The genial "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table" was born in the city of Cambridge, in Massachusetts, in the year 1809, upon the day given to the Commencement exercises of Harvard College. It was the day of small things in that institution, and the day of small things in American literature. The child who was born that day was destined to add much to the estimation in which both were held. He occupied a professor's chair in the University for thirty-five years, and did good work in it too; and he is one of the little group of illustrious men who have helped to make a distinctively American literature, which is now honored throughout the world. As we believe with Dr. Holmes that "it is an ungenerous silence which leaves all the fair words of honestly-earned praise to the writer of obituary notices and the marble-worker," we shall endeavor to set forth in this paper some of the good points in the character and work of this distinguished man,—perhaps the best beloved of our native authors.
The Rev. Abiel Holmes, the father of our hero, was one of the typical New England ministers of that day; the mother, Sarah Wendell, was from a Dutch family, who came to Boston from Albany in the eighteenth century. The old gambrel-roofed house where the poet was born stood close to the buildings of Harvard University, and to the south flows the Charles River, so often celebrated by Holmes and Longfellow and Lowell. The environs of Cambridge are particularly beautiful, and have been the subjects of many charming descriptions by all these writers. The old yellow hip-roofed house was about one hundred and sixty years old when it was moved away to make room for modern improvements. The New England colonists knew how to build a house, and the work of their hands puts to shame the sham edifices of the present day, which come up like Jonah's gourd in a night. The mansion-houses of New England are among her most precious inheritances; and we can scarcely blame the families, in whose hands they have remained until this time, for feeling a certain pride in them.
The study was the great attraction to Oliver and his brother John. It was a large heavy-beamed room, lined upon all sides with books,—which was almost an unheard-of thing in this country at that time. Here the boys were allowed to choose for themselves what they would read, and here they doubtless formed the scholarly tastes of after-days. The contrast between this library and that of the Whittier household, with its less than a dozen books, is a great one, and has something to do with the distinctive flavor of the work of the two men. There is a wild woodsy flavor about Whittier to this day, pungent and stimulating; and about all that Holmes has written is the atmosphere of books,—a smell of Russia-leather, as it were, and the mustiness of old tomes. The childhood of Oliver was very happy, and the memory of it has lingered with him through life; he has always been very fond of talking of it and writing about it. Of the old garden surrounding the manse, he has written eloquently, and one can almost see it for himself from his description,—with its lilac-bushes, its pear-trees, its peaches (for they raised peaches in New England in those days), its lovely nectarines, and white grapes. Old-fashioned flowers grew in the borders,—hyacinths, coming up even through the snow; tulips, adding their flaming splendor to the spring, although they are so much more like autumn flowers; peonies, of mammoth size and gorgeous coloring; flower-de-luce, lilies, roses—damask, blush, and cinnamon,—larkspurs, lupines, and royal hollyhocks. Then there were the vegetables growing with the flowers,—"beets, with their handsome dark-red leaves, carrots, with their elegant filagree foliage, parsley, that clung to the earth like mandrakes, radishes, illustrations of total depravity, a prey to every evil underground emissary of the powers of darkness."
The Holmes boys were lively and frolicsome, not unlike what we have been accustomed to hear of ministers' sons in general, and some of their pranks were remembered in Cambridge for many a year. In one of Dr. Holmes's college poems he hints at some of these "high old times:"—
"I am not well to-night; methinks the fumes
Of overheated punch have something dimmed
The cerebellum or pineal gland,
Or where the soul sits regnant."
Still, there was nothing worse than boyish fun in any of their larks, and they were studious beyond their years.
Among their schoolmates was Margaret Fuller. Dr. Holmes says of her:—
"Her air to her schoolmates was marked by a certain stateliness and distance, as if she had other thoughts than theirs, and was not of them. I remember her so well, as she appeared at school and later, that I regret that she had not been faithfully given to canvas or marble in the day of her best looks. None know her aspect who have not seen her living. Margaret, as I remember her at school and afterwards, was tall, fair-complexioned, with a watery aquamarine lustre in her light eyes, which she used to make small, as one does who looks at the sunshine. A remarkable point about her was that long flexible neck, arching and undulating in strange sinuous movements, which one who loved her would compare to those of a swan, and one who loved her not, to those of the ophidian who tempted our common mother. Her talk was affluent, magisterial, de haut en bas, some would say euphuistic, but surpassing the talk of women in breadth and audacity."
In due time young Holmes was graduated from Harvard, with a class which he has helped to make well known by his annual college poems. The boys of '29 were a noble and talented set of men, and quite a number of them still live, among our most honored citizens. Some of his well-known humorous poems were written for the college papers, among them "The Dorchester Giant," "Evening, by a Tailor," "The Spectre Pig," and "The Height of the Ridiculous." For a few years after he left college he went on "writing as funny as he could," then discontinued his literary work for some time, and only permanently renewed it with the starting of the "Atlantic Monthly" in 1857. Here he began "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," and followed it with that brilliant series of papers and of novels which made him known the world over, as one of our most original and characteristic writers. Long before this he had been married, and settled down for life in the city of Boston. His wife, to whom he was united in 1840, was Amelia Lee Jackson, daughter of Judge Jackson of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. They lived in one house for over twenty years, in Montgomery Place, near Bromfield Street. Holmes says of it, in "The Professor at the Breakfast Table:"—
"When he entered that door, 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. What changes he saw in that quiet place! Death rained through every roof but his; children came into life, grew into maturity, wedded, faded away, threw themselves away; 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, for the many pleasant years he passed in them."