DOCTOR, PROFESSOR OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1809

August 29, Tuesday: Oliver Wendell Holmes was born in the center of the universe, in a nice house just north of Harvard Yard in Cambridge, Massachusetts as a member of the “harmless, inoffensive, untitled aristocracy” of the “Brahmin Caste of New England,” that is,

merely the richer part of the community, that live in the tallest houses, drives real carriages (not “kerriges”) ... and have a provokingly easy way of dressing, walking, talking, and nodding to people.

He was and never would forget that he was descended from the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet — who was descended from William the Conqueror (known on the continent as William the Bastard).

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 3rd day 29th of 8 M 1809// Was instructed this morning in reading the 39 Chapt Gen, how when he (Joseph) was tempted he HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES nobly withstood & tho’ he was imprisoned & suffers for a while yet the Lord wrought for him & for his faithfulness raised him not only to the second in the kings house, but Second in the Kingdom — Thought best to go again to Town meeting, there is no solid satisfaction gotten there, but from my present views it seems best upon occasions to attend - Father return’d this afternoon from Narragansett Mother & Niobe went Yesterday & he went to accompany them Set the eveng at home & read the Scripture - ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1817

The final hanging in Cambridge, Massachusetts took place on the town’s Gallows Hill or Jones’s Hill just off the Great County Road, which sloped north of Linnaean Street in easy walking distance of Harvard College, a location that is now registered on the map as the “Stone Court” private parking lot (the address that now corresponds most precisely to the location of the original gallows tree would be 15-19 Lancaster Street). The hanging was witnessed by Oliver Wendell Holmes, 8 years of age, who brought along with him 5-year-old brother John Holmes — and when his parents found out about this lark they surely gave them the best of scoldings. The name of the person the boys witnessed being hanged, and the nature of his offense, are not part of this record.

The earliest execution to take place on this spot had presumably been that of Goody Kendall in about 1701 (no precise date is given), she having been convicted of “bewitching to death” a child of Goodman Genings, probably named Robert or Samuel Jennings.

Two better-recorded executions that had taken place at this locale had been those of the slaves Mark and Phillis for the alleged poisoning of their owner Captain John Codman of Charlestown, Massachusetts in 1755. Mark had been hanged and his body put up in irons on a gibbet along what has become Washington Street in Somerville, near the Charlestown line, for some two decades. Phillis, per custom, had not been hanged but strangled, and then her body had been burned as it would have been considered unseemly to have placed a female body on display in such manner. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1821

Doctor John White Webster put out A DESCRIPTION OF THE ISLAND OF ST. MICHAEL, a definitive mineralogical and geological survey of this island in the Azores. Upon the recommendation of Doctor George Parkman among others, he was chosen as a Harvard Medical School lecturer at a salary of $800 per year.1

1. After the murder of Doctor Parkman, Doctor Oliver Wendell Holmes would visit Professor Webster’s prison cell as he awaited execution. The fact that Harvard was a bastion of white righteousness has it goes without saying nothing whatever to do with these sad events. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1823

Margaret Fuller was attending the school of the Misses Prescott in rural Groton, Massachusetts, where for a time she would be sitting next to a child named Oliver — Oliver Wendell Holmes. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1826

Fall: Oliver Wendell Holmes matriculated at Harvard College. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1827

Oliver Wendell Holmes became a member of a predecessor club (under another name) of today’s Hasty Pudding Club. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1829

Benjamin Peirce and William Henry Channing graduated from Harvard College.

NEW “HARVARD MEN”

Oliver Wendell Holmes graduated from Harvard as Class Poet, and went into the study of medicine — for many years afterward he would congratulate each graduating class by means of a poem.

Dr. Charles Follen became, in addition to the Professor of German Language and Literature, an instructor of ethics and history at the Divinity School.

Horatio Wood entered Divinity School. Among his classmates would be his lifelong friend the Reverend Andrew Preston Peabody, the Reverend Charles Babbidge of Pepperell, and the Reverend Henry Adolphus Miles. The Reverend Wood would afterward write of this period as follows: My mind was taken by the first movements of Rev. Dr. Tuckerman among the poorest, the most friendless, the most neglected, the most exposed to sin and ruin of our fellow-men. It struck me like the dawning of a new day for the Unitarian Church if it would be not only doctrinally, but practically, truly Christian. Rev. F.T. Gray, Rev. C.F. Barnard, Rev. J.T. Sargent, Rev. R.C. Waterston, I saw step forward, one after another, and put their hands zealously and vigorously to the plough of Christ in the new field, and my heart went with them. On a Saturday of my last collegiate year, in 1827, I went alone and spent a day in visiting the crowded rooms, cellars and attics of Broad Street [in Boston], where there was a stifled mass of HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES degradation and woe. I let nothing escape my eyes, heard all tales, sat down and talked familiarly with many till they unburdened themselves and turned themselves inside out, letting me know all that was in their hearts. I carried away knowledge and lessons which were never to leave me....

LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1830

Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote “Old Ironsides” to arouse public sentiment against destruction of the USS Constitution, an American fighting ship that had seen service in the War of 1812. (He was studying law, and deciding to give it up in favor of the study of medicine.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES September 16, Thursday: In Vienna, Aloys Fuchs, a collector of musical manuscripts, presented his new friend Felix Mendelssohn with the “Wittgenstein” sketchbook of Ludwig van Beethoven. This contained drafts of the Piano Sonata op.109, the Diabellis Variations, and the Missa Solemnis.2

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 16 of 9 M / Attended Meeting in Town Wm Almy & An old friend from the eastward by the name of Crowell preached - it was however no time of elevation to me, tho’ not so poor as sometimes — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “Old Ironsides” appeared in the Boston Daily Advertiser. Aye, tear her tattered ensign down! Long has it waved on high, And many an eye has danced to see That banner in the sky; Beneath it rung the battle shout, And burst the cannon’s roar; The meteor of the ocean air Shall sweep the clouds no more! Her decks, once red with heroes’ blood, Where knelt the vanquished foe, When winds were hurrying o’er the flood, And waves were white below, No more shall feel the victor’s tread Or know the conquered knee; The harpies of the shore shall pluck The eagle of the sea! Oh, better that her shattered hulk Should sink beneath the wave; Her thunders shook the mighty deep, And there should be her grave; Nail to the mast her holy flag, Set every threadbare sail, And give her to the god of storms, The lightning and the gale!3

2. In this period Ludwig van Beethoven was beginning to score for the flute in his musical creations. 3. The poet who wrote this grand national chauvinistic stuff, it must be pointed out, was more interested in law-n-order than in abolition. He had the habit of referring to abolitionists as “philo-melanics,” a term which one presumes he meant to be freely translated into the vernacular as “niggerlovers.” He was in favor of the welfare of black Americans of course (at a first approximation everyone wants what’s best for everyone) but their needs had inevitably to be subordinated to the needs of white citizens simply because they were racially inferior beings. At that time, although thankfully no longer, it was considered natural and therefore right that “our sympathies” should be extended primarily toward “our own color first.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1831

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe noticed that: [I]t is expected that a person who has distinguished himself in one field ... will not ... venture into one entirely unrelated. Should an individual attempt this, no gratitude is shown.

An individual who failed to follow Goethe’s advice, becoming not only a man of literature but also an attorney at law: Richard Henry Dana, Jr. As a 15-year-old he had been attending a private school in which the teachers frequently and severely flogged the students: “There was never a half-day without a good deal of flogging.” During this year he matriculated at Harvard College. Quite unlike Henry Thoreau in temperament, he would make poor use of his abundant scholarly free time while enrolled. Evidence of this is that in all of this first three-year period of education he would check out from the library only a total of 10 books. Toward the end of this first year he would be rusticated for his part in the Harvard Rebellion, and during this period of rustication he would be tutored by the conservative professor religion at Andover Theological Seminary, the Reverend Leonard Woods (1807-1878).

After his dropping out of school in his junior year because his eyesight had been temporarily impaired by measles, and after his famous period of recuperation and adventure in California, he would be significantly HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES older and more disciplined and yet he would do only slightly better in the study department: he would check out only 11 more books from the college library. Although Professor Edward Tyrrell Channing had both Dana (who was his cousin) and Thoreau as students, clearly Thoreau learned better about writing from Professor Channing than did Dana — all his life this sailor/lawyer/author would preserve a sloppy tendency to leave danglers in his prose.

Another individual who failed to follow Goethe’s advice, becoming not only a medical doctor but also a man of literature: Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes in this year published a series of essays, in the New England Magazine, entitled “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.”

(A quarter of a century later, this series would continue, in The Atlantic Monthly.)

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes “Stack of the Artist of HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1833

To further his study of medicine, Oliver Wendell Holmes went to Paris, where he would remain for three years.

The Reverend James Freeman Clarke took his first pastorate at a Unitarian church in Louisville, Kentucky,

till 1840. While in Kentucky he would put out a magazine named the Western Messenger, which would print works by his friends Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Article III of the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 had provided for the creation of an institutional “Publick religion.” In this year, aspects of this which had proved to be unworkable were removed by constitutional amendment, although much of the establishment of a state religion was allowed to remain intact. According to the thesis of Richard Eddy Sykes, MASSACHUSETTS UNITARIANISM AND SOCIAL CHANGE: A RELIGIOUS SOCIAL SYSTEM IN TRANSITION, 1780-1870 (U of Minnesota Thesis, 1966, page 173), the development of Unitarian was significantly slowed down by this change in the law respecting establishment of religion. Previously, the new Unitarian churches had been able to tax all the inhabitants of their parish, regardless of whether or not they were members. The new arrangement brought this income source to an end: “The separation of church and state in Massachusetts was perhaps the most significant event in American Unitarian history. The event itself, and the change in attitudes which accompanied it, fundamentally altered the conditions under which Unitarianism flourished As a result, it changed from a growing movement to a staggering denomination, only gradually and painfully adapting to the new voluntary nature of American HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES religious social systems. Attitudes which developed before 1833 still dominate the Unitarian movement today, and retard its growth, though the origin of these attitudes is seldom recognized.” When the new Constitution of the federal government had come along, and with it a Bill of Rights and a 1st Amendment, this establishment of State Religion had been, like marriage licences and murder convictions, entirely unaffected. The establishment of a state religion was simply one of those powers reserved by the existing state governments that had not been abandoned to the new federal layer of government. This had been considered to be a sensitive area to be left under local control and not to be meddled in, in any fashion, by the officials in the newly created federal layer. Actually, our several controversies about secular government have been controversies which arose considerably later in our historical trajectory as a nation: The hands-off warning of the 1st Amendment meant that the feds could not prohibit, for instance, Massachusetts from continuing to give legislative appropriations to the Harvard Divinity School. The effective disestablishment of the State Religion of Massachusetts came about only when the state legislature, in this year, was upset that the dominant teaching at Harvard had become Unitarian rather than Trinitarian. That was heresy — so the conservatives reacted by cutting off the flow of tax dollars. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1835

Oliver Wendell Holmes’s POEMS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1836

Oliver Wendell Holmes received his degree in medicine and wrote a song for the college’s bicentennial in which God was asked to bless, evidently retroactively, the “ancient Puritans” who had created all this “true- born Yankee stuff.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1838

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes became Professor of Anatomy at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1839

George H. Moore attended Dartmouth College.

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes continued as Professor of Anatomy at Dartmouth College. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1840

June 15, Monday: Professor of Anatomy at Dartmouth College Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes got married with Amelia Lee Jackson, daughter of the Massachusetts Supreme Court justice, at King's Chapel in Boston, and returned to general practice. This couple would produce Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., a future justice of the United States Supreme Court; a daughter Amelia Holmes, the future Mrs. Turner Sargent, and Edward Jackson Holmes, who would become a Boston lawyer. Soon Dr. Holmes would return to private practice. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES June 15. I stood by the river to-day considering the forms of the elms reflected in the water. For every oak and birch, too, growing on the hilltop, as well as for elms and willows, there is a graceful ethereal tree making down from the roots, as it were the original idea of the tree, and sometimes Nature in high tides brings her mirror to its foot and makes it visible. [A Week, pages 44-45; Riv. 56.] Anxious Nature sometimes reflects from pools and puddles the objects which our grovelling senses may fail to see relieved against the sky with the pure ether for background. It would be well if we saw ourselves as in perspective always, impressed with distinct outline on the sky, side by side with the shrubs on the river’s brim. So let our life stand to heaven as some fair, sunlit tree against the western horizon, and by sunrise be planted on some eastern hill to glisten in the first rays of the dawn. Why always insist that men incline to the moral side of their being? Our life is not all moral. Surely, its actual phenomena deserve to be studied impartially. The science of Human Nature has never been attempted, as the science of Nature has. The dry light has never shone on it. Neither physics nor metaphysics have touched it. We have not yet met with a sonnet, genial and affectionate, to prophane swearing, breaking on the still night air, perhaps, like the hoarse croak of some bird. Noxious weeds and stagnant waters have their lovers, and the utterer of oaths must have honeyed lips, and be another Attic bee after a fashion, for only prevalent and essential harmony and beauty can employ the laws of sound and of light. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1841

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes went into private medical practice in Boston, and got married with Amelia Lee Jackson, whose father, Charles, was a justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of the State of Massachusetts, a bench on which their firstborn, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was to sit for 20 years. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES March 8, Monday: Birth of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in Boston.

The Proud Father

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1842

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s HOMEOPATHY AND ITS KINDRED DELUSIONS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1843

Samuel Kneeland, Jr. graduated from Harvard College with an AM and MD.

In 1828 New-York Hospital had been forced to shut down its obstetric services due to the ravages of puerperal fever, a disease that we now know is due to an infection, usually with Streptococcus pyogenes, sometimes with Staphylococcus aureus. During this year it took Harvard professor Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes 21 days to write a monograph, THE CONTAGIOUSNESS OF PUERPERAL FEVER (New England Quarterly Journal of Medicine and Surgery, 27 pages), first read on February 15, 1843, before the Improvement Society, about this dreaded childbirth disease that was killing so many mothers. While both the theory of contagion and the supposed

existence of unviewably tiny germs were known, no one had as yet connected these two theories. Infection still carried with it an aura of moral deficiency, and therefore this monograph which incautiously referred to medical doctors as “instruments of death” would excite little more than animosity and would have no discernible impact on medical practice. One of Dr. Holmes’s colleagues, commenting on such strange hypotheses, would write that I prefer to attribute [puerperal fever] to accident, or Providence, of which I can form a clear conception, rather than to contagion of which I cannot form any clear idea. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES (Dr. Holmes’s monograph was not only offensive and ineffective, but also, it was conveying no new information. The thesis that puerperal fever was contagious and transmissible had already been clearly and systematically demonstrated four decades earlier, by Dr. Alexander Gordon in Scotland. It would not be until the late 19th Century that the bacterium Streptococcus pyogenes would be discovered. In 1847 in Wien, Dr. Ignac Phillip Semmelweis would again theorize that puerperal fever was probably being transmitted to healthy expectant mothers by their physicians and would advise his fellows that they should all be washing their hands with a solution of calcium chloride before and after they examined patients, but again there would be resistance.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1846

At this point Henry Thoreau was working on drafts of both A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS and WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, using recent journal passages on memory, history, fable, and religion and probably inserting revised versions of “Dark Ages” and “Homer. Ossian. Chaucer.” from his articles in THE DIAL. By February the 2d draft of WEEK had expanded to nearly twice the length of the 1st draft.

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes published the 2d edition of his POEMS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1847

James Gordon Bennett, Sr. of the New-York Herald announced that henceforth the newspaper would be accepting no advertisements which ran for more than a 2-week insertion. What he wanted was advertisements which in themselves were interesting, in themselves were, one might almost venture, “news” — in the place of all these boring boring boring boilerplate “standing ads” which people were so accustomed to disregarding. This new policy would be so effective in raising readership that, in the following year, Bennett would announce that he would accept no ad for more than a single day’s insertion! HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES A couple of reminisces by Walt Whitman dealing in part with or probably with this year: “Specimen Days”

BROADWAY SIGHTS Besides Fulton ferry, off and on for years, I knew and frequented Broadway — that noted avenue of New York’s crowded and mixed humanity, and of so many notables. Here I saw, during those times, Andrew Jackson, Webster, Clay, William Henry Seward, Martin Van Buren, filibuster Walker, Kossuth, Fitz Greene Halleck, Bryant, the Prince of Wales, Charles Dickens, the first Japanese ambassadors, and lots of other celebrities of the time. Always something novel or inspiriting; yet mostly to me the hurrying and vast amplitude of those never-ending human currents. I remember seeing James Fenimore Cooper in a court-room in Chambers street, back of the city hall, where he was carrying on a law case — (I think it was a charge of libel he had brought against some one.) I also remember seeing Edgar A. Poe, and having a short interview with him, (it must have been in 1845 or ’6,) in his office, second story of a corner building, (Duane or Pearl street.) He was editor and owner or part owner of “the Broadway Journal.” [Page 702] The visit was about a piece of mine he had publish’d. Poe was very cordial, in a quiet way, appear’d well in person, dress, &c. I have a distinct and pleasing remembrance of his looks, voice, manner and matter; very kindly and human, but subdued, perhaps a little jaded. For another of my reminiscences, here on the west side, just below Houston street, I once saw (it must have been about 1832, of a sharp, bright January day) a bent, feeble but stout-built very old man, bearded, swathed in rich furs, with a great ermine cap on his head, led and assisted, almost carried, down the steps of his high front stoop (a dozen friends and servants, emulous, carefully holding, guiding him) and then lifted and tuck’d in a gorgeous sleigh, envelop’d in other furs, for a ride. The sleigh was drawn by as fine a team of horses as I ever saw. (You needn’t think all the best animals are brought up nowadays; never was such horseflesh as fifty years ago on Long Island, or south, or in New York city; folks look’d for spirit and mettle in a nag, not tame speed merely.) Well, I, a boy of perhaps thirteen or fourteen, stopp’d and gazed long at the spectacle of that fur-swathed old man, surrounded by friends and servants, and the careful seating of him in the sleigh. I remember the spirited, champing horses, the driver with his whip, and a fellow-driver by his side, for extra prudence. The old man, the subject of so much attention, I can almost see now. It was John Jacob Astor. The years 1846, ’47, and there along, see me still in New York city, working as writer and printer, having my usual good health, and a good time generally. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

“Specimen Days”

OMNIBUS JAUNTS AND DRIVERS One phase of those days must by no means go unrecorded — namely, the Broadway omnibuses, with their drivers. The vehicles still (I write this paragraph in 1881) give a portion of the character of Broadway — the Fifth avenue, Madison avenue, and Twenty-third street lines yet running. But the flush days of the old Broadway stages, characteristic and copious, are over. The Yellow-birds, the Red-birds, the original Broadway, the Fourth avenue, the Knickerbocker, and a dozen others of twenty or thirty years ago, are all gone. [Page 703] And the men specially identified with them, and giving vitality and meaning to them — the drivers — a strange, natural, quick-eyed and wondrous race — (not only Rabelais and Cervantes would have gloated upon them, but Homer and Shakspere would) — how well I remember them, and must here give a word about them. How many hours, forenoons and afternoons — how many exhilarating night-times I have had — perhaps June or July, in cooler air — riding the whole length of Broadway, listening to some yarn, (and the most vivid yarns ever spun, and the rarest mimicry) — or perhaps I declaiming some stormy passage from Julius Caesar or Richard, (you could roar as loudly as you chose in that heavy, dense, uninterrupted street-bass.) Yes, I knew all the drivers then, Broadway Jack, Dressmaker, Balky Bill, George Storms, Old Elephant, his brother Young Elephant (who came afterward,) Tippy, Pop Rice, Big Frank, Yellow Joe, Pete Callahan, Patsy Dee, and dozens more; for there were hundreds. They had immense qualities, largely animal — eating, drinking, women — great personal pride, in their way — perhaps a few slouches here and there, but I should have trusted the general run of them, in their simple good-will and honor, under all circumstances. Not only for comradeship, and sometimes affection — great studies I found them also. (I suppose the critics will laugh heartily, but the influence of those Broadway omnibus jaunts and drivers and declamations and escapades undoubtedly enter’d into the gestation of “Leaves of Grass.”) HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1849

January 18, Thursday: J.P. Kimball presented an enlarged new edition of POEMS by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, just printed in Boston by William D. Ticknor & Company, to Emily Dickinson. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1850

Dr. Josiah Clark Nott and Ralph Hermon Major argued against the prevailing “miasma” theory in YELLOW FEVER CONTRASTED WITH BILIOUS FEVER: REASONS FOR BELIEVING IT A DISEASE SUI GENERIS – ITS MODE OF PROPAGATION – REMOTE CAUSE – PROBABLE INSECT OR ANIMALCULAR ORIGIN (Oxford: Blackwell Scientific).

Professor Samuel George Morton became President of the Academy of Natural Sciences.

George Robins Gliddon’s INDIGENOUS RACES OF THE EARTH (in conjunction with Dr. Josiah Clark Nott and others). Also, his ANCIENT EGYPT. THE SCIENCE OF 1850 HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

George Robins Gliddon, the American vice-consul to Alexandria, Egypt in 1832, had organized a small shipment of mummies from a friend in Egypt.

In this year this collection if antique desiccated human corpses was placed on exhibit in Boston, and would be viewed by, among others, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the Reverend Professor Jared Sparks, Doctor Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Professor Louis Agassiz.

While at the AAAS meeting of scientists in Charleston arguing on behalf of the idea that the races of man were separately created, Professor Agassiz found he was much, much more welcome than the Hoars of Concord had been in 1844, when they had visited this port to protest the systematic imprisonment of innocent free northern

THE HOARS CONCORD’S “ROYAL FAMILY”

black sailors. The good people of Charleston knew a kindred white soul when they saw one. Agassiz was trustworthy, he was a friend, they knew what conclusions he would arrive at after seeing the evidence: he was invited to visit their plantations and to inspect their black slaves. He commissioned a series of daguerreotypes of type specimens, and then these shockingly invasive and unsettling photographs lay in a box at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology for many, many years, until they were rediscovered in 1977 — long after the Harvard institution had conveniently forgotten all about the rabid “scientific” racism of one of its illustrious father figures. EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES “Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline. We may therefore be sorely tempted to misuse that power in furthering a personal prejudice or social goal — why not provide that extra oomph by extending the umbrella of science over a personal preference in ethics or politics?” — Stephen Jay Gould BULLY FOR BRONTOSAURUS NY: Norton, 1991, page 429

Coincidentally, this was the year in which the astronomer Maria Mitchell was installed as an honorary member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.4

Subsequent to the death of his 1st wife, Professor Agassiz remarried with the writer Elizabeth Cabot Cary of Boston, a promoter of education for females. During this year he prepared his volume LAKE SUPERIOR.

End of March: Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at the medical school of Harvard College, and some 800 other citizens of Boston signed a letter to their Senator Daniel Webster in support of his March 7 stand in Congress in favor of the Compromise of 1850, inclusive of the Fugitive Slave Law which was part of that negotiated package, and Waldo Emerson commented that “the badness of the times is making death attractive.”

Webster truly represents the American people just as they are, with their vast material interests, materialized intellect, & low morals.

Sure, Emerson could charge Webster with this. And yet, typically, it was Emerson in his lectures who conceded to popular taste and delivered crowd-pleasers, whereas typically it was Henry Thoreau who refused to so pander. Emerson’s attitude was that “he is no master who cannot vary his forms, & carry his own end triumphantly through the most difficult,” which being translated meant “It is all right for me to pander,” whereas Thoreau’s attitude was a self-suspecting one, that most likely “whatever succeeded with the audience was bad.”

As of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, anyone who aided someone in attempting to flee bondage was subject to a $1,000.00 fine or six months imprisonment. Many abolitionists who had previously been able to combine their resistance to the peculiar institution of human slavery with an attitude of respect for and obedience to law took an oath to disobey this law, and the oath had a radicalizing effect on their consciences. What is your sense of it, did both Emerson and Thoreau take this oath or did one refuse to take this oath?

4. How could she, not only as a woman but also as an abolitionist, have been acceptable to these good ol’ white racist boys? –Did they maybe notice that she wore a skirt but neglect to notice that she was wearing nothing made of cotton cloth because such cotton cloth was a product of the slave system? No, that wasn’t what it was, what it was was that she was not becoming a member, but only an honorary member. On her printed certificate, signed by the scientist Asa Gray, the salutation “Sir” had needed to be struck through and above it penned the substitute “Madam,” which is not particularly problematic, but also, the word “fellow” had needed to be struck through — and what had been substituted for this was the invidious descriptor “honorary member.” — There’s a big difference between an honorable member and an honorary member, and the difference is that a woman is not a real human being because an honorary member is not a real member. The lady scientist has eyes and can see a comet and a tongue and can report a comet, but she lacks a penis and therefore cannot interfere with processes of reality formation. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

May: Bidding “farewell forever to this abominable city,” the Hawthornes moved to Lenox in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, a colony of intellectuals which included James Russell Lowell, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the novelist George Payne Rainsford James, and Fanny Kemble Butler.5 Nathaniel Hawthorne began working on his THE HOUSE OF SEVEN GABLES ms, which would become a later romance or prose-tragedy of the Puritan-American community as he had himself known it —“starving for symbols” as Waldo Emerson put it— defrauded of art and of the joy of life.

5. While in retirement at Lenox, Massachusetts, Fanny would author such autobiographical works as JOURNAL OF A RESIDENCE ON A GEORGIAN PLANTATION (1863), RECORD OF A CHILDHOOD (1878), and RECORDS OF LATER LIFE (1882). HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES August 5, Tuesday: The British Parliament passed the Australia Constitution Act (Victoria was separated from New South Wales; South Australia and Tasmania were granted representative government).

In Massachusetts, Herman Melville met Nathaniel Hawthorne during a climb, of Monument Mountain in the Berkshire Hills, that had been sponsored by a group of luminaries and publishers (luminaries such as Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, publishers such as Melville’s boss Evert Augustus Duyckinck).

While they were appreciating their champagne at the summit, Cornelius Mathews recited for them William Cullen Bryant’s doggerel poem about a jilted native maiden who had thrown herself from a precipice, “The Story of the Indian Girl,” a poem tainted irremediably by primitivism which enjoyed considerably greater reputation then than, fortunately, now. …There was scooped, Upon the mountain’s southern slope, a grave; And there they laid her, in the very garb With which the maiden decked herself for death, With the same withering wild-flowers in her hair. And o’er the mound that covered her, the tribe Built up simple monument, a cone Of small loose stones. Thenceforward all who passed, Hunter, and dame, and virgin, laid a stone In silence on the pile. It stands there yet…. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

(In a few days, Herman would be seeking out Nathaniel at the Red Shanty which now stands on the grounds of Tanglewood, and they would again be enjoying champagne.)

November 7, Thursday: Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at Harvard Medical College, delivered an eulogy of Doctor George Parkman to the assembled students and faculty.6

6. “The Benefactors of the Medical School of Harvard University: with a biographical sketch of the late Dr. George Parkman.” An introductory lecture delivered at the Massachusetts Medical College, November 7, 1850. Boston: Ticknor, Reed & Fields. 1850. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES Winter: Martin Robison Delany and two other black students were dismissed from Harvard Medical School on account of their untreatable hereditary skin condition, noninfectious but unfortunately such as would make it unfit for them to attempt to practice medicine anywhere in the United States of America.7

Harriet Hunt was also made unwelcome, on account of an inherent genital condition.

7. In his capacity as dean of the Medical School, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology, was approached by 38-year-old Martin Delany. He had been turned away by four other schools, including the University of Pennsylvania. Might he study to be a doctor in America, at the Harvard Medical School? Two other candidates of color, Daniel Laing, Jr., and Isaac H. Snowden, also applied for admission, but their cases were easier as they were being sponsored by the American Colonization Society and they were pledged to get the hell out of America as soon as they obtained their MDs. Harriet Hunt had also applied, and she also was accepted, on condition that she not attempt to sit in the regular anatomy class. At this dilution of the privilege of white maleness, the white male medical students revolted. In December a majority, 60 students, approved a petition resolving that “we cannot consent to be identified as fellow students with blacks, whose company we would not keep in the streets, and whose Society as associates we would not tolerate in our houses,” and that “we feel our grievances to be but the beginning of an evil, which, if not checked will increase, and that the number of respectable white students will, in future, be in an inverse ratio to that of blacks,” while a minority, 48 students, signed an alternate petition that “they would feel it a far greater evil, if, in the present state of public feeling, a medical college in Boston could refuse to this unfortunate class any privileges of education, which it is in the power of the profession to bestow.” The faculty met for two evenings at Professor Holmes’s home to consider the issue, and predictably chickened out after being notified by some of the white male students of an intention to transfer. Harriet Hunt had already stopped attending, under pressure, and the black students would be dismissed at the end of the winter term. Delany would leave Boston in March. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES December 6, Friday: The foraging party that had been abandoned by the barque Powhatten, including Eugene Ring, arrived at Minatitlan on the eastern coast of Mexico.

In Concord the day was cold and snowy. Waldo Emerson delivered “PROPERTY”.

Meanwhile Henry Thoreau was in Newburyport, Massachusetts lecturing on Cape Cod at their Market Hall, a building on the waterfront with a landing place at the back of the building for boats and barges. His was the 6th lecture in that season’s course of 20, and he received the usual $20 awarded to out-of-town lecturers such as Emerson. Some 424 season tickets had been sold at $1 each, and for Thoreau’s lecture an additional 30 evening tickets were sold for $.12 apiece (by contrast, just nine such additional tickets would be sold when Emerson lectured there on February 21st). The average sale of such additional tickets that season would be 22 if we disregard one extreme case, a lecture by the hugely popular Reverend Henry Ward Beecher. It is likely then that Thoreau drew a good crowd. Other lecturers who spoke before the Newburyport Lyceum that season, in addition to the Reverends Beecher and Emerson were Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and the local Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

DATE PLACE TOPIC

June 1, 1850 (?) Worcester “Cape Cod” (?) December 6, Friday, 1850, at 7:30PM Newburyport MA; Market Hall “An Excursion to Cape Cod” January 1, Wednesday, 1851 Clinton MA; Clinton Hall “An Excursion to Cape Cod” HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES There had been notices placed in both Newburyport gazettes, the Morning Advertiser and the Daily Herald, for the day of the lecture and for the preceding day. Here is the Daily Herald: NEWBURYPORT LYCEUM. The 6th Lecture will be delivered at MARKET HALL, 1 on FRIDAY EVENING, Dec. 6, at 7 /2 o’clock, by H. D. THOREAU, Esq. Subject — “Cape Cod.” SEASON TICKETS are for sale by the Secretary at one dollar each. A.A. CALL, Sec’y.

December 6: Being at Newburyport this evening Dr (H.C.?) Perkins showed me the circulations in the Nitella, which is slightly different from the Chara, under a microscope– I saw plainly the circulation looking like bubbles going round in each joint up one side & down the other of a sort of white line, and some times a dark colored moat appeared to be carried along with them. He said that the circulation could be well seen in the Common Celandine and moreover that when a shade was cast on it by a knife blade the circulation was reversed.– Ether would stop it –or the death of the plant. He showed me a green clam shell –anodon fluviatilis, which he said was a female with young –found in a pond near by. Also the head of a Chinook or Flathead. Also the humerus of a Mylodon ______of Owen from Oregon– Some more remains have been found in Missouri, and a whole skeleton in Buenos Ayres. A digging animal. He could not catch his frogs asleep. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1851

March: Martin Robison Delany, who had been expelled from the Harvard Medical School by the white racist Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology, upon protest from white students over the color of his skin, at this point shook the dust of Boston from off his sandals.

The itinerant “service” minister Daniel Foster, whose wife Deborah “Dora” Swift Foster in Chester was almost 8 months pregnant, accepted a temporary position filling the pulpit of the Trinitarian Church in Concord, Massachusetts (while living in Concord and for several years afterward, Dora would frequent the Thoreau home and become best friends with Sophia Thoreau).

William Mitchell’s article THE ASTRONOMICAL OBSERVATORY OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY appeared in the Christian Examiner (this would soon be bound as a 16-page pamphlet by Wm. Crosby and H.P. Nichols of 111 Washington Street, Boston and John Wilson & Son, Printers, 22 School-street, Boston). ASTRONOMY HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1852

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes offered a gilt-edge 3d edition in cloth bindings, with engravings, of his HOLMES POETICAL WORKS (London: G. Routledge).

The content of this edition was similar to the edition of 1849, the 2d, except that it offered the newer poems “The Ploughman,” Pittsfield Cemetery,” and the iambic tetrameter string of sonnet couplets “To an English Friend”: The seed that wasteful autumn cast To waver on its stormy blast, Long o’er the wintry desert tost, Its living germ has never lost. Dropped by the weary tempest’s wing, It feels the kindling ray of spring, And, starting from its dream of death, Pours on the air its perfumed breath. So, parted by the rolling flood, The love that springs from common blood Needs but a single sunlit hour Of mingling smiles to bud and flower; Unharmed its slumbering life has flown, From shore to shore, from zone to zone, HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES Where summer’s falling roses stain The tepid waves of Pontchartrain, Or where the lichen creeps below Katahdin’s wreaths of whirling snow. Though fiery sun and stiffening cold May change the fair ancestral mould, No winter chills, no summer drains The life-blood drawn from English veins, Still bearing wheresoe’er it flows The love that with its fountain rose, Unchanged by space, unwronged by time, HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES From age to age, from clime to clime!

In this year, also, William Cullen Bryant’s POEMS were published.

Also, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s POEMS (in two volumes), GOLDEN LEGEND, and PROSE WORKS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES Winter: I have a note to the effect that one morning Bill Wheeler, the Concord town drunk, was found frozen. (I am, however, unable to find anything about anything like this in any Wheeler family genealogy, so perhaps this report is entirely without substance.)

The lecture season of ’52/53, in the Odeon Hall of Boston, amounted to the following:

14th Season of The Lowell Institute Sir Charles Lyell, F.R.S. Geology, etc. 12 lectures Charles Bishop Goodrich, Esq. Science of Government, etc. 12 lectures Right Reverend Alonzo Potter, D.D. Natural Religion 12 lectures Professor C.C. Felton. Life of Greece 12 lectures Doctor O.W. Holmes. English Poetry of the 19th Century 12 lectures

At the Concord Lyceum, Elizabeth Oakes Smith delivered “Womanhood.”

At the Concord Lyceum, Ellery Channing lectured on “Society.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1853

Benjamin Peirce, Perkins Professor of Astronomy and Mathematics at Harvard College, became the president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. THE SCIENCE OF 1853 HARVARD OBSERVATORY

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes left off being dean of the Harvard Medical School.

The 6th and final volume of Richard Hildreth’s HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, which had begun publication in 1849. Also, finally, his THEORY OF POLITICS. Hildreth was one of the initial American historians to experiment with a “science” of history, through attempting to present not merely an edifying story with a patriotic moral but instead the state of affairs “exactly as it was.” He was in disagreement with the Reverend Professor Francis Bowen, who had written discouragingly in an 1851 review, “it is impossible to write history without seeking, either avowedly or stealthily, or unawares, to verify some hypothesis, or HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES establish some theory, which furnishes a reason and guide for the selection and arrangement of materials.”

An attempt to appoint the Reverend Professor Bowen as McLean Professor of History was blocked when some state office-holders who had been made members of the Harvard Board of Overseers, ex-officio, took offense at the honest plainness of his political agenda. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1854

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes produced another volume of annoying self-celebrating Harvard “poetry,” entitled SONGS OF THE CLASS OF 1829.

For instance, he wrote of his classmate the Baptist Reverend Samuel Francis Smith, who had in 1831 made himself author of words for (not the tune of) the patriotic song “America,” that: There’s a nice youngster of excellent pith, Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith; But he shouted a song for the brave and the free, Just read on his medal, “My country ’Tis of thee.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

Literary Hermits Recreating Themselves in Their Chapel: Whittier-Holmes-Emerson-Motley-Alcott-Hawthorne-Lowell-Agassiz-Longfellow HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES August 21, Monday: Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes purchased a copy of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS which –on the evidence of his later writings– did him no good at all. One wonders whether he read it.

In the afternoon Henry Thoreau went to Hubbard’s Bath, HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

and then to Conantum (Gleason J6). WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS was reviewed under the heading “Recent Publications” in the Newark, New Jersey Daily Advertiser, page 2, column 5:

We have read this volume while lying upon a sick bed, and never before better appreciated the convenience of the light octavo form, so generally adopted by his house for its publications. There were other works which more urgently demanded attention, but the convenience of this gave it the preference. Light as it was, even this was very fatiguing to hold—the others impossible. Thoreau is an original. Although of Harvard education, colleges have not formed him. He has lived according to his whims, and here is his justification. Perhaps there is nothing new in the idea, but his application and incidents are fresh. He lived alone for two years in the Walden woods near Concord, Mass., some miles from the village, away from all society, in a house (shanty) built by himself, raising his own food, principally preparing it himself, and at an actual cost of about $100 per year, all told—and that earned by himself. This life is a novel one, but his account of it is full as curious. He writes almost as many thoughts as words. Indeed, his pages are more fully peppered with ideas than commas.— The reader cannot fail to be entertained with a book, which took two years of almost entire solitude to write, and will take as many more to think out. We would urge those tired with every day issues of the press, to seek for this, as a fresh bouquet from the wilds, fragrant and inspiring. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1855

The Town and Country Club was succeeded by the Saturday Club. Waldo Emerson was a charter member.8 Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes joined.

This is the year in which Dr. Holmes revealed once and for all his white racism, averring of native Americans that: They are nothing more than a half-filled outline of humanity whose extermination was the necessary solution of the problem of [their] relation to the white race. They are a sketch in red crayons of a rudimental manhood who is natural for the white man to hate and to hunt down like the wild beasts of the forest ... and so the red-crayon sketched is rubbed out, and the canvas is ready for a picture of manhood a little more like God’s own image.... RACE POLITICS AMERICAN GENOCIDE

8. This is the club Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes would write about in THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST TABLE. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1856

May 14, Wednesday: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote to Thomas Gold Appleton, his brother-in-law, in Paris (Appleton happens to have been the Boston wit who originated the famous comment “Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris”) that “We have formed a Dinner Club, once a month, at Parker’s. Agassiz, Motley, Emerson, Peirce, Lowell, Whipple, Sam Ward, Holmes, Dwight, Woodman, myself, and yourself. We sit from three o’clock till nine, generally, which proves it to be very pleasant.”9

May 14. Air full of golden robins. Their loud clear note betrays them as soon as they arrive. Yesterday and to-day I see half a dozen tortoises on a rail, — their first appearance in numbers. Catbird amid shrub oaks. Female red-wing [Red-winged Blackbird Agelaius phoeniceus]. Flood tells me he saw cherry-birds am the 12th of April in Monroe’s garden.

9. Longfellow overlooked to mention that Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, and Cornelius Conway Felton would soon join. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1857

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes helped Moses Dresser Phillips found The Atlantic Monthly. It was he who named it. Initially, he contributed “Breakfast-Table” essays. He wrote that the State House, atop Beacon Hill, was “the hub of the solar system.” That’s why, even today, just as New York is referred to as “the Big Apple,” Boston is referred to as “the Hub.”10 James Russell Lowell, just then assuming Longfellow’s position as professor of modern languages at Harvard College, became the magazine’s initial editor (for 4 years).

10. Actually, the doctor’s calculations were off by about twenty statute miles — it is not a high hill in Boston that is the hub of the solar system, but a deep pond in Concord that is the bellybutton of the universe. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1858

February: The Atlantic Monthly published Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “The Chambered Nautilus.”

This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign, Sails the unshadowed main,— The venturous bark that flings On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings In gulfs enchanted, where the Siren sings, And coral reefs lie bare, Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair. Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl; Wrecked is the ship of pearl! And every chambered cell, Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell, As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell, Before thee lies revealed,— Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed! Year after year beheld the silent toil That spread his lustrous coil; Still, as the spiral grew, He left the past year’s dwelling for the new, Stole with soft step its shining archway through, HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES Built up its idle door, Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more. Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee, Child of the wandering sea, Cast from her lap, forlorn! From thy dead lips a clearer note is born Than ever Triton blew from wreathèd horn! While on mine ear it rings, Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:— Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low-vaulted past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!

In a riverside grotto near Lourdes in the Pyrenees Mountains that divide France from Spain, a very poor 14- year-old named Bernadette Soubirous began to have a series of visions, eighteen in all continuing into July, of a young girl identified as The Virgin. On this basis the writer Henri Lasserre would create a book, and it is very likely that this book sold more copies than any other work of the 19th Century. Bernadette herself would eventually enter a convent and disappear from our view, but today about four million pilgrims are visiting Lourdes each year to be ushered into a masonry-girdled grotto capped with a basilica and decorated with crutches.

Our national birthday, Sunday the 4th of July: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 54th birthday.

In Chicago, Illinois Central Railroad workers were attempting to launch a balloon they were referring to as “The Spirit of ’76.” The record doesn’t state whether or not they did manage to get this “monster balloon” up into the air, or if they did, how long it stayed up or how high it rose.11

In Brooklyn, New-York, the corner-stone of the Armory was set in position with appropriate ceremony.

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes delivered an oration in Boston.

William Maxwell Monroe was born to Professor and Mrs. James Wilbur Monroe and Elisabeth Maxwell Monroe in Oberlin, Ohio.

A treaty was signed in Tientsin between China and France. Over and above the sums in silver to be paid to Britain, China would pay 16,000,000 francs in silver to France. Chinese Christians currently imprisoned were to be released. 11. The Russian film “Burnt by the Sun” records a similar attempt near Moscow. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES This is what the Niagara Falls looked like in this year, to Currier & Ives:

During the celebration of the opening of the associated hydraulic canal, the dam gave way (fortunately, no one was injured).

The negrero Wanderer sailed from the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina for the coast of Africa, disguised as a luxury cruise ship. There’s now an entire book about this one remarkable vessel, Erik Calonius’s THE WANDERER: THE LAST AMERICAN SLAVE SHIP AND THE CONSPIRACY THAT SET ITS SAILS, published by St. Martin’s Press in 2006.

Jefferson Davis, delivering a 4th-of-July oration on board a steamer bound from Baltimore to Boston, predicted (it would seem :-) the outcome of the Civil War, when he roundly declared that “this great country will continue united.” CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY

Overlooking Lake Winnepiseogee, now Winnepesaukee:

July 4. Sunday. A. M.–Clears up after a rainy night. Get our breakfast apparently in the northern part of Loudon, where we find, in a beech and maple wood, Panax quinquefolium, apparently not quite out, BIGELOW Osmorrhiza brevistylis (or hairy uraspermum), gone to seed, which Bigelow refers to woods on Concord Turnpike, i. e. hairy sweet cicely. Also ternate polypody (?). Saw a chestnut tree in Loudon. Leaving Loudoh Ridge on the right we continued on by the Hollow Road –a long way through the forest without houses– through a part of Canterbury into Gilmanton Factory village. I see the Ribes prostratum, or fetid currant, by roadside, already red, as also the red elder-berries, ripe or red.1 Strawberries were abundant by HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES the roadside and in the grass on hillsides everywhere, with the seeds conspicuous, sunk in pits on the surface. (Vide a leaf of same kind pressed.) The Merrimack at Merrimack, where I walked, –half a mile or more below my last camp on it in ’9,– had gone down two or three feet within a few days, and the muddy and slimy shore was covered with the tracks I This only in the northern part of New Hampshire.of many small animals, apparently three-toed sandpipers, minks, turtles, squirrels, perhaps mice, and some much larger quadrupeds. The Solidago lanceolata, not out, was common along the shore. Wool-grass without black sheaths, and a very slender variety with it; also Carex crinita. We continue along through Gilmanton to Meredith Bridge, passing the Suncook Mountain on our right, a long, barren rocky range overlooking Lake Winnepiseogee. Turn down a lane five or six miles beyond the bridge and spend the midday near a bay of the lake. Polygon1bm cilinode, apparently not long. I hear song sparrows there among the rocks, with a totally new strain, ending whit whit, whit whit, whit whit whit. They had also the common strain. We had begun to see from Gilmanton, from high hills in the road, the sharp rocky peak of Chocorua in the north, to the right of the lower Red Hill. It was of a pale-buff color, with apparently the Sandwich Mountains west of it and Ossipee Mountain on the right. The goldfinch was more common than at home, and the fragrant fern was perceived oftener. The evergreen-forest not frequently heard. It is far more independent to travel on foot. You have to sacrifice so much to the horse. You cannot choose the most agreeable places in which to spend the noon, commanding the finest views, because commonly there is no water there, or you cannot get there with your horse. New Hampshire being a more hilly and newer State than Massachusetts, it is very difficult to find a suitable place to camp near the road, affording water, a good prospect, and retirement. We several times rode on as much as ten miles with a tired horse, looking in vain for such a spot, and then almost invariably camped in some low, unpleasant spot. There are very few, scarcely any, lanes, or even paths and bars along the road. Having got beyond the range of the chestnut, the few bars that might be taken down are long and heavy planks or slabs, intended to confine sheep, and there is no passable road behind. And beside, when you have chosen a place one must stay behind to watch your effects, while the other looks about. I frequently envied the independence of the walker, who can spend the midday hours and take his lunch in the most agreeable spot on his route. The only alternative is to spend your noon at some trivial inn, pestered by flies and tavern loungers. Camped within a mile of Senter Harbor, in a birch wood on the right near the lake. Heard in the night a loon, screech owl, and cuckoo, and our horse, tied to a slender birch close by, restlessly pawing the ground all night and whinnering to us whenever we showed ourselves, asking for something more than meat to fill his belly with. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

November 1, Monday: Governor-General Charles John Canning, Viscount Canning of India proclaimed Queen Victoria as sovereign over all India. All powers and territories held by the British East India Company would henceforward inhere to the British crown. Viscount Canning would serve as the initial British Viceroy of India.

In Boston, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes dated the preface to his initial collected edition of his occasional “Breakfast-Table” essays for The Atlantic Monthly, titled THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST TABLE. This was the year of appearance of his “The Deacon’s Masterpiece, or ‘The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay’,” a frontal mockery of Calvinism. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES Una Hawthorne was diagnosed as a victim of the “Roman fever,” that is, malaria.

THE MARBLE FAUN: The final charm is bestowed by the Malaria. There is a piercing, thrilling, delicious kind of regret in the idea of so much beauty thrown away, or only enjoyable at its half- development, in winter and early spring, and never to be dwelt amongst, as the home-scenery of any human being. For if you come hither in summer, and stray through these glades in the golden sunset, Fever walks arm in arm with you, and Death awaits you at the end of the dim vista. Thus the scene is like Eden in its loveliness; like Eden, too, in the fatal spell that removes it beyond the scope of man’s actual possessions. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1859

Real misogyny as of 1859:

The brain-women never interest us like the heart- women; white roses please less than red. — Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE) HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1860

Frederick Goddard Tuckerman privately printed POEMS (Boston: John Wilson and Son), which he mailed to various literary figures such as Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Nathaniel Hawthorne under cover letter.

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s 2d collected edition of his occasional “Breakfast-Table” essays for The Atlantic Monthly, titled THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE.

From this year into 1872, The Atlantic Monthly would be from issue to issue publishing passages from Hawthorne’s NOTE-BOOKS, and scenes from the DOLLIVER ROMANCE, SEPTIMUS FELTON, etc.

Evidently, at some point between this year with the Hawthornes returning from England to their Wayside property in Concord and 1862 when Henry Thoreau died, Hawthorne had difficulties with a manuscript he was HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES working on. His working title started out as “The Ancestral Footprint” but then became “Etherege” and then “Grimshawe,” while the scene of the action became a gloomy burial ground in Salem. Thoreau passed along to him a story about a previous resident of his Wayside who had determined to live forever. Hawthorne resituated his work-in-progress from Salem to Concord and took from his story “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” the idea of a magic elixir. His hero Septimius he made out to be a halfbreed native American seminary student undergoing a crisis of faith. Septimius kills a British soldier and discovers, on his body, a formula for eternal life. Hawthorne would never be able to get anywhere with this tale, and it would remain unpublished. One wonders, did Thoreau get this stuff about a previous resident of the Wayside who had determined to live forever out of his imagination — or might there be some person, with a name and a date, to whom Thoreau had been making reference?

June 15, Friday: According to urban legend, this was the day of the founding of the 1st town in the Idaho Territory, Franklin. The settlers were 13 families of Mormons who were presuming themselves to be within the territory of a Greater Utah, who named their place “Franklin” in honor of one of the current dozen leaders of their Church, Apostle Franklin D. Richards. Actually, Lemhi, Idaho, site of Fort Lemhi, had been the 1st Mormon settlement in the Idaho Territory and had been in existence since 1855, while Lewiston (named overtly in memory of early passer-by Merriwether Lewis but covertly in honor of the Maine town of Lewiston, origin of one of the settlers), was also already in existence and would become the state capital. In actuality nothing in particular of record happened in this tiny settlement during this day (Brigham Young had visited on June 10th, in between wives, to consecrate Preston Thomas as Bishop over the community, which had been arriving in wagon trains during that spring). So, why do we now have this urban legend, sponsored on the internet, that on this day the 1st town in the Idaho Territory was created, and named Franklin? –Because on March 7, 1911 the Idaho Legislature would belatedly set June 15th apart as “Pioneer Day” and said Legislature would HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES belatedly decree this to constitute its explanation. –And who are you to say nay to your elected representatives who have determined it to be in the public interest to pin this tale on this Franklin donkey, may I enquire?

Anyway, present-day Franklin, although close, is not exactly on the site of this 1860 Franklin.

Joseph Emerson Worcester having issued his A DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, George P. Marsh

compared this with the latest dictionary issued by the Webster empire, for the New-York WORLD, finding Noah Webster to be by contrast “unscholarly and unsound.” Worcester eventually would come to have the support of Thomas Carlyle, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Horace Mann, Sr., Daniel Webster, and The Atlantic Monthly. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1861

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s psychological novel ELSIE VENNER: A ROMANCE OF DESTINY aroused controversy because, since it dealt with “original sin,” it amounted to a critique of Calvinism.

It was in this text that Holmes described the untitled aristocracy of Boston –an aristocracy that although untitled was neither inoffensive nor harmless– as “Brahmins.”

It has been suggested that the character “Elsie Venner” might have been based on the poet Sarah Morewood, or might possibly have been based on Margaret Fuller. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1862

January 28, Tuesday: The Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway spoke for a select audience at Parker House in Boston. Among the attenders were Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, James Thomas Fields, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the Governor of Massachusetts, John Andrew.12

John J. May wrote from Boston to James M. Stone to indicate that he would be unable to serve on the Executive Committee of the Emancipation League.

George Luther Stearns wrote from Boston to James M. Stone, accepting the office of Treasurer of The Emancipation League.

John Ayres wrote from Boston to Charles (?) Slack, providing a letter of introduction from Charles Norton.

Die ersten Curen op.261, a waltz by Johann Strauss, was performed for the initial time, in the Sophiensaal, Vienna.

12. (Another reference says he spoke at the Tremont Temple. Would this have been the same oration for a more general audience?) HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES February: Waldo Emerson lectured to the Reverend Theodore Parker’s “Fraternity” in Boston, and made some remarks in his journal about the dying Henry Thoreau:13

H D T ... Perhaps his fancy for Walt Whitman grew out of his taste for wild nature, for an otter, a wood-chuck, or a loon. He loved sufficiency, hated a sum that would not prove: loved Walt & hated Alcott. * * * Therien came to see Thoreau on business, but Thoreau at once perceived that he had been drinking; and advised him to go home & cut his throat, and that speedily. Therien did not well know what to make of it, but went away, & Thoreau said, he learned that he had been repeating it about town, which he was glad to hear, & hoped that by this time he had begun to understand what it meant.

WALT WHITMAN THE LIST OF LECTURES

Emerson also remarked in his journal about Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, mobilizing for this purpose a Thoreau trope:

Holmes came out late in life with a strong sustained growth for two or three years, like old pear trees which have done nothing for ten years, & at last begin & grow great. The Lowells come forward slowly, & H.T. remarks, that men may have two growths like pears.

13. We may here treat as a projection of his own attitudes, a displacement, Waldo Emerson’s strange and entirely unsupported assertion that Henry Thoreau’s affect toward Bronson Alcott amounted to a species of contempt, and we may likewise desire to distance ourselves from Emerson’s idea that Thoreau in this reported incident with Alek Therien was merely expressing a hostile attitude — rather than attempting to administer to this long-term friend a much needed corrective.

As a temperance Friend, John Greenleaf Whittier “would have been quite incapable of such an act as Henry Thoreau committed when he advised an intemperate man who came to see him under the influence of liquor to go home and cut his throat and do it quickly.… [He] contributed an article to The American Manufacturer on ‘Cultivation of the Vine’” (pages 24-25 of Wagenknecht, Edward. JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER: A PORTRAIT IN PARADOX. NY: Oxford UP, 1967). There is abundant evidence that, despite temperance convictions, despite being known as “a cold-water man by habit and principle,” Whittier not only drank hard cider and used alcoholic drinks for medicinal purposes and for sleeplessness but even, while traveling, carried on his person a flask of brandy. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES December 21, Sunday: Visiting James Thomas Fields, the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway met Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry James, Sr. Meanwhile, on the bank of the Rappahannock River in Virginia, in the rooms of the Conway plantation home, Walt Whitman was searching fruitlessly for his wounded brother:

Begin my visits among the camp hospitals in the army of the Potomac. Spent a good part of the day in a large brick mansion on the banks of the Rappahannock, used as a hospital since the battle — seems to have received only the worst cases. Out doors, at the foot of a tree, within ten yards of the front of the house, I notice a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, etc., a full load for a one-horse cart. Several dead bodies lie near, each cover’d with its brown woolen blanket. In the door-yard, towards the river, are fresh graves, mostly of officers, their names on pieces of barrel- staves or broken boards, stuck in the dirt. (Most of these bodies were subsequently taken up and transported north to their friends.) The large mansion is quite crowded upstairs and down, everything impromptu, no system, all bad enough, but I have no doubt the best that can be done; all the wounds pretty bad, some frightful, the men in their old clothes, unclean and bloody. Some of the wounded are rebel soldiers and officers, prisoners. One, a Mississippian, a captain, hit badly in leg, I talk’d with some time; he ask’d me for papers, which I gave him. (I saw him three months afterward in Washington, with his leg amputated, doing well.) I went through the rooms, downstairs and up. Some of the men were dying. I had nothing to give at that visit, but wrote a few letters to folks home, mothers, &c. Also talk’d to three or four, who seem’d most susceptible to it, and needing it.

You can still see the hammering marks on the lock of this house, made when Union troops broke in:

US CIVIL WAR December 22, Monday: President Abraham Lincoln sent a brief message to the considerable number of Union soldiers who had survived, out of his Army of the Potomac. Executive Mansion, Washington December 22, 1862 To the Army of the Potomac: I have just read your Commanding General's preliminary report of the battle of Fredericksburg. Although you were not successful, the attempt was not an error, HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES nor the failure other than an accident. The courage with which you, in an open field, maintained the contest against an entrenched foe, and the consummate skill and success with which you crossed and re-crossed the river, in face of the enemy, show that you possess all the qualities of a great army, which will yet give victory to the cause of the country and of popular government. Condoling with the mourners for the dead, and sympathizing with the severely wounded, I congratulate you that the number of both is comparatively so small. I tender to you, officers and soldiers, the thanks of the nation. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1864

James Russell Lowell and Charles Eliot Norton became co-editors of The North American Review.

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes took a snapshot of Professor Lowell on the lawn of his home “Elmwood” in Cambridge, leaning against a tree.

May 24, Tuesday: The 88th Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment was advancing toward Dallas, Georgia. People were continuing to kill each other at North Anna / Jericho Mill / Hanover Junction. In addition, on this day, people were killing each other at Wilson’s Wharf / Fort Pocahontas. US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

Far Too Rich And Far Too Important To Ever Get His Ass Drafted HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

In Concord on this day, however, people were burying each other. Waldo Emerson recorded in his journal that:

Yesterday, May 23, we buried Hawthorne in Sleepy Hollow, in a pomp of HAWTHORNE sunshine and verdure, and gentle winds. James Freeman Clarke read the service in the church and at the grave. Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Agassiz, Hoar, Dwight, Whipple, Norton, Alcott, Hillard, Fields, Judge LONGFELLOW Thomas, and I attended the hearse as pallbearers. Franklin Pierce was J.R. LOWELL with the family. The church was copiously decorated with white flowers DR. O.W. HOLMES delicately arranged. The corpse was unwillingly shown, — only a few PROF. AGASSIZ moments to this company of his friends. But it was noble and serene in its aspect, — nothing amiss, — a calm and powerful head. A large company JUDGE E.R. HOAR filled the church and the grounds of the cemetery. All was so bright and J.S. DWIGHT quiet that pain or mourning was hardly suggested, and Holmes said to me C.K. WHIPPLE that it looked like a happy meeting. C.E. NORTON Clarke in the church said that Hawthorne had done more justice than any other to the shades of life, shown a sympathy with the crime in our BRONSON ALCOTT nature, and, like Jesus, was the friend of sinners. HILLARD I thought there was a tragic element in the event, that might be more JAMES T. FIELDS fully rendered, — in the painful solitude of the man, which, I suppose, JUDGE THOMAS could not longer be endured, and he died of it. I have found in his death a surprise and a disappointment. I thought him a greater man than any of his works betray, that there was still a great deal of work in him, and that he might one day show a purer power. Moreover, I have felt sure of him in his neighbourhood, and in his necessities of sympathy and intelligence, — that I could well wait his time, — his unwillingness and caprice, — and might one day conquer a friendship. It would have been a happiness, doubtless to both of us, to have come into habits of unreserved intercourse. It was easy to talk with him, — there were no barriers, — only, he said so little, that I talked too much, and stopped only because, as he gave no indications, I feared to exceed. He showed no egotism or self-assertion, rather a humility, and, at one time, a fear that he had written himself out. One day, when I found him on top of his hill, in the woods, he paced back the path to his house, and said, “This path is the only remembrance of me that will remain.” Now it appears that I waited too long. Lately he had removed himself the more by the indignation his perverse politics and unfortunate friendship for that paltry Franklin Pierce awakened, though it rather moved pity for Hawthorne, and the assured belief that he would outlive FRANKLIN PIERCE it, and come right at last. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES “The Wayside” would be occupied by the widowed Mrs. Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, with her daughters Una Hawthorne and Rose Hawthorne and her son Julian Hawthorne, until, while again living in Europe, in October 1868 they would vend the place to George and Abby Gray. OLD HOUSES HAWTHORNE MAY 23, 1864 How beautiful it was, that one bright day In the long week of rain! Though all its splendor could not chase away The omnipresent pain. The lovely town was white with apple-blooms, And the great elms o’erhead Dark shadows wove on their aerial looms Shot through with golden thread. Across the meadows, by the gray old manse, The historic river flowed: I was as one who wanders in a trance, Unconscious of his road. The faces of familiar friends seemed strange; Their voices I could hear, And yet the words they uttered seemed to change Their meaning to my ear. For the one face I looked for was not there, The one low voice was mute; Only an unseen presence filled the air, And baffled my pursuit. Now I look back, and meadow, manse, and stream Dimly my thought defines; I only see — a dream within a dream — The hill-top hearsed with pines. I only hear above his place of rest Their tender undertone, The infinite longings of a troubled breast, The voice so like his own. There in seclusion and remote from men The wizard hand lies cold, Which at its topmost speed let fall the pen, And left the tale half told. Ah! who shall lift that wand of magic power, And the lost clew regain? The unfinished window in Aladdin’s tower Unfinished must remain! HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1867

Associate Justice of the Superior Court of Massachusetts Thomas Russell resigned, to be appointed by President Ulysses S. Grant as Collector of the Port of Boston.

On Plymouth beach, the bottom half of the glacial erratic known as “Plymouth Rock” was at this point placed on display inside the iron gates of a Victorian gazebo-type canopy. –Or, rather, most of it was, since in order to get this lower portion to fit in its new home it was necessary to cut off several pieces which apparently then were used to supply the tourist demand for “a piece of the rock.”

Under this canopy were also to be preserved a number of bones that had been found on Cole’s Hill in 1854 when a sewer was installed there. These had been identified by the white racist Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes as the remains of white persons and thus were presumed to be the bones of the Pilgrims who had expired during the First Winter, who had been buried in secret (according to a tradition preserved by Elder Faunce) on Leyden HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES Street near the original Common House.

Upon completion of the canopy, The Pilgrim Society purchased and tore down a number of “unsightly buildings that encumber this space” on Cole’s Hill overlooking the new monument. –Clearly, this municipality was already well on its way toward its destiny as a grand tourist trap.

Dr. Holmes’s THE GUARDIAN ANGEL, about a little girl whose development is troubled by her need to learn how to overcome turbulent, glowing impulses which are not her fault because they are due to the mingling of racial bloods and inherited qualities that has been from birth, unfortunately, inside her body. Fortunately, she is able to overcome this by obtaining the needed guidance of a white man. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1870

Existence, for at most 9 months at Cambridge, of a discussion group known as “The Metaphysical Club” (refer to Louis Menand’s 1971 THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB: A STORY OF IDEAS IN AMERICA, FS&G). HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES Among those who took part were Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Chauncey Wright, Nicholas St. John

Green, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Fiske, and the Reverend Francis Ellingwood Abbot. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES The one thing this club would produce was an idea about the rôle that beliefs play and the rôle they do not play in people’s lives. That idea would be best expressed in the philosophy of John Dewey. After 1903, Peirce would recall imprecisely that: In the sixties I started a little club called the Metaphysical Club. It seldom if ever had more than half a dozen present. Wright was the strongest member and probably I was next. Nicholas St. John Green was a marvelously strong intelligence. Then there was Frank Abbot, William James, and others. It was there that the name and the doctrine of pragmatism saw the light.

For the following decade the Reverend Abbot would edit a Boston journal of freethought, The Free Religious Index. For a time Bronson Alcott would affiliate with the Free Religious Association sponsored by the Reverend. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1872

By this point Chauncey Wright had become one of the elders of the proto-pragmatist Metaphysical Club, “our boxing-master” for his junior colleagues C.S. Peirce, William James, and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. In this year his support for the theory of Charles Darwin, and his attack on St. George Mivart’s anti-selectionist GENESIS OF SPECIES in the North American Review, earned him a personal invitation to visit at Down (this would be his only trip abroad). Darwin would arrange to have Wright’s attack on Mivart reprinted in England at his own expense. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s 3d collected edition of his occasional “Breakfast-Table” essays for The Atlantic Monthly, titled THE POET AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1877

Our national birthday, Wednesday the 4th of July: In Woodstock, Connecticut, Roseland Park was dedicated. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes read a couple of poems celebrating Americans with faces white: The Ship of State! above her skies are blue, But still she rocks a little, it is true, And there are passengers whose faces white Show they don’t feel as happy as they might; Yet on the whole her crew are quite content, Since its wild fury the typhoon has spent, And willing, if her pilot thinks it best, To head a little nearer south by west. And this they feel: the ship came too near wreck, In the long quarrel for the quarter-deck, Now when she glides serenely on her way,— The shallows past where dread explosives lay,— The stiff obstructive’s churlish game to try Let sleeping dogs and still torpedoes lie! And so I give you all the Ship of State; Freedom’s last venture is her priceless freight; God speed her, keep her, bless her, while she steers Amid the breakers of unsounded years; Lead her through danger’s paths with even keel, And guide the honest hand that holds her wheel!

“A Family Record” Not to myself this breath of vesper song, Not to these patient friends, this kindly throng, Not to this hallowed morning, though it be Our summer Christmas, Freedom’s jubilee, When every summit, topmast, steeple, tower, That owns her empire spreads her starry flower, Its blood-streaked leaves in heaven’s benignant dew Washed clean from every crimson stain they knew,— No, not to these the passing thrills belong That steal my breath to hush themselves with song. These moments all are memory’s; I have come To speak with lips that rather should be dumb; For what are words? At every step I tread The dust that wore the footprints of the dead But for whose life my life had never known This faded vesture which it calls its own. Here sleeps my father’s sire, and they who gave That earlier life here found their peaceful grave. In days gone by I sought the hallowed ground; Climbed yon long slope; the sacred spot I found Where all unsullied lies the winter snow, Where all ungathered spring’s pale violets blow, And tracked from stone to stone the Saxon name That marks the blood I need not blush to claim, Blood such as warmed the Pilgrim sons of toil, Who held from God the charter of the soil. I come an alien to your hills and plains, Yet feel your birthright tingling in my veins; Mine are this changing prospect’s sun and shade, In full-blown summer’s bridal pomp arrayed; Mine these fair hillsides and the vales between; Mine the sweet streams that lend their brightening green; I breathed your air—the sunlit landscape smiled; HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES I touch your soil—it knows its children’s child; Throned in my heart your heritage is mine; I claim it all by memory’s right divine Waking, I dream. Before my vacant eyes In long procession shadowy forms arise; Far through the vista of the silent years I see a venturous band; the pioneers, Who let the sunlight through the forest’s gloom, Who bade the harvest wave, the garden bloom. Hark! loud resounds the bare-armed settler’s axe, See where the stealthy panther left his tracks! As fierce, as stealthy creeps the skulking foe With stone-tipped shaft and sinew-corded bow; Soon shall he vanish from his ancient reign, Leave his last cornfield to the coming train, Quit the green margin of the wave he drinks, For haunts that hide the wild-cat and the lynx. But who the Youth his glistening axe that swings To smite the pine that shows a hundred rings? His features?—something in his look I find That calls the semblance of my race to mind. His name?—my own; and that which goes before The same that once the loved disciple bore. Young, brave, discreet, the father of a line Whose voiceless lives have found a voice in mine; Thinned by unnumbered currents though they be, Thanks for the ruddy drops I claim from thee! The seasons pass; the roses come and go; Snows fall and melt; the waters freeze and flow; The boys are men; the girls, grown tall and fair, Have found their mates; a gravestone here and there Tells where the fathers lie; the silvered hair Of some bent patriarch yet recalls the time That saw his feet the northern hillside climb, A pilgrim from the pilgrims far away, The godly men, the dwellers by the bay. On many a hearthstone burns the cheerful fire; The schoolhouse porch, the heavenward pointing spire Proclaim in letters every eye can read, Knowledge and Faith, the new world’s simple creed. Hush! ’t is the Sabbath’s silence-stricken morn No feet must wander through the tasselled corn; No merry children laugh around the door, No idle playthings strew the sanded floor; The law of Moses lays its awful ban On all that stirs; here comes the tithing-man At last the solemn hour of worship calls; Slowly they gather in the sacred walls; Man in his strength and age with knotted staff, And boyhood aching for its week-day laugh, The toil-worn mother with the child she leads, The maiden, lovely in her golden beads,— The popish symbols round her neck she wears, But on them counts her lovers, not her prayers,— Those youths in homespun suits and ribboned queues, Whose hearts are beating in the high-backed pews. The pastor rises; looks along the seats With searching eye; each wonted face he meets; Asks heavenly guidance; finds the chapter’s place That tells some tale of Israel’s stubborn race; Gives out the sacred song; all voices join, For no quartette extorts their scanty coin; Then while both hands their black-gloved palms display, Lifts his gray head, and murmurs, “Let us pray!” And pray he does! as one that never fears To plead unanswered by the God that hears; What if he dwells on many a fact as though Some things Heaven knew not which it ought to know,— Thanks God for all his favors past, and yet, HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES Tells Him there’s something He must not forget; Such are the prayers his people love to hear,— See how the Deacon slants his listening ear! What! look once more! Nay, surely there I trace The hinted outlines of a well-known face! Not those the lips for laughter to beguile, Yet round their corners lurks an embryo smile, The same on other lips my childhood knew That scarce the Sabbath’s mastery could subdue. Him too my lineage gives me leave to claim,— The good, grave man that bears the Psalmist’s name. And still in ceaseless round the seasons passed; Spring piped her carol; Autumn blew his blast; Babes waxed to manhood; manhood shrunk to age; Life’s worn-out players tottered off the stage; The few are many; boys have grown to men Since Putnam dragged the wolf from Pomfret’s den; Our new-old Woodstock is a thriving town; Brave are her children; faithful to the crown; Her soldiers’ steel the savage redskin knows; Their blood has crimsoned his Canadian snows. And now once more along the quiet vale Rings the dread call that turns the mothers pale; Full well they know the valorous heat that runs In every pulse-beat of their loyal sons; Who would not bleed in good King George’s cause When England’s lion shows his teeth and claws? With glittering firelocks on the village green In proud array a martial band is seen; You know what names those ancient rosters hold,— Whose belts were buckled when the drum-beat rolled,— But mark their Captain! tell us, who is he? On his brown face that same old look I see Yes! from the homestead’s still retreat he came, Whose peaceful owner bore the Psalmist’s name; The same his own. Well, Israel’s glorious king Who struck the harp could also whirl the sling,— Breathe in his song a penitential sigh And smite the sons of Amalek hip and thigh: These shared their task; one deaconed out the psalm, One slashed the scalping hell-hounds of calm; The praying father’s pious work is done, Now sword in hand steps forth the fighting son. On many a field he fought in wilds afar; See on his swarthy cheek the bullet’s scar! There hangs a murderous tomahawk; beneath, Without its blade, a knife’s embroidered sheath; Save for the stroke his trusty weapon dealt His scalp had dangled at their owner’s belt; But not for him such fate; he lived to see The bloodier strife that made our nation free, To serve with willing toil, with skilful hand, The war-worn saviors of the bleeding land. His wasting life to others’ needs he gave,— Sought rest in home and found it in the grave. See where the stones life’s brief memorials keep, The tablet telling where he “fell on sleep,”— Watched by a winged cherub’s rayless eye,— A scroll above that says we all must die,— Those saddening lines beneath, the “Night-Thoughts” lent: So stands the Soldier’s, Surgeon’s monument. Ah! at a glance my filial eye divines The scholar son in those remembered lines. The Scholar Son. His hand my footsteps led. No more the dim unreal past I tread. O thou whose breathing form was once so dear, Whose cheering voice was music to my ear, Art thou not with me as my feet pursue The village paths so well thy boyhood knew, HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES Along the tangled margin of the stream Whose murmurs blended with thine infant dream, Or climb the hill, or thread the wooded vale, Or seek the wave where gleams yon distant sail, Or the old homestead’s narrowed bounds explore, Where sloped the roof that sheds the rains no more, Where one last relic still remains to tell Here stood thy home,—the memory-haunted well, Whose waters quench a deeper thirst than thine, Changed at my lips to sacramental wine,— Art thou not with me, as I fondly trace The scanty records of thine honored race, Call up the forms that earlier years have known, And spell the legend of each slanted stone? With thoughts of thee my loving verse began, Not for the critic’s curious eye to scan, Not for the many listeners, but the few Whose fathers trod the paths my fathers knew; Still in my heart thy loved remembrance burns; Still to my lips thy cherished name returns; Could I but feel thy gracious presence near Amid the groves that once to thee were dear Could but my trembling lips with mortal speech Thy listening ear for one brief moment reach! How vain the dream! The pallid voyager’s track No sign betrays; he sends no message back. No word from thee since evening’s shadow fell On thy cold forehead with my long farewell,— Now from the margin of the silent sea, Take my last offering ere I cross to thee!

In New-York, at a ceremony held at the Sturtevant House, 89-year old Daniel Lopez, who had fought aboard the frigate USS Constitution, performed a sailor’s jig. CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY

December 17, Monday: Just about every living American author of note (for instance Ralph Waldo Emerson, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow — even a new writer who had only two names, Mark Twain) was in attendance at Friend John Greenleaf Whittier’s 70th birthday party.

A good time was had by all, not.

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/onstage/whittier.html HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1882

When Oscar Wilde arrived in Boston for his year-long lecture tour of America he had with him, among his

letters of introduction to such hosts as Professor Charles Eliot Norton and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, an invitation to make the acquaintance of Julia Ward Howe. Wilde was welcome in Howe’s Boston apartment on Beacon Street and in her home in Newport, Rhode Island, where she would arrange numerous receptions and dinner parties (when the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson in Newport would begin to write letters accusing Howe of impropriety, her entanglement with Wilde would be a large part of what was on his mind).

During this year and the following one, Marion Crawford would be making his home at 241 Beacon Street in Boston. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1883

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes became emeritus.

According to Cleveland Amory’s THE PROPER BOSTONIANS (NY: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1957, pages 185- 6): “Dating from 1785, the Humane Society was founded for the purpose of saving lives at sea. Originally it provided huts and lifeboats. Then, with the emergence of the Coast Guard, it turned to giving medals and money for acts of heroism and instruction in swimming with the cooperation of the State YMCA. At length overwhelmed with trying to give away its income surplus –from an original trust fund of $400,000– in such ever-narrowing spheres, it began in desperation giving money to any and all worthy causes, among them the Boston Lying-In Hospital. Finally it has turned itself over to becoming not only a charity but in the words of one of its historians, ‘frankly and gracefully dedicated to the most lavish, the most delicious, and the most memorable annual dinner known to the US.’ Trustees of this remarkable Society admit that they have no longer anything to do but attend this dinner and, since there are eleven of them, pay for it every eleventh year. Officered by Charles Francis Adams, Sr., Francis Lee Higginson, T. Jefferson Coolidge and Leverett Saltonstall, the Humane men form what is perhaps the most impeccable social organization in Boston and, if they admit to being outdated as a charity, they will not admit to being outdated in their idea of how gentlemen should eat. A menu, served course by course in its entirety at the home of Charles Henry Joy in the year 1883, still stands as the Society’s mark to shoot for” (on the following screen; note the intrusion of the tomato): HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

Hidalgo Brown Sherry Oysters

Royal Pale Sherry Clear Soup

Latour Blanche Boiled Chicken Halibut Tomatoes

Pommery Sec Boiled Capon, Chestnut stuffing Truffles Vegetables

Veuve Cliquot Grouse with Fresh Mushrooms Oyster Cutlets Vol-au-vent

Chateau Margaux 1864 Ducks

Peter Dumesq Sherry Cafe Parfait

Blue Seal Brandy Frozen Pudding with Peaches

Old Ruby Port Cheese

Madeira (choice of Daniel Webster 1795, Farquar, Benjamin Joy, Codman D, Carolina) Dessert HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1884

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes delivered himself of a biography RALPH WALDO EMERSON in the series AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS EDITED BY CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER, in which he was, basically, unsympathetic not only with Emerson but also with a whole slew of other lesser minds: Of course no one can hold Emerson responsible for the “Yoga” doctrine of Brahmanism, which he has amused himself with putting in verse. The oriental side of Emerson’s nature delighted itself in these narcotic dreams, born in the land of the poppy and of hashish. They lend a peculiar charm to his poems, but it is not worth while to try to construct a philosophy out of them. The knowledge, if knowledge it be, of the mystic is not transmissible. It is not cumulative; it begins and ends with the solitary dreamer, and the next who follows him has to build his own cloud-castle as if it were the first aerial edifice that a human soul had ever constructed. Whether it was from him [Emerson] that Thoreau got the hint of the Walden cabin and the parched corn, or whether this idea was working in Thoreau’s mind and was suggested to Emerson by him, is of no great consequence. Emerson, to whom he owed so much, may well have adopted some of these fancies which Thoreau entertained, and afterwards worked out in practice.... [However] It would have never have occurred to him to leave all the conveniences and comforts of life to go and dwell in a shanty, so as to prove to himself that he could live like a savage.... He [Emerson] was surrounded by men who ran to extremes in their idiosyncrasies: Alcott in speculations, which often led him into the fourth dimension of mental space; Hawthorne, who brooded himself into a dream-peopled solitude; Thoreau, the nullifier of civilization, who insisted on nibbling his asparagus at the wrong end, to say nothing of idolators and echoes. He kept his balance among them all. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES As an aside Dr. Holmes also made a profoundly snide comment anent Henry Thoreau, amounting to an implicit accusation that such concern over nature could have amounted only to a sublimated sexuality: Thoreau “told the story of Nature in undress as only one who had hidden in her bedroom could have told it.”

HERE WE FIND HENRY, STILL HIDING IN HER BEDROOM HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1885

The new J.R. Osgood and Co. was taken over by Benjamin Holt Ticknor and renamed Ticknor and Co.

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s A MORTAL ANTIPATHY: FIRST OPENING OF THE NEW PORTFOLIO (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, the Riverside Press; London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, Crown Buildings, 188, Fleet Street). HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1891

Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Bottle Imp.”14

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s OVER THE TEACUPS.

14.This story is considered by some to express a Thoreauvian attitude toward economics. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1894

October 7, Sunday: There was a feast to celebrate the completion of a road, “The Road of the Loving Heart,” that native political prisoners had built connecting Vailima to the public road (the Stevensons had supported these political prisoners during the construction).

Oliver Wendell Holmes died, of course in Cambridge, Massachusetts. HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1974

June: A cache of Dr. Samuel Arthur Jones’s incoming correspondence was discovered in Urbana. Illinois. In this trove were “letters by Henry Thoreau, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and others; ... and there were scores of letters about Thoreau by those who had known the poet- naturalist and by several collectors and scholars.”

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2017. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: August 20, 2017 HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button.

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in HDT WHAT? INDEX

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.