HOLMES 



and to this day most people think of Holmes 

 with a smile, remembering the glancing humor 

 of his Autocrat, and such of his poems as The 

 Height of the Ridiculous, The Specter Pig and 

 The Hot Season. But Oliver Wendell Holmes 

 was more than a humorist. He was a physician 

 of note in his day, the writer of medical 



v\\ 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 



treatises which have a permanent value; he 

 was a teacher, so inspiring that he was given 

 the last hour in the college day for his classes, 

 because he alone could enliven the fagged 

 brains; he was a novelist, though not a great 

 one; and above all else he perfected a certain 

 style of literature, which in reality was but 

 printed conversation. To his unusual abilities 

 was joined a manner of rare charm and a 

 genuine kindliness and love for humanity, and 

 it is thus not strange that he should have been 

 one of the most popular men of his day. 



Years of Preparation. Holmes was born on 

 August 29, 1809, at Cambridge, Mass., and was 

 the son of a Congregational minister. The 

 family life was pleasant; he was turned loose 

 in a library and allowed to read "in books 

 rather than through them," and -thus he came 

 to young manhood with the idea that the 

 world was a delightful place. After graduating 

 from Harvard 'in 1829 he began to study law, 

 but soon gave it up for medicine, in which 

 he became more and more deeply interested. 

 Meanwhile, his name was on men's lips all 

 over the country. In 1830 he heard that the 

 famous ship Constitution was to be destroyed, 

 and he wrote the stirring Old Ironsides 



2811 HOLMES 



Ay, tear her shattered ensign down ! 



Long has it waved on high, 

 And many an eye has danced to see 



That banner in the sky. 



The verses were copied and recopied, and 

 so strong was the popular protest which they 

 voiced that the old ship was saved. 



In 1833 Holmes went to Europe to pursue 

 his medical studies, and on his return three 

 years later settled down to practice his pro- 

 fession in Boston. He took his work seriously 

 enough, but other people did not, for they 

 had read his humorous verses, and were not 

 going to trust their lives to a "frivolous- 

 minded" young poet. Partly because of this 

 fact, and partly because he could not endure 

 to witness the constant suffering and misery 

 with which the practice of medicine brought 

 him into contact, he gave up his active work 

 in 1838 and became professor of anatomy at 

 Dartmouth. Two years later .he married 

 Amelia Lee Jackson, with whom he lived a 

 peculiarly happy life, and for a time resumed 

 his practice in Boston. But in 1847 he resigned 

 this profession once and for all, to become 

 dean and professor of anatomy at Harvard 

 Medical School, a post he held for thirty-five 

 years. "It's not," he wrote when he first dis- 

 covered the multiplicity of his duties "it's not 

 a chair which I've been called to occupy; it's 

 a settee." 



Years of Achievement. Hand in hand with 

 his wonderful success as a lecturer he developed 

 a growing literary reputation. For a time this 

 was purely local, and no important occasion 

 in Boston, that beloved city which he called 



BIRTHPLACE, AT CAMBRIDGE 



"the hub of the universe," was complete with- 

 out his presence and his verses. But, in 1857, 

 there was founded the Atlantic Monthly, and it 

 made Holmes famous at home and abroad. 

 For to it he contributed those talks, wise, 



