Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 15.pdf/31

 The Green Bag. its owner lived and did his daily work, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was born in Boston, on the eighth of March, 1841. Those who believe that special abilities may be inherited will point to the fact that his mother was the daughter of Charles Jackson, judge of the Supreme Judicial Court from 1813 until ill health compelled his resignation in 1823, and sharer with Mr. Parker, afterward Chief Jus tice Parker, of the leadership of the bar of his generation. Holmes went to the school kept when he first attended by Mr. T. R. Sullivan, and afterwards by Mr. E. S. Dixwell, whose daughter he was subsequently to marry. He entered Harvard College in the class of 1861. During the last months of his undergraduate life, the great war broke out, and in April Holmes left college to join the Fourth Battallion of Infantry, Major Thomas G. Ste venson commanding, then stationed at Fort Independence in Boston Harbor. His class had chosen him for their poet, and he was fortunately able to deliver on class day the poem which he wrote in quarters. Captain Holmes' war record is open to all, and only the barest facts need be stated here. Shortly after class day in 1861 he was commissioned first lieutenant of Company A (afterward transferred to Company D) of the famous Twentieth Massachusetts. In the Fall he was wounded twice at Balls Bluff. In the Spring of the next year he was captain of Company G, and in the Fall he was wounded again at Antietam. In May. 1863. he was wounded still again at Marye's Hill near Fredericksburg. In July he was com missioned lieutenant-colonel of his regiment, but the Twentieth was too much reduced by losses in the field for further service, and he was never mustered in. In the beginning of 1864 he was appointed A. D. C. on the staff of Brigadier-General H. G. Wright, com manding the First Division of the Sixth Corps, afterward Major-General command ing the Sixth Corps, and served with Gen

eral Wright during Grant's campaign in the Wilderness, returning to Washington when the capital was threatened in July. On the seventeenth of the same month he was mus tered out at the end of his term of enlistment. Many of his comrades, his nearest friends, were dead. But he turned eagerly to the life before him. "It was given to us to learn at the outset," he said, in his Memorial Dav address at Keene, in 1884, "that life is a pro found and passionate thing. While we are permitted to scorn nothing but indifference, and do not pretend to undervalue the worldly rewards of ambition, we have seen with our own eyes, beyond and above the gold fields, the snowy heights of honor, and it is for us to bear the report to those who come after us. But, above all, we have learned that whether a man accepts from Fortune her spade, and will look downward and dig, or from Aspiration her axe and cord, and will scale the ice, the one and only success which it is his to command is to bring to his work a mighty heart." In September, Holmes entered the Har vard Law School, taking his degree two years later, in 1866. During part of his time in the school he studied also in the office of Robert M. Morse, Esq. In the Fall of '66 he entered the office of Chandler, Shattuck & Thayer as a student. On March 4, 1867, Mr. Holmes was admitted to practice before the bench, where fifteen years later he was to take his seat. During the fifteen years that followed. Mr. Holmes practiced his profession in Boston, first in partnership with his brother, and after 1873 as a member of the firm of Shat tuck, Holmes and Munroe. These years of practice were crowded also with literary, edu cational and editorial occupation. In the Winter of 1870-71 he gave a series of lectures on constitutional law at Harvard College, and in 1871-72 he was University lecturer on jurisprudence. In June, 1872, he married Miss Fanny Dixwell, daughter of his old