The American poet, doctor, teacher, hymn writer, lecturer and novelist Oliver Wendell Holmes was one of the illustrious East Coast Brahmins – the Fireside Poets who included Longfellow, Whittier and Bryant. He was immensely popular in his own time, and his poems and hymns were recited and sung throughout the land. His patriotic ballads, his meditations on love and life, and his satirical and humane observations on the home and society have given us a robust panoply of America in the late nineteenth century.