75 With mittened hands, and caps drawn low, The horned patriarch of the sheep, 80 85 90 95 The sun through dazzling snow-mist shone. Are left of all that circle now,- Their written words we linger o'er, 180 185 190 195 225 Then roused himself to safely cover 230 Within our beds awhile we heard Next morn we wakened with the shout 245 250 253 260 280 Clasp, Angel of the backward look With the white amaranths underneath. 285 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES (1809-1894) Had Holmes written an autobiography at forty-eight, an age when most men have taken their final place in the world, he would have said little about literary achievements. It would have been the record of a man of science, of a physician in the front rank of his profession, of the occupant of the chair of anatomy in two prominent institutions, of a specialist who had published such works as Homœopathy and its Kindred Delusions. He had sprung from a literary environment he had been born under the shadow of Harvard, into a home where authorship was no uncommon thing, and he had entered the college at sixteen as a matter of course to be graduated with what was to be the famous class of '29. Perplexed as to the profession he was best fitted to enter upon, he had, like Longfellow, at first considered the law, even spending a year in the law school, but had given it up to enter upon the study of medicine. Two years at Harvard and two more at Paris, where he seems to have been impressed only by his medical opportunities, a short period at Edinburgh, and he was back again in Boston equipped for his new work. He built up for himself a practice in Boston, he became lecturer on anatomy at Dartmouth and in 1847 was given the chair of anatomy at Harvard. For twenty-five years literature was to him a pleasing diversion not to be taken at all seriously. For one brief period he had taken it seriously. In college he had had a poetic period during which he had contributed freely to the Collegian and to other journals such poems as The Height of the Ridiculous,' 'The Comet,' 'My Aunt,' 'The Last Leaf,' Old Ironsides,'- remarkable work indeed, but as he had become more and more interested in his profession, he had gathered it up as Poems in 1836,- a book to be republished at intervals and had considered it in reality a closed chapter, an 'old portfolio' containing the relics of his vanished boyhood. The emergence of Holmes, the man of letters who was destined to dominate completely the specialist and professor, came in 1857 with the establishment of the Atlantic Monthly. Lowell, whether by editorial intuition, or critical discernment, or by a crafty desire to make his companion share the responsibility for the new magazine of which the group had made him editor, had insisted that his Harvard colleague should contribute a serial to the first volume. Thus challenged, Holmes produced The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, which not only put the magazine upon its feet but gave its author at a bound a permanent place in American literature. Encouraged by his success, he contributed other series of Autocrat papers: The Professor at the Breakfast Table, 1860, The Professor's Story, afterwards published as Elsie Venner, 1861, The Guardian Angel, 1867, and The Poet at the Breakfast Table, 1872. His resignation of the chair at Harvard in 1882 marks the beginning of the last period of his literary life. He would devote himself now entirely to authorship, and the result was Pages from an Old Volume of Life, and Medical Essays, 1883, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1884, A Mortal Antipathu, 1885. Our Hundred Days in Europe, 1887. Before the Curfew (final poems). 1888, and Over the Tea-Cups, 1890. He lingered until 1894, until he was indeed the last leaf on the tree,' the last prominent member of the remarkable group that we call to-day The New England School. |