CHAPTER VIII

DOCTOR HOLMES

Young Mr. Holmes wrote so much poetry he had little time for law during the twelve months after his graduation. So at the end of the year he gave up law and began to study medicine. At first he felt his heart come up into his throat at the sight of skeletons grinning at him from the walls; and his cheek grew pale as the hospital sheets when he passed among the sufferers and saw the dead and dying, or helped to perform a surgical operation; but after a time these things were to him as nothing, mere every-day affairs.

About the same time, too, he became a collector of rare old books. In 1833, when he had finished his medical education as far as he could at home, he went to Europe to complete his studies in the hospitals of Paris and other cities. He remained there two years and a half, and in that time he had a chance to pick up some rare and queer old volumes.

He returned a full-fledged doctor; but he seems to have felt that he had neglected poetry long enough, and soon published his first book, which is dated 1836. He had been invited to read a long and serious poem before the Phi Beta Kappa society of Harvard, and this he made the chief poem of his little volume, including more than forty others. Beside the early humorous poems which we have already referred to, there was the well-known poem “The September Gale,” beginning,—

I’m not a chicken; I have seen Full many a chill September,—

and ending,—

And not till fate has cut the last Of all my earthly stitches, This aching heart shall cease to mourn My loved, my long-lost breeches!

George Ticknor Curtis describes the youthful poet in the following bright paragraph:

“Dr. Holmes had then just returned from Europe. Extremely youthful in his appearance, bubbling over with the mingled humor and pathos that have always marked his poetry, and sparkling with coruscations of his peculiar genius, his Phi Beta Kappa poem of 1836, delivered with a clear, ringing enunciation, which imparted to the hearers his own enjoyment of his thoughts and expressions, delighted a cultivated audience to a very uncommon degree.”

Here is another description of the reading of the same poem, which was printed in _The Atlantic Monthly_:

“A brilliant, airy, and _spirituelle_ manner, varied with striking flexibility to the changing sentiment of the poem,—now deeply impassioned, now gayly joyous and nonchalant, and anon springing up almost into an actual flight of rhapsody,—rendered the delivery of this poem a rich, nearly a dramatic, entertainment, such as we have rarely witnessed.”

Abraham Lincoln read and admired the poems in this first little volume. Once, in conversation, he remarked, “There are some quaint, queer verses, written, I think, by Oliver Wendell Holmes, entitled ‘The Last Leaf,’ one of which is to me inexpressibly touching.” He then repeated the poem from memory, and as he finished this much-admired stanza,—

The mossy marbles rest On the lips that he has prest In their bloom; And the names he loved to hear Have been carved for many a year On the tomb,—

he said, “For pure pathos, in my judgment, there is nothing finer than those six lines in the English language.” Perhaps Lincoln was thinking of the lonely grave of his own first love in Illinois, for he once said, “Oh, I cannot bear the thought of her lying out there with the storms beating upon her.”

Holmes, having received his degree of M.D. from Harvard College, began practicing medicine in Boston. He was young and popular, he was related to the best families, and he had the best medical education the world could give. The result was that he had plenty of practice. He didn’t believe much in giving medicine, and his doses were usually very small. He would enter the sick-room with a bright, cheerful smile on his face that of itself made the patient soon feel better. In one of his books he gives this maxim: “When visiting a patient enter the sick-room at once, without keeping the patient in the torture of suspense by discussing the case with others in another room.”

Prize medals were offered in Boston for medical essays, and in the first two years after he began practicing medicine he gained three of these medals. In 1838, after two years in Boston, he was appointed professor of anatomy and physiology in Dartmouth College. He remained there two years, at the end of which time he resigned. He then came back to Boston and married the daughter of Judge Charles Jackson. He and his wife took a house in the very heart of Boston, in a little court leading out of Tremont street, and there they lived for nearly twenty years. “When he first entered that house two shadows glided over the threshold; five lingered in the doorway when he passed through it for the last time,—and one of the shadows was claimed by its owner to be longer than his own.” Those other shadows were his children, his eldest son being taller than the doctor himself. In the surrounding houses there had been sorrow and disappointment and death. “The whole drama of life was played in that stock company’s theatre of a dozen houses, one of which was his, and no deep sorrow or severe calamity ever entered his dwelling. Peace be to those walls, forever,” the professor said, “for the many pleasant years he has passed within them.”

He had two sons and a daughter. The oldest son was named Oliver Wendell, and became a judge. The other son, Edward, was also a lawyer. The daughter, named after his wife Amelia Jackson, married Mr. John Turner Sargent, and it was at her country home at Beverly Farms that Holmes spent much of his time toward the end of his life.

He practiced medicine again in Boston for seven years, when he accepted an appointment as professor of anatomy and physiology in Harvard Medical School. This professorship he held for thirty-five years, when he resigned on account of old age.

He had a beautiful country home called Canoe Place, in the Berkshire Hills, in western Massachusetts. There he spent “seven happy summer vacations, which,” he declares, “stand in his memory like the seven golden candlesticks seen in the beatific vision of the holy dreamer.” Some famous literary people lived near by, among them Herman Melville, the novelist and traveler, and not far away were Miss Sedgwick and Fanny Kemble, and for a short time Hawthorne. The doctor’s dwelling was a modest one, he tells us,—“not glorious, yet not unlovely in the youth of its drab and mahogany,—full of great and little boys’ playthings.” This place had come to him by inheritance from his mother.