CHAPTER II

THE BIRTH OF OLIVER HOLMES

“In the last week of August used to fall Commencement day at Cambridge,” remarks the doctor. “I remember that week well, for something happened to me once at that time, namely, I was born.”

It was in the year 1809—the same year that Gladstone, Tennyson, Darwin, and Lincoln were born—and on August 29. There is still in existence an old and yellow almanac that belonged once to Dr. Abiel Holmes, Oliver’s father. On the page given to August the numbers of the days run down the left-hand side, 1, 2, 3, down to 28, 29, 30, 31. Opposite 29 are two little parallel lines, used as a star or mark of reference, and at the bottom of the page the two little lines are repeated, and after them is written in ink “_son b_.” Of course “_b_” stands for “born.” A few grains of black sand were scattered over the wet ink to prevent it from blotting, and some of those grains of sand may be seen glistening there to this day. Oliver Wendell Holmes was born, and the fact of his birth was thus recorded in the almanac—“_son b_.”

Samuel Johnson was born in 1709; or, as Holmes expresses it, “the year 1709 was made ponderous and illustrious in English history by his birth.” It appeared to strike Holmes as a huge joke that he had been born just one hundred years after Dr. Johnson, and he amused himself by following out the parallel of their lives. Every year he used to take down his copy of Boswell’s “Life of Johnson” to see what the big, wise old grumbler was doing in that year, just a hundred years before. At last, in the year 1884, when he came to the end of Johnson’s life, he said that he felt that the incubus was raised; he had outlived the ponderous parallel.

The birth of the “laughing philosopher,” as Holmes has been called, took place in a very old house in Cambridge, close to Harvard College, and made famous in his poems as “the old gambrel-roofed house.” After the battle of Lexington, General-in-chief Artemas Ward had made this house the headquarters for the rallying of the patriots, and General Warren had stopped there on his way to Bunker Hill. George Washington and other famous men in those days must often have darkened its doors.

For years it stood, this quaint old house in which Holmes was born and grew to manhood, and from which he went to Harvard College; but before he died the property was sold to the University and the house was torn down. Holmes admitted that it was “a case of justifiable domicide.” He went to pay it a last visit, and “found a ghost in each and every chamber and closet,” and to each he said a fond goodbye. When the land was leveled down he did not care to go that way again.

Oliver’s father, Dr. Abiel Holmes, was an orthodox clergyman of the strictest kind. But he was nearly as good-natured as his son. He was a handsome young man, and all the girls used to say, “There goes Holmes—look!”

Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson once found a letter written by his mother when she was a girl, in which she gives some gossip about Dr. Abiel. He sent it to his friend Oliver Wendell and you can imagine the doctor’s amusement when he read the following paragraph:

“Now, mamma, I am going to surprise you. Mr. Abiel Holmes, of Cambridge, whom we so kindly chalked out for Miss N. W., is going to be married and, of all folks in the world, guess who to! Miss Sally Wendell! I am sure you will not believe it. However, it is an absolute fact, for Harriet and M. Jackson told Miss P. Russell so, who told us; it has been kept secret for six weeks, nobody knows for what. I could not believe it for some time, and scarcely can now; however, it is a fact, they say.”

Evidently girls a hundred years ago wrote much as they do now.