Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.
Author of Life of Garfield, Life of Washington, From Night to Light, ETC., ETC.
CHICAGO NEW YORK THE WERNER COMPANY
COPYRIGHT 1884 By D. LOTHROP AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT 1895 By THE WERNER COMPANY
Holmes

IN a quaint old gambrel-roofed house that once stood on Cambridge Common, Oliver Wendell Holmes—poet, professor, beloved physician —was born, on the twenty-ninth of August, 1809. His father, the Rev. Abiel Holmes, was the pastor of the First Church in Cambridge—
That ancient church whose lofty tower, Beneath the loftier spire, Is shadowed when the sunset hour Clothes the tall shaft in fire.
Here, in Revolutionary times, General Washington frequently worshiped, and the old homestead itself was the headquarters of the American army during the siege of Boston.

It was a great happiness, writes the Poet at the Breakfast-Table , to have been born in an old house haunted by such recollections, with harmless ghosts walking its corridors, with fields of waving grass and trees and singing birds, and that vast territory of four or five acres around it, to give a child the sense that he was born to a noble principality....