Black Gulf & Sunset

When the Supreme Court met last week, Associate Justice Willis Van Deventer appeared with his arm in a sling as the result of rheumatism. Associate Justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis did not appear at all because of a bad cold. Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes got to his seat on the bench only with great difficulty. His 90 years settled like a dead weight around his shuffling feet and lumbago stooped his black-gowned shoulders low. A strong steady hand from Chief Justice Hughes finally got him up the steps to the bench, steered him to his high-backed black leather chair. There the oldest man ever to sit on the Supreme Court settled down to read in a voice forced to firmness one of the court's two opinions for the day, an inconsequential thing sustaining a liquor law conviction.

Late that afternoon in his own office at the Capitol, Mr. Justice Holmes closed his books, put away his papers and remarked to his clerks: "I won't be in tomorrow." Then he went home to write a letter to President Hoover. The letter:

"In accordance with the provision of the Judicial Code as amended, Section 260--Title 28 United States Code 375--I tender my resignation as Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America. The condition of my health makes it a duty to break off connections that I cannot leave without deep regret after the affectionate relations of many years and the absorbing interests that have filled my life.

"But the time has come and I bow to the inevitable. I have nothing but kindness to remember from you and from my brethren. My last word should be one of grateful thanks.

"With great respect,

Your obedient servant,

Oliver Wendell Holmes."

Thus simply did a great jurist step down from the bench which his presence has graced, honored and liberalized for 29 full and fruitful years.

The event moved President Hoover to a strange new eloquence when he wrote the retiring Justice: "No appreciation I could express would even feebly represent the gratitude of the American people for your whole life of wonderful public service, from the time you were an officer in the Civil War to this day ... I know of no American retiring from public service with such a sense of affection and devotion of the whole people."

Senators, Congressmen, editors, lawyers, leaders in every field vied to heap the highest praise upon the infirm old gentleman who lives in a red brick house on a Washington side street. To this outpouring, however, he paid no heed. Only when his eight colleagues on the court wrote him a solemn letter of farewell did he publicly reply:

"My dear Brethren:

You must let me call you so once more. Your more than kind, your generous letter touches me to the bottom of my heart. . . . For such little time as may be left for me, I shall treasure it as adding gold to the sunset.

Affectionately yours,

O. W. Holmes."

Famed though Mr. Justice Holmes is for the liberalism of his judicial thought, for his vigorous dissents from majority opinions, for his literary grace and phrasemaking, it is likely that he will be remembered longest as a great abstract thinker, a philosopher who practiced his profession under the guise of the law. Years ago he gave Harvard students his high intellectual creed in these words:

"No man has earned the right to intellectual ambition until he has learned to lay his course by a star which he has never seen--to dig by the divining rod for springs which he may never reach. ... To think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists. Only when you have worked alone--when you have felt around you a black gulf of solitude more isolating than that which surrounds the dying man, and in hope and in despair have trusted to your own unshaken will --then only will you have achieved. Thus only can you gain the secret isolated joy of the thinker, who knows that, a hundred years after he is dead and forgotten, men who never heard of him will be moving to the measure of his thought--the subtile rapture of a postponed power, which the world knows not because it has no external trappings, but which to his prophetic vision is more real than that which commands an army."

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