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Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: HIG-HOR |
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HOLMES, OLIVER WENDELL (18o9-1894) , American writer and physician, was born on the 29th of August 1809 at Cambridge , Mass. His father, Abiel Holmes (1763-1837), was a Calvinist clergyman, the writer of a useful history, Annals of America, and of much very dull poetry. His mother (the second wife of Abiei) was Sarah Wendell, of a distinguished New York
as the discoverer of a beneficent truth. The volume of his more sustained work, and in 1861 his novel, Elsie Venner, at medical essays holds some of his most sparkling wit, his shrewdest observation, his kindliest humanity. In 1840 he married Amelia Lee Jackson, daughter of the Hon. Charles Jackson (1775-1855), formerly associate justice of the State supreme judicial court, a lady of rare charm alike of mind and character. She died in the winter of 18871888. Their first-born child, Oliver Wendell Holmes, afterwards became chief
In 1836, being in that year the Phi Beta Kappa poet at Harvard University, he published his first volume of Poems, which afterwards reached a second edition. Among these earlier lyrics was " The Last Leaf," one of the most delicate combinations of pathos and humour in literature. His collected poetry fills three volumes. In 18561857 a Boston publishing house (Phillips, Sampson, and Co.) invited James Russell Lowell to edit a new magazine, which he agreed to do on condition that he could secure the assistance of Dr Holmes. By this urgent invitation the Doctor
Cambridge and Boston. He accepted with pleasure, and at once threw himself into the enterprise with zeal. He christened it The Atlantic Monthly; and, as Mr Howells afterwards said, he " not only named but made " it, for in each number of its first volume there appeared one of the papers of the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. The opening of the Autocrat" I was just going to say when I was interrupted "is explained by the fact that in the old New England Magazine (1831 to 1833) the Doctor
chief
There were characters and incidents, but hardly a story, in the Autocrat and the Professor. Holmes had an ambition. forfirst called The Professor's Story, was published. The book was illuminated throughout by admirable pictures of character and society in the typical New England town. But the rattle-snake element was unduly extravagant, and in other respects the book was open to criticism as a work of art. It was written with the same purpose which informed the greatest part of the Doctor's literary work, and which had already been scented and nervously condemned by the religious world. By heredity the Doctor was a theologian; no other topic enchained him more than did the stern and merciless dogmas of his Calvinist forefathers. His humanity revolted against them, his reason condemned them, and he set himself to their destruction as his task in literature. The religious world of his time was still so largely under the control of old ideas that he was assailed as a freethinker and a subverter of Christianity; though before his death opinions had so changed that the bitterness of the attacks upon him seemed incredible, even to some of those who had most vehemently made them. None the less, undaunted and profoundly earnest , he returned, six years later, to the same line of thought in his second novel, The Guardian Angel
drawn
Holmes generally held himself aloof from politics, and from those " causes " of temperance, abolition and woman's rights which enthralled most of his contemporaries in New England. The Civil War, however, aroused him for the time; finding him first a strenuous Unionist, it quickly converted him into an ardent advocate of emancipation. His interest
After his return from Paris in 1835 Dr Holmes lived in Boston, with summer sojournings at Pittsfield and Beverly Farms, and occasional trips to neighbouring cities, until 1886. He then undertook a four months' journey in Europe, and in England had a sort of triumphal progress. On his return he wrote Our Hundred Days in Europe (1887), a courteous recognition of the hospitality and praise which had been accorded to him. During this visit Cambridge University made him Doctor of Letters, Edinburgh University made him Doctor of Laws, and Oxford University made him Doctor of Civil Law. Already, in 188o, Harvard University had made him Doctor of Laws. He died on the 7th of October 1894, and was buried from King's Chapel, Boston, in the cemetery of Mount Auburn. His eldest son Oliver Wendell (b. 1841), who graduated from Harvard in 1861 and fought in the Civil War, retiring from the army as brevet lieut.-colonel in 1864, took up the study of law and was admitted to the bar in Boston in 1866. He was for some years editor of the American Law Review, and after being professor in the Harvard Law School in 1882 was appointed in the same year a judge of the Massachusetts supreme court, rising to be chief justice in 1899. In 1902 he was made a judge of the United States Supreme Court. His work on The Common Law (1881) and his edition (1873) of Kent's Commentaries are his principal publications; and he became widely recognized as one of the great jurists of his day. End of Article: HOLMES, OLIVER WENDELL (18o9-1894) If you wish, you can link directly to this article.
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