HOLMES, Oliver Wendell (1809-1894). Autograph manuscript signed (''Oliver Wendell Holmes''), ''Dorothy Q – A Family Portrait,'' Boston, 22 January 1878.

HOLMES, Oliver Wendell (1809-1894). Autograph manuscript signed ("Oliver Wendell Holmes"), "Dorothy Q – A Family Portrait," Boston, 22 January 1878.

Five pages, bifolia, 125 x 203mm.

Holmes's tribute to his great-great-grandmother. Dorothy Quincy was born in 1709 to the Quincy family of Braintree, one of Massachusetts' most distinguished families. Holmes's ode honors the life of "Dorothy Q" and references a famous portrait of her that hangs in the Massachusetts Historical Society: "On her hand a parrot green / Sits unmoving and broods serene. / Hold up the canvas in full in view, – / Look! there’s a rent the light shines through, / Dark with a century’s fringe of dust, – / That was a Red-Coat’s rapier-thrust! / Such is the tale the lady old, / Dorothy’s daughter’s daughter, told." The tribute closes: "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."

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