria, illumined by 

 facetice, for to him the funny-bone by definition bordered on the hume- 

 rus. Upon his valuable contributions to the profession, and upon his 

 all-pervasive scientific sense on the subject, it is not necessary here to 

 dwell. For thirty-five years he held the chair of Anatomy and Phys- 

 iolonry in the Harvard Medical School, delighting successive genera- 

 tions of students, and when at last he resigned, in 1882, the ovation he 

 received showed how dearly he was loved. 



One episode in his medical career, however, is important, from a 

 literary standpoint. In 1833 he went abroad to study medicine in 

 Paris. The importance of this lies not in the fact, but in its effect 

 upon Holmes, and the importance of the effect not upon its positive, 



