He coined the term “Boston Brahmin” and was a Brahmin himself. But unlike some in that class, Oliver Wendell Holmes was not content with sedentary self-satisfaction. He was a medical reformer, an inventor, a literary light—the founder who gave The Atlantic Monthly its name. His poetry was popular, his prose conversational. (He resumed a 25-year interruption of his “Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table” essays with the words “I was just going to say….”) Ambition was part of Holmes’s character, and accomplishment came easily—perhaps too easily. A person of principle must sometimes cause a fuss. He admitted African Americans to medical school at Harvard, then walked the decision back. He opposed slavery, but not with the stubborn fire of others in his circle, and he detested the more radical abolitionist element, whom he saw using "every form of language calculated to inflame." Such language invited civil war! When war came, his eldest son—Holmes Jr., the future Supreme Court justice—enlisted and was three times wounded, including at Antietam. In “My Hunt After the Captain,” published in The Atlantic in 1862, Holmes recounted his search for his son after that battle. The son’s passion would stiffen the father’s spine. 

Neither man ever lost his Brahmin reserve. When desperate father and wounded son were at last reunited, the emotional climax was rendered like this: “How are you, Boy?” “How are you, Dad?"