The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Arena, by Various

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Title: The Arena
Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891

Author: Various

Editor: B.O. Flower

Release Date: October 22, 2006 [EBook #19603]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE ARENA.

No. XX.

JULY, 1891.

[Illustration: (signed) Very truly Yours, Oliver Wendell Holmes.]

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.

BY GEORGE STEWART, D. C. L., LL. D.

To the year 1809, the world is very much indebted for a band of
notable recruits to the ranks of literature and science, statesmanship
and military renown. One need mention only a few names to establish
that fact, and grand names they are, for the list includes Darwin,
Gladstone, Erastus Wilson, John Hill Burton, Manteuffel, Count Beust,
Lord Houghton, Alfred Tennyson, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Each of
these has played an important part in the world's history, and
impressed the age with a genius that marks an epoch in the great
department of human activity and progress. The year was pretty well
advanced, and the month of August had reached its 29th day, when the
wife of Dr. Abiel Holmes presented the author of "The American Annals"
with a son who was destined to take his place in the front line of
poets, thinkers, and essayists. The babe was born at Cambridge,
Massachusetts, in the centre of a Puritan civilization, which could
scarcely have been in touch and harmony with the emphasized
Unitarianism emanating from Harvard. But Abiel Holmes was a genial,
generous-hearted man, and despite the severity of his religious
belief, contrived to live on terms of a most agreeable character with
his neighbors. A Yale man himself, and the firm friend of his old
professor, the president of that institution, who had given him his
daughter Mary to wed (she died five years after her marriage), we may
readily believe that for a time, Harvard University, then strongly
under the sway of the Unitarians, had little fascination for him. But
his kindly natu