Project Gutenberg's The Guardian Angel, by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

(The Physician and Poet, not the Jurist, O. W. Holmes, Jr.)

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Title: The Guardian Angel

Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Last Updated: February 11, 2009
Release Date: August 16, 2006 [EBook #2697]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GUARDIAN ANGEL ***

Produced by David Widger

THE GUARDIAN ANGEL

By Oliver Wendell Holmes

TO MY READERS.

"A new Preface" is, I find, promised with my story. If there are any
among my readers who loved Aesop's Fables chiefly on account of the
Moral appended, they will perhaps be pleased to turn backward and learn
what I have to say here.

This tale forms a natural sequence to a former one, which some may
remember, entitled "Elsie Venner." Like that,--it is intended for two
classes of readers, of which the smaller one includes the readers of the
"Morals" in Aesop and of this Preface.

The first of the two stories based itself upon an experiment which some
thought cruel, even on paper. It imagined an alien element introduced
into the blood of a human being before that being saw the light. It
showed a human nature developing itself in conflict with the ophidian
characteristics and instincts impressed upon it during the pre-natal
period. Whether anything like this ever happened, or was possible,
mattered little: it enabled me, at any rate, to suggest the limitations
of human responsibility in a simple and effective way.

The story which follows comes more nearly within the range of common
experience. The successive development of inherited bodily aspects
and habitudes is well known to all who have lived long enough to see
families grow up under their own eyes. The same thing happens, but less
obviously to common observation, in the mental and moral nature. There
is something frightful in the way in which not only characteristic
qualities, but particular manifestations of them, are repeated from
generation to generation. Jonathan Edwards the younger tells the story
of a brutal wretch in New Haven who was abusing his father, when the old
man cried out, "Don't drag me any further,