Emerson's Rhetorical Bomb at Harvard Divinity Became Foundational to U.S. Culture With Murfin Verse

 

A centennial edition of the speech that threw down a gauntlet.

It was a fine Summer Sunday afternoon on July 15, 1838 when fewer than 100 people jammed into a small second floor Divinity Hall chapel at Harvard.  The occasion was the commencement ceremony for the latest crop of Harvard Divinity School graduates.  There were seven that year, six of whom were in attendance.  That was more than enough young men to meet the needs of Unitarian congregations that were clustered mostly in New England.  The class selected the main speaker for the day—a youngish former Unitarian minister now making a name for himself as a lecturer, essayist, and poet.  His heterodox views were well known, but Harvard authorities probably hoped that he would mute them in deference to his old alma mater and prevailing Unitarian sensibilities.

That Ralph Waldo Emerson did not do.

Instead, he read an indictment of Unitarian worship and preaching, which he charged was disconnected from life and drained of spirituality. He went on to a critique of Christianity in general as practiced.  He discounted the miracles of the Bible, and rejected the divinity of Christ, mocking the attention to the person of Jesus as a distraction from his message.  He offered novel alternatives to the authority of the Church—the direct experience of the divine.  It was a clarion call for what might be called post-Christian religion.  There would soon be a name for it—a name Emerson did not particularly like—Transcendentalism.

The young graduates may have been inspired by the challenge Emerson laid before them.  Their professors, the worthies of Harvard, the parents of the graduates, the learned clergy of Boston, and both the denominational and public press were united in outrage, especially when Emerson’s Divinity School Address was published.  Despite his soaring reputation as America’s most significant intellectual and most original philosopher Emerson would be banned from speaking again at Harvard for more than 30 years.

The leading Unitarian journal, The Christian Examiner dismissed Emerson’s comments as, “…so far as they are intelligible, are utterly distasteful to the instructors of the school, and to Unitarian ministers generally, by whom they are esteemed to be neither good divinity nor good sense.”

                                    Harvard professor and historian of American Unitarianism Andrews Norton led the conservative charge against Emerson's perceived apostasy.

Andrews Norton, a professor at Harvard, the recent author of the definitive history of Unitarian thought, and with William Ellery Channing a leading figure in the denomination, led the charge against Emerson and his heresy.  The so-called “Unitarian Pope” responded to Emerson in an address the following year to the alumni of the Divinity School at their Commencement reunion.  His lecture, the Discourse on the Latest Form of Infidelity, indicted the European philosophers Spinoza, Schleiermacher, Strauss, and Hegel, on whom he blamed transcendental error and refuted Emerson by indirection, without mentioning him or taking explicit issue with his views.

When Emerson’s friend and ally George Ripley answered and refuted Norton in a pamphlet of his own, the controversy erupted on a more personal note and Norton, a daring liberal thinker in his youth, spent most of the rest of his life as a neo-orthodox reactionary to the new theological thinking, and in the process muddied his own reputation.

If the establishment rallied against Emerson and his new-fangled ideas, he had his supporters.  Along with Ripley other ministers offered support including Frederic Henry Hedge, who first convened the meeting of what would become known as the Transcendentalist Club, and rising star Theodore Parker who would come to fame as the preacher of his own proto-mega church and as a fiery abolitionist who was also shunned by the closed club of Unitarian ministers.  Channing, who occasionally attended Transcendentalist Club meetings, while disagreeing with Emerson on some points, refrained from joining the attack on him. 

Emerson also enjoyed the support of the growing salon of intellectuals he gathered around him and who became collectively one of the most significant, if not the most significant, philosophical movements in American history.  These included Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa May), the Peabody Sisters, Orestes Brownson, James Freeman Clarke, William Henry Channing (not to be confused with his near-namesake cousin), Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Margaret Fuller among others.  Together they would amplify Emerson’s philosophy and imbed it deeply into American culture.

The young ministers who invited Emerson that day and the generations that followed them would themselves become, more or less, Transcendentalist.  Within a generation they supplanted the old establishment and bring Unitarianism itself into conformation with the new ideas.  Which is why Emerson later in life could comfortably return to his old faith home and why Harvard, at long last, forgave their most illustrious son and not only invited him back to speak but elected him to the Board of Overseers.

All is forgiven now at Harvard.  The cramped Chapel where Emerson delivered his address is now named for him and the speech is annually celebrated.

But if the Divinity School Address was simply a revolution in the minor American sect of Unitarianism, it would be, at best, a footnote to history.  But its implications reverberated across American culture and resonate today.  In fact, they resonate with even more urgency and reflect the values of a growing generation that has defined itself as “spiritual but not religious.”  Emerson sounds almost as if he were speaking for them.

So what, exactly, did he say?  Here are some samples. 

In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and sweet with the breath of the pine, the balm-of-Gilead, and the new hay. Night brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade. Through the transparent darkness the stars pour their almost spiritual rays. Man under them seems a young child, and his huge globe a toy. The cool night bathes the world as with a river, and prepares his eyes again for the crimson dawn. The mystery of nature was never displayed more happily. The corn and the wine have been freely dealt to all creatures, and the never-broken silence with which the old bounty goes forward, has not yielded yet one word of explanation. One is constrained to respect the perfection of this world, in which our senses converse. How wide; how rich; what invitation from every property it gives to every faculty of man! In its fruitful soils; in its navigable sea; in its mountains of metal and stone; in its forests of all woods; in its animals; in its chemical ingredients; in the powers and path of light, heat, attraction, and life, it is well worth the pith and heart of great men to subdue and enjoy it. The planters, the mechanics, the inventors, the astronomers, the builders of cities, and the captains, history delights to honor.

But when the mind opens, and reveals the laws which traverse the universe, and make things what they are, then shrinks the great world at once into a mere illustration and fable of this mind. What am I? and What is? asks the human spirit with a curiosity new-kindled, but never to be quenched. Behold these outrunning laws, which our imperfect apprehension can see tend this way and that, but not come full circle. Behold these infinite relations, so like, so unlike; many, yet one. I would study, I would know, I would admire forever. These works of thought have been the entertainments of the human spirit in all ages…

… The perception of this law of laws awakens in the mind a sentiment which we call the religious sentiment, and which makes our highest happiness. Wonderful is its power to charm and to command. It is a mountain air. It is the embalmer of the world. It is myrrh and storax, and chlorine and rosemary. It makes the sky and the hills sublime, and the silent song of the stars is it. By it, is the universe made safe and habitable, not by science or power. Thought may work cold and intransitive in things, and find no end or unity; but the dawn of the sentiment of virtue on the heart, gives and is the assurance that Law is sovereign over all natures; and the worlds, time, space, eternity, do seem to break out into joy.

This sentiment is divine and deifying. It is the beatitude of man. It makes him illimitable. Through it, the soul first knows itself. It corrects the capital mistake of the infant man, who seeks to be great by following the great, and hopes to derive advantages from another, — by showing the fountain of all good to be in himself, and that he, equally with every man, is an inlet into the deeps of Reason. When he says, “I ought;” when love warms him; when he chooses, warned from on high, the good and great deed; then, deep melodies wander through his soul from Supreme Wisdom. Then he can worship, and be enlarged by his worship; for he can never go behind this sentiment. In the sublimest flights of the soul, rectitude is never surmounted, love is never outgrown….

… Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his world. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, “I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or, see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.” But what a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the following ages! There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding. The understanding caught this high chant from the poet's lips, and said, in the next age, “This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you, if you say he was a man.” The idioms of his language, and the figures of his rhetoric, have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. He spoke of miracles; for he felt that man's life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that this daily miracle shines, as the character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain…

… Historical Christianity has fallen into the error that corrupts all attempts to communicate religion. As it appears to us, and as it has appeared for ages, it is not the doctrine of the soul, but an exaggeration of the personal, the positive, the ritual. It has dwelt, it dwells, with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus. The soul knows no persons. It invites every man to expand to the full circle of the universe, and will have no preferences but those of spontaneous love. But by this eastern monarchy of a Christianity, which indolence and fear have built, the friend of man is made the injurer of man. The manner in which his name is surrounded with expressions, which were once sallies of admiration and love, but are now petrified into official titles, kills all generous sympathy and liking. All who hear me, feel, that the language that describes Christ to Europe and America, is not the style of friendship and enthusiasm to a good and noble heart, but is appropriated and formal, — paints a demigod, as the Orientals or the Greeks would describe Osiris or Apollo. Accept the injurious impositions of our early catachetical instruction, and even honesty and self-denial were but splendid sins, if they did not wear the Christian name. One would rather be “A pagan, suckled in a creed outworn,” than to be defrauded of his manly right in coming into nature, and finding not names and places, not land and professions, but even virtue and truth foreclosed and monopolized. You shall not be a man even. You shall not own the world; you shall not dare, and live after the infinite Law that is in you, and in company with the infinite Beauty which heaven and earth reflect to you in all lovely forms; but you must subordinate your nature to Christ's nature; you must accept our interpretations; and take his portrait as the vulgar draw it…

… Whenever the pulpit is usurped by a formalist, then is the worshipper defrauded and disconsolate. We shrink as soon as the prayers begin, which do not uplift, but smite and offend us. We are fain to wrap our cloaks about us, and secure, as best we can, a solitude that hears not. I once heard a preacher who sorely tempted me to say, I would go to church no more. Men go, thought I, where they are wont to go, else had no soul entered the temple in the afternoon. A snow storm was falling around us. The snow storm was real; the preacher merely spectral; and the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and then out of the window behind him, into the beautiful meteor of the snow. He had lived in vain. He had no one word intimating that he had laughed or wept, was married or in love, had been commended, or cheated, or chagrined. If he had ever lived and acted, we were none the wiser for it. The capital secret of his profession, namely, to convert life into truth, he had not learned. Not one fact in all his experience, had he yet imported into his doctrine. This man had ploughed, and planted, and talked, and bought, and sold; he had read books; he had eaten and drunken; his head aches; his heart throbs; he smiles and suffers; yet was there not a surmise, a hint, in all the discourse, that he had ever lived at all. Not a line did he draw out of real history. The true preacher can be known by this, that he deals out to the people his life, — life passed through the fire of thought. But of the bad preacher, it could not be told from his sermon, what age of the world he fell in; whether he had a father or a child; whether he was a freeholder or a pauper; whether he was a citizen or a countryman; or any other fact of his biography. It seemed strange that the people should come to church. It seemed as if their houses were very unentertaining, that they should prefer this thoughtless clamor. It shows that there is a commanding attraction in the moral sentiment, that can lend a faint tint of light to dullness and ignorance, coming in its name and place. The good hearer is sure he has been touched sometimes; is sure there is somewhat to be reached, and some word that can reach it. When he listens to these vain words, he comforts himself by their relation to his remembrance of better hours, and so they clatter and echo unchallenged…

… Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil. Friends enough you shall find who will hold up to your emulation Wesleys and Oberlins, Saints and Prophets. Thank God for these good men, but say, “I also am a man.” Imitation cannot go above its model. The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man’s.

Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost, — cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity. Look to it first and only, that fashion, custom, authority, pleasure, and money, are nothing to you, — are not bandages over your eyes, that you cannot see, — but live with the privilege of the immeasurable mind. Not too anxious to visit periodically all families and each family in your parish connection, — when you meet one of these men or women, be to them a divine man; be to them thought and virtue; let their timid aspirations find in you a friend; let their trampled instincts be genially tempted out in your atmosphere; let their doubts know that you have doubted, and their wonder feel that you have wondered. By trusting your own heart, you shall gain more confidence in other men. For all our penny-wisdom, for all our soul-destroying slavery to habit, it is not to be doubted, that all men have sublime thoughts; that all men value the few real hours of life; they love to be heard; they love to be caught up into the vision of principles. We mark with light in the memory the few interviews we have had, in the dreary years of routine and of sin, with souls that made our souls wiser; that spoke what we thought; that told us what we knew; that gave us leave to be what we only were. Discharge to men the priestly office, and, present or absent, you shall be followed with their love as by an angel…

… I look for the hour when that supreme Beauty, which ravished the souls of those eastern men, and chiefly of those Hebrews, and through their lips spoke oracles to all time, shall speak in the West also. The Hebrew and Greek Scriptures contain immortal sentences, that have been bread of life to millions. But they have no epical integrity; are fragmentary; are not shown in their order to the intellect. I look for the new Teacher, that shall follow so far those shining laws, that he shall see them come full circle; shall see their rounding complete grace; shall see the world to be the mirror of the soul; shall see the identity of the law of gravitation with purity of heart; and shall show that the Ought, that Duty, is one thing with Science, with Beauty, and with Joy.

 

                           

                                    Emerson about the time of the Divinity School Address.

In reflecting on all of this one lazy Sunday afternoon some years ago, I set down my own thoughts.

Here’s to You, Ralph Waldo

 

You have reached across time

and found me dozing on an afternoon,

reached your hand down

and shaken me by the toe

until I stir bewildered.

 

Wake up! you cry,

the world is waiting to be noticed,

the very autumn air vibrant with miracles,

the incessant sun prying into every dark space

for you, if you will see it,

if you will be it!

 

The deadest of white males,

you have climbed long-limbered

from the pages of a book

splayed open on my desk,

swept your arm wide around the random piles,

            half-read volumes,

half-completed projects,

half-lived life that is my study

and demanded I seize my life,

clear my head of every derivation,

even that from the dust of your own mouth,

and speak at last my own revelation.

 

So, here’s to you Ralph Waldo,

Dreamer,

Darer,

Doer.

 

—Patrick  Murfin

 

From We Build Temple in the Heart, Skinner House Books, Boston, 2004.

Ralph Waldo Emerson's Concord Hymn--National Poetry Month 2026

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson at 35

Ralph Waldo Emerson  commemorated the Battle of Concord Bridge, in which his grandfather Rev. William Emerson served, and which took place at the very doorstep of the Old Manse, both the residence of his ancestor and his own home.  In addition to the Obelisk monument that he dedicated fifty years later, verses of his poem were later inscribed on the famed Minuteman statue.  In Lexington, an equally famous statue memorialized Captain Parker grandfather of Unitarian preacher and theologian Theodore Parker.

Emerson had just concluded his brief career as a Unitarian minister as he found himself at odds with a lingering traditionally Christian orthodoxy.  Based on readings in German Romanticism and other sources he was just beginning to formulate what became known as Transcendentalism.  He was beginning to be noticed for his sermons, essays, and lectures but was not yet famous outside of the precincts of Boston, Harvard, and his hometown.  He wanted to be known principally as a poet, but few of his verses were ever as widely popular as this one, which was uncharacteristic of his more cerebral efforts.

Paul Revere's ride as immortalized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

In 1860 Emerson’s good friend and almost exact contemporary Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote his most famous poem Paul Revere’s Ride—better known as The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere about the events of the evening before that Battles of Lexington and Concord as the Boston silversmith rode to alert the countryside of English plans to march out from the city to capture Patriot arms and leaders.  In his long poem, Longfellow took certain liberties with the exact details.

Emerson’s comparatively terse description of the battles more closely aligned with the facts.

On April 19, 1775 British Regulars set out, supposedly in secret, to seize Patriot arms, including cannon, at Concord and if possible, round up leaders like Sam Adams and John Hancock.  But the intelligence operation of Dr. Josiah Warren was tipped off about the immanent movement, perhaps by the New Jersey born wife of British Commanding General Thomas Gage, a Patriot sympathizer.  

A 1775 print by Amos Doolittle, an eyewitness, show the British entering Concord.

Paul Revere, William Dawes, and relays of dispatch riders roused the countryside. Patriot militia, known as Minutemen, had time to arm and assemble.  As the main body of troops got bogged down crossing the swampy ground after their landfall from crossing the Bay by boat, they became aware by hearing signal bells and gunfire that the militia was being rallied.  Lt. Colonel Francis Smith in overall command dispatched Major John Pitcairn and six companies of light infantry ahead on a quick march to Concord.

In Lexington Col. John Parker (the grandfather of Unitarian preacher and abolitionist Theodore Parker) mustered his home guard militia at a tavern on the Town Green. These men were not designated as Minutemen, who were ready to rally and be dispatched as ordered, but rather were a “training band” for local defense.  As the Regulars noisily approached, Parker and his men spilled out of the tavern and formed ranks on the Green. A company of Royal Marines charged toward the Green, shouting as they came while Pitcairn and three companies took position on the Patriot flank.

Seeing his men outnumbered Parker ordered them to withdraw in an orderly fashion. He never said, as legend records it, “Stand your ground; don't fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.” 

An accurate depiction of the physical scene and disposition of forces on Lexington Green as the local Militia under Capt. Parker take mass fire from the British Regulars.

At some point an officer, possibly Pitcairn, rode forward and ordered the men to lay down their arms and disperse, possibly also calling the men “you damn rebels.” In the confusion, possibly because Parker, who suffered from tuberculosis, could not be heard by all of his men, the militia began a slow retreat carrying their arms while some still stood in rank.  Both sides were under orders to hold fire.

Then a shot was fired from an unknown source.  Neither group of men facing each other on the Green fired. Speculation has been that a bystander—40 to 100 residents were gathered to watch the scene—may have fired from behind a hedge or from inside the tavern. The Regulars responded first with a rattle of individual fire. Return fire was desultory and ineffective. Then devastating volleys tore into the militia ranks sending the men running for their lives. 

Some were shot in the back. At least one, a cousin of Parker’s was run through by a bayonet by the charging troops.  Some troops turned fire on surrounding buildings, sending witnesses scrambling and were preparing to enter homes when Col. Smith came up and ordered the men to cease fire and assemble.

Eight militia men were killed and ten wounded, including a Black slave serving in the company.  One Regular was injured, and Major Pitcairn’s horse took two balls.

The Redcoats rearmed and resumed their march toward Concord. Revere, who had been captured and released by a patrol, was able to get Adams and Hancock out of the village to safety.  Meanwhile militia from Lincoln and Concord gathered in the latter town. They quickly received word that musket fire had been heard in Lexington and that the Regulars were advancing. Unsure of what to do as more militiamen filtered in from the surrounding area, a column of about 250 men advanced down the road to Lexington to check on the situation. About a mile and a half out they came in sight of the Redcoat column.  Recognizing that they were outnumbered more than two to one, they fell back to Concord in relatively good order staying just out of musket range from the troops.

After retreating to a ridge at the end of town the Militia officer in charge, Col. James Barrett, surrendered the town and was allowed to retire with his men still in arms.  They took up positions just across Concord’s North Bridge where they could monitor Redcoat movements while they gathered strength.

The Regulars, now under tight discipline, conducted an orderly search of the town and nearby farms. Most of the arms and all the powder had been moved and/or well hidden. All the troops were able to find were three old 24 lb. cannon, far too heavy for use in the field but potentially useful for laying siege to Boston. They disabled those guns. They also turned up some gun carriages, which were destroyed, about 500 rounds of musket balls, and barrels of salt pork and flour for rations. The lead and provisions were tossed in the mill pond but were retrieved later.

At this point Col. Smith split his forces. He sent detachments to secure the South and North Bridges leading to the town.  The bulk of the men sent to the North Bridge, four companies in all under Captain Pearson were sent a mile and a half ahead to search Col. Barrett’s farm, which is where Loyalists had reported most of the missing military supplies were hidden.  Inexperienced Captain Walter Laurie was left with two companies of raw light infantry to defend the bridge.  Col. Barrett ordered his men to advance down the road to the bridge but to hold their fire. By now he had 400 men with five full companies of Minutemen and the local militias of Acton and Bedford reinforcing the Concord men.  Laurie had only 90 men to face them. 

The rapidly gathering Militia surprised the British by holding their ground at Concord's North Bridge and repulsing the British advance with heavy losses.

He ceded a commanding hill to the Patriots.  Barrett’s men in a long column and confined to the road by ground that was boggy from the spring floods continued to advance and Laurie pulled his men back across the bridge.  Laurie formed his men in a position for “street fighting,” i.e. concentrating fire down a lane between buildings where he should have fanned out so his men could fire on the Colonists confined to the road from both sides. After tense stand-off with the two sides facing each other over the river, a British officer discharged a pistol setting of a ragged burst of fire. Then the Regulars got off an organized volley down the road killing the two privates in advance of the patriot column.  But instead of breaking ranks, the militia responded with well-aimed volleys.  Four of the eight officers and sergeants leading the Regulars were shot and injured.  Three or four privates were killed or mortally wounded and eight others injured.

The panicked Redcoats broke and fled back towards Concord where they were met by a force of Grenadiers coming up under Col. Smith himself.  Captain Parsons and the men at Barrett’s farm were now cut off from the main force.  After a tense standoff, Barrett allowed Parson’s men to pass unmolested and join the main body under Col. Smith. After pausing in town to continue the fruitless search for the missing arms and to eat lunch, Col. Smith turned his command back up the road back to Lexington and Boston.

But the delay allowed more colonial troops to arrive. The militia ranks grew to 1,000 then to 2,000 in units from across a broad swath of Massachusetts. They harried the retreating British and engaged in several stand-up fights with them.  The Redding militia engaged the troops as they retreated over a small bridge at Merium’s Corner. 

Militia units organized a leapfrog ambush of the retreating British inflicting heavy losses from fire behind stone walls and trees all the way to Cambridge.

Gathered Patriot militias from surrounding communities hectored the retreating Red Coats by ambush under cover for almost the entire distance to Boston inflicting heavy casualties.  The exhausted troops finally found shelter in Charleston under the guns of Royal Navy ships and with reinforcements sent by Gage from Boston.  An attempt to fortify the surrounding hills was begun but abandoned.  

Within days 15,000 militia not only from Massachusetts but from throughout New England arrived to surround and lay siege to Boston. These units would be mustered into the new Continental Army by Congress and placed under the command of Virginian George Washington.

Eventually the siege succeed, and the British were forced to evacuate the epicenter of Colonial resistance, Boston.  

But it all began on a Spring day recalled by Emmerson.

A contemporary illustration of the Concord Monument where Emerson read his poem.

Concord Hymn

 

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,

    Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,

Here once the embattled farmers stood,

    And fired the shot heard round the world.

 

The foe long since in silence slept;

    Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;

And Time the ruined bridge has swept

    Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

 

On this green bank, by this soft stream,

    We set to-day a votive stone;

That memory may their deed redeem,

    When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

 

Spirit, that made those heroes dare

    To die, and leave their children free,

Bid Time and Nature gently spare

    The shaft we raise to them and thee.

 

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Composed for and read at the dedication of the Obelisk, a monument to the battles of Lexington and Concord erected at Concord in 1837.

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table Was More Than a Supreme Court Justice’s Dad

 

 

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. 

Despite his many accomplishments, Oliver Wendell Homes, Sr. is best remembered today as the father of the great Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., he of the impressive mustachio and beneficiary of a bestselling fictionalized biography and an even more fanciful MGM movie.  The father, who evidently did not engage a good press agent, would probably have been both proud and amused.

 

                                         The famous son, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. 

The senior Holmes was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts on August 29, 1809. Like his nearly exact contemporary, Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was the son of noted liberal minister and a descendent of poet Anne Bradstreet.  Unlike Emerson, he felt no call to the ministry.   

Instead, he studied medicine at Harvard and launched a highly successful practice.  The high regard for his professional abilities was demonstrated when he was appointed Harvard’s chair of anatomy and physiology. 

Holmes’ intellect and interests, however, were broader than the sciences.  He was a revered wit and wide ranging conversationalist. He pursued literature as a second career.  In 1857 he co-founded The Atlantic Monthly with James Russell Lowell.  His literary output was marked by amazing versatility.  A collection of his humorous essays The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table was published to great success in 1858.  Among his contributions to the American language was Boston Brahmins to describe the largely Unitarian elite like himself who dominated the Hub City both culturally and politically. 

 

The first edition of Holmes' hugely popular book of humorous essays, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. 

He also wrote novels, which were popular in their day but are now largely forgotten and scholarly biography.  Holmes’ biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1885 is a classic of the genre. 

Over his long life he frequently contributed poetry to newspapers and journals, which led to his greatest public acclaim.  His work ranged from the whimsical The Deacon’s Masterpiece or the Wonderful One-Hoss Shay, to the transcendental musings of The Chambered Nautilus, to the unabashedly patriotic Old Ironsides.  The latter poem was credited with saving the famous frigate USS Constitution from the scrap yard.  It floats today in Boston Harbor, a tribute to the power of Holmes’s words. 

Holmes died on October 7, 1894 in Boston at the age 84.

He is best remembered for Old Ironsides, but his wit is best displayed in another poem.  Note that decades before the local color writers supposedly invented it, Holmes was capturing the old New England accent and the attitude of Massachusetts villages. 

 

 Plates from Holms's Wonderful One-Hoss Shay.

The Deacon’s Masterpiece or the Wonderful One-Hoss Shay

Have you heard of the wonderful one-hoss shay,

That was built in such a logical way

It ran a hundred years to a day,

And then of a sudden it — ah, but stay,

I’ll tell you what happened without delay,

Scaring the parson into fits,

Frightening people out of their wits, –

Have you ever heard of that, I say?

 

Seventeen hundred and fifty-five.

Georgius Secundus was then alive, –

Snuffy old drone from the German hive.

That was the year when Lisbon-town

Saw the earth open and gulp her down,

And Braddock’s army was done so brown,

Left without a scalp to its crown.

It was on that terrible Earthquake-day

That the Deacon finished the one-hoss shay.

 

Now in building of shaises, I tell you what,

There is always a weakest spot, –

In hub, tire, felloe, in spring or thill,

In pannel or crossbar, or floor, or sill,

In screw, bolt, throughbrace, — lurking still,

Find it somewhere you must and will, –

Above or below, or within or without, –

And that’s the reason, beyond a doubt,

That a chaise breaks down, but doesn’t wear out.

 

But the Deacon swore (as deacons do,

With an “I dew vum,” or an I tell yeou”)

He would build one shay to beat the taown

‘n’ the keounty ‘n’ all the kentry raoun’;

It should be so built that it couldn’ break daown:

“Fer,” said the Deacon, “’t’s mighty plain

Thut the weakes’ place mus’ stan’ the strain;

‘n’ the way t’ fix it, uz I maintain, is only jest

‘T’ make that place uz strong uz the rest.”

 

So the Deacon inquired of the village folk

Where he could find the strongest oak,

That couldn’t be split nor bent nor broke, –

That was for spokes and floor and sills;

He sent for lancewood to make the thills;

The crossbars were ash, from the straightest trees

The pannels of whitewood, that cuts like cheese,

But lasts like iron for things like these;

 

The hubs of logs from the “Settler’s ellum,” –

Last of its timber, — they couldn’t sell ‘em,

Never no axe had seen their chips,

And the wedges flew from between their lips,

Their blunt ends frizzled like celery-tips;

Step and prop-iron, bolt and screw,

Spring, tire, axle, and linchpin too,

Steel of the finest, bright and blue;

Throughbrace bison-skin, thick and wide;

Boot, top, dasher, from tough old hide

Found in the pit when the tanner died.

That was the way he “put her through,”

“There!” said the Deacon, “naow she’ll dew!”

 

Do! I tell you, I rather guess

She was a wonder, and nothing less!

Colts grew horses, beards turned gray,

Deacon and deaconess dropped away,

Children and grandchildren — where were they?

But there stood the stout old one-hoss shay

As fresh as on Lisbon-earthquake-day!

 

EIGHTEEN HUNDRED; — it came and found

The Deacon’s masterpiece strong and sound.

Eighteen hindred increased by ten; –

“Hahnsum kerridge” they called it then.

Eighteen hundred and twenty came; –

Running as usual; much the same.

Thirty and forty at last arive,

And then come fifty and FIFTY-FIVE.

 

Little of all we value here

Wakes on the morn of its hundredth year

Without both feeling and looking queer.

In fact, there’s nothing that keeps its youth,

So far as I know, but a tree and truth.

(This is a moral that runs at large;

Take it. — You’re welcome. — No extra charge.)

 

FIRST OF NOVEMBER, — the Earthquake-day, –

There are traces of age in the one-hoss shay,

A general flavor of mild decay,

But nothing local, as one may say.

There couldn’t be, — for the Deacon’s art

Had made it so like in every part

That there wasn’t a chance for one to start.

 

For the wheels were just as strong as the thills

And the floor was just as strong as the sills,

And the panels just as strong as the floor,

And the whippletree neither less or more,

And the back-crossbar as strong as the fore,

And the spring and axle and hub encore.

And yet, as a whole, it is past a doubt

In another hour it will be worn out!

 

First of November, fifty-five!

This morning the parson takes a drive.

Now, small boys get out of the way!

Here comes the wonderful one-hoss shay,

Drawn by a rat-tailed, ewe-necked bay.

 

“Huddup!” said the parson. — Off went they.

The parson was working his Sunday’s text, –

Had got to fifthly, and stopped perplexed

At what the — Moses — was coming next.

All at once the horse stood still,

Close by the meet’n’-house on the hill.

First a shiver, and then a thrill,

Then something decidedly like a spill, –

And the parson was sitting upon a rock,

At half past nine by the meet’n-house clock, –

Just the hour of the earthquake shock!

 

What do you think the parson found,

When he got up and stared around?

The poor old chaise in a heap or mound,

As if it had been to the mill and ground!

You see, of course, if you’re not a dunce,

How it went to pieces all at once, –

All at once, and nothing first, –

Just as bubbles do when they burst.

 

End of the wonderful one-hoss shay.

Logic is logic. That’s all I say.

 

—Oliver Wendell Holmes

Note:  Adapted from the Biographical Notes accompanying my reader’s theater piece Four Hundred Years of Unitarian and Universalist Biography—From John Milton to Sylvia Plath.