Holmes

and Quincy—from which he inherited the por-
trait that prompted his familiar poem, "Dor-
othy Q."—was his father's second wife. He was
the fourth of his parents' five children, of whom
three were his older sisters, one of whom died
when he himself was three years old, and one
(John, a witty lawyer of Cambridge) was his
younger brother. In the opening pages of his
novel, Elsie Venner, he defined the "Brahmin
caste of New England," and isolated, as a chem-
ist might say, a definite class in New England.
Of this class he was a truly typical member, ac-
quainted with Europe only through one early
sojourn there as a student of medicine, and an-
other in his old age as a "lion/* and, largely by
reason of the physical limitations imposed by
asthma, almost entirely untraveled in his own
country.

Few American authors have been so autobio-
graphical as Holmes in their general writings.
It is in the "Life and Letters" of a writer that the
concentrated items of his personality are usually
to be found. Not so with Dr. Holmes—and it is
significant that although the "Mr/* usually drops
readily away from the names of eminent authors
at death, it is only after more than thirty years
that the familiar "Dr. Holmes" is giving.place in
common speech to "Holmes." Even today he
seems, quite as clearly through his own pages
as through those of the excellent biography by
his kinsman, John T. Morse, Jr., to establish a
definitely personal relation with his readers. In
this regard one stanza from his poem, "At a
Bookstore," may be taken to state the case: "A
Boswell, writing out himself!" is the single line
of it that must be quoted.

The "old Gambrel-roofed House" in which he
was born, near what were still called "the col-
leges" at Cambridge, the blending of clerical
and mercantile ancestry, the early influences of
good books and the companionship of thoughtful
elders—all described or suggested in his writings
as desirable backgrounds for the young Brahmin
—made the setting for his own favored boyhood.
The Calvinism of his father was by no means of
a repellent nature in its personal manifestations,
but as a system of theology, especially as Holmes
the boy became acquainted with it through the
Pilgrim's Progress of Bunyan, it afforded an
early occasion for a healthy revolt on his part.
A youthful independence of spirit is suggested
also by the record (Letters of John Holmes to
James Russell Lowell and Others, 1917, p. 5)
that before he was eight, he took his younger
brother, aged five, to witness the last public
hanging in Cambridge, on Gallows Lot—an en-
terprise for which he was duly brought to book.

Holmes

Holmes received his earlier education in Cam-
bridge and at the age of fifteen proceeded to Phil-
lips Academy, Andover, then, as through many
years to follow, a stronghold of Orthodoxy. If
his father hoped thus to make a minister of him,
he did not reckon sufficiently with the force of
revulsion from the embodied Calvinism which
surrounded a son who could write in later years,
"I might have been a minister myself, for aught
I know, if [a certain] clergyman had not looked
and talked so like an undertaker" (Life and Let-
ters, I, 26). After Andover came four years of
Harvard College, with the class of 1829, made
famous in part by Holmes's long series of poems
for its reunions, and in part by the early produc-
tion of "America" by another of its members,
Samuel F. Smith [#.#.]. The frankly Unitarian
influences of the college at this time served but
to strengthen Holmes's revulsion from Calvin-
ism. "A youth of low stature and an exceeding
smooth face" (Ibid., 1,55)—five feet three, wear-
ing "substantial boots" in his junior year, after-
wards "five feet five (not four as some have pre-
tended)" (Ibid., II, 101)—clear-sighted enough
to write in his old age, "I have always consid-
ered my face a convenience rather than an orna-
ment" (Ibid., II, I03)—the young collegian en-
tered heartily into the life of the Harvard of his
day, neglecting neither its serious nor its con-
vivial opportunities. The easy Latinity of all
his writings, the flattering assumption that his
readers were really educated persons and could
be approached as such, must be counted high
among the fruits of his non-professional educa-
tion.

In the year following his graduation he made
his first public appearances as a writer of verse,
and began a course of study for the legal profes-
sion which he abandoned at the end of that year.
The verses, only a few of which met his own
rigid requirements for inclusion in his collected
writings, were printed chiefly in a short-lived
Harvard periodical, the Collegian, and in a Bos-
ton periodical, also short-lived, the Amateur.
The poem which brought him first into general
notice—and he was but twenty-one when this
happened—was "Old Ironsides," impetuously
written in pencil on a scrap of paper after he had
read the news that the frigate Constitution was
about to be destroyed, and printed over the sim-
ple initial "H." in the Boston Daily Advertiser
for Sept. 16, 1830. In the column next to these
verses was an elaborate announcement oŁ the ar-
rangements for celebrating on the following day
the two-hundredth anniversary of the founding
of Boston. The intensely patriotic sentiment that
charged the local air was evidently not restricted

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