3
Who the painter was none may tell-- One whose best was not over well; Hard and dry, it must be confessed,
Flat as a rose that has long been pressed; Yet in her cheek the hues are bright, Dainty colors of red and white;
And in her slender shape are seen Hint and promise of stately mien. [15]
Look not on her with eyes of scorn-- Dorothy Q. was a lady born!
Ay, since the galloping Normans came, England's annals have known her name; And still to the three-hilled rebel town Dear is that ancient name's renown,
For many a civic wreath they won,
The youthful sire and the gray-haired son. O damsel Dorothy! Dorothy Q.,
Strange is the gift that I owe to you; Such a gift as never a king
Save to daughter or son might bring-- All my tenure of heart and hand,
All my title to house and land;
Mother and sister, and child and wife, And joy and sorrow, and death and life. What if a hundred years ago
Those close-shut lips had answered, no, When forth the tremulous question came That cost the maiden her Norman name; And under the folds that look so still
The bodice swelled with the bosom's thrill
Should I be I, or would it be
One tenth another to nine tenths me? Soft is the breath of a maiden's yes; Not the light gossamer stirs with less; But never a cable that holds so fast,
Through all the battles of wave and blast, And never an echo of speech or song That lives in the babbling air so long!
[16]
There were tones in the voice that whispered then
You may hear to-day in a hundred men. O lady and lover, how faint and far
Your images hover, and here we are, Solid and stirring in flesh and bone, Edward's and Dorothy's--all their own-- A goodly record for time to show
Of a syllable spoken so long ago! Shall I bless you, Dorothy, or forgive,
For the tender whisper that bade me live? It shall be a blessing, my little maid,
I will heal the stab of the Redcoat's blade, And freshen the gold of the tarnished frame, And gild with a rhyme your household name, So you shall smile on us, brave and bright,
As first you greeted the morning's light, And live untroubled by woes and fears, Through a second youth of a hundred years.
4
This Dorothy Quincy, it is interesting to note, was the aunt of a second Dorothy Quincy, who married Governor Hancock. The
Wendells were of Dutch descent.
Evert Jansen Wendell, who came from East Friesland in 1645, was the original settler in Albany. From the church records, we find that he was the Regerendo Dijaken in 1656, and upon one of the windows of the old Dutch church[17] in Albany, the arms of the Wendells--a ship riding at two anchors--were represented in stained glass. Very little is known of these early ancestors, but the name is still an influential one among the old Knickerbocker families.
Early in the eighteenth century, Abraham and Jacob Wendell left their Albany home and came to Boston. It is said that Jacob (the great-grandfather of Oliver Wendell Holmes) fell in love with his future wife, the daughter of Doctor James Oliver, when she was only nine years of age. Seeing her at play, he was so impressed by her beauty and grace that, like the Jacob of old, he willingly waited the flight of years. Twelve children blessed this happy union, and the youngest daughter married William Phillips, the first mayor of Boston, and the father of Wendell Phillips.
Fair cousin, Wendell P.,
says Doctor Holmes in his Phi Beta Kappa poem of 1881:
Our ancestors were dwellers beside the Zuyder Zee; Both Grotius and Erasmus were countrymen of we,
And Vondel was our namesake, though he spelt it with a v. [18]
Jacob Wendell became, eventually, one of the richest merchants of Boston; was a member of the City Council and colonel of the
Boston regiment. His son, Oliver (the grandfather of Doctor Holmes), was born in 1733, and after his graduation at Harvard, in
1753, he went into business with his father. He still continued his studies, however, and preferring a professional life to that of a business man, he afterwards graduated at the Law School, was admitted to the bar, and soon after appointed Judge of Probate for Suffolk County. In Drake's Old Landmarks of Boston, we find that Judge Wendell was a selectman during the siege of Boston, and was commissioned by General Washington to raise a company of men to watch the British after the evacuation, so that no spies might pass between the two armies.
The original Bradstreet was Simon, the old Charter Governor, who married Governor Dudley's daughter Anne.[2] This accomplished lady, the first New England poetess, and frequently [19]called by her contemporaries "The Tenth Muse," was Doctor Hol-mes' grandmother's great-great-grandmother.[3]
With such an ancestry, Oliver Wendell Holmes surely fulfils all the conditions of "a man of family," and who will not readily agree
with the Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, when he writes as follows:
"I go for the man with the family portraits against the one with the twenty-five cent daguerreotype, unless I find out that the last is the better of the two. I go for the man that inherits family traditions and the cumulative humanities of at least four or five generations. Above all things, as a child, he should have tumbled about in a library. All men are afraid of books that have not handled them from infancy."
[20] CHAPTER II. BOYHOOD.
IN a curious little almanac for 1809 may still be seen against the date of August 29, the simple record, "Son b." Twice before had good Parson Holmes recorded in similar manner the births of his children, for Oliver Wendell, who bore his grandfather's name, was his third child; but this was the first time he could write "son."
A few years later another son came--the "brother John" whose wit and talents have gladdened so many hearts--and, last of all,
another daughter came to brighten the family circle for a few brief years.
The little Oliver was a bright, sunny-tempered child, highly imaginative and extremely sensitive. Speaking of his childhood in after years, and of certain superstitious fancies that always clung to him, he says:
5
[21]
"I tell you it was not so pleasant for a little boy of impressible nature to go up to bed in an old gambrel-roofed house, with untenant-ed, locked upper chambers, and a most ghostly garret; ... There was a dark store-room, too, on looking through the keyhole of which I could dimly see a heap of chairs and tables and other four-footed things, which seemed to me to have rushed in there frightened, and in their fright to have huddled together and climbed up on each other's backs--as the people did in that awful crush where
so many were killed at the execution of Holloway and Haggerty. Then the lady's portrait up-stairs with the sword-thrusts through it--marks of the British officers' rapiers--and the tall mirror in which they used to look at their red coats--confound them for smashing its mate!--and the deep, cunningly-wrought armchair in which Lord Percy used to sit while his hair was dressing; he was a gentleman, and always had it covered with a large peignoir to save the silk covering my grandmother embroidered. Then the little
room down-stairs from which went the orders to throw up a bank of earth on the hill yonder where you may now observe a granite obe[22]lisk, the study in my father's time, but in those days the council-chamber of armed men, sometimes filled with soldiers. Come with me, and I will show you the 'dents' left by the butts of their muskets all over the floor. With all these suggestive objects round me, aided by the wild stories those awful country boys that came to live in our service brought with them--of contracts written in blood and left out over night not to be found