Essays from Reviews Author:George Stewart Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. (The Arena, Boston, Mass., July, 1S01.) The Gift is thine the weary world to make More cheerful for thy nake, Soothing the ears i... more »ts Miserere pains, With the old Hellenic strains, Lighting the sullen face of discontent With smile for lles-wiy sent. Euouyh of Selfish icailbnj has been had, Thank God .'for uote-t more ijlad. John Gkeenleaf Whittier. 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, Lord 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 neighbours. A Yale man himself, and the firm friend of his old professor, the president of that institu- tion, who had given him his daughter Mary to wed (she died five years after her marriage), we may readi...« less