Quote: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire.

Oliver Wendell Holmes the younger is not the poet and writer—his father—but the Supreme Court justice; this did not, however, prevent him from composing this absolutely remarkable speech, which he delivered to a veteran’s group at a Memorial Day gathering. (He himself had fought in the Civil War years earlier.)

I can honestly say that I did not understand this quote, though I found it still somehow inflaming, until I dug up the entire speech and saw the context. The surrounding lines: “But, nevertheless, the generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.”