A prevailing alertness of mind in Holmes's generation offset the natural conservatism which belongs to an aristocracy. For a hundred years Harvard had been more liberal than Yale. The cleavage was already taking place between Unitarian and Trinitarian or Congregational believers. To be sure, the eyes of Abiel Holmes were focused on the past, and he sent his son to be schooled under the safe influences of Phillips Andover Academy, which were fostered by the orthodox theological seminary just across the road. But even here Wendell--as he was called--decided against entering the ministry because a certain clergyman "looked and talked so like an undertaker." And when he entered college in his home town, while he faced the traditional required course of classical languages, history, mathematics, and moral philosophy, the wind from over the sea was blowing through it, and he breathed the atmosphere which was passing into the blood of Emerson and Thoreau and George Ripley and the other Transcendentalists-to-be. In his college days he was a little cheerful student of average performance who refused then as always to take himself soberly, although he did not lack inner seriousness. He practised his gift for writing and was rewarded by the acceptance of some of his efforts in the fashionable Annuals of the day--repositories of politely sentimental tales, sketches, and poems in fancy bindings which ornamented the marble-topped tables in the "best rooms." Under his apparently aimless amiability, however, there was an independence of judgment which twice recorded itself, in 1829 and '30. The first time was on the occasion of an issue in his father's church when the son was forced to agree with the liberal majority, who literally took the pastor's pulpit from him, so that he had to reëstablish himself in North Cambridge. Few harder tests could be devised than one between loyalty to conviction and loyalty to family interests. The other sign of independence was his choice of a profession. A boy of his heritage was socially if not divinely predestined for some sort of intellectual life. If he went to college, assurance was made doubly sure that he would not become a business man. From the outset he rejected the ministry as his "calling." He shrank from the formal complexities of the law as he did from the logic of the theologians. The thought of teaching did not seem to enter his mind. Literature could not afford him a livelihood. By elimination, then, only medicine was left to him, but in his day medicine did not occupy a position of dignity equal with the other professions. Medical science was still in earliest youth, and the practice of "physic" was jointly discredited by the barber, the veterinary, the midwife, the "yarb doctor," and the miscellaneous quack. This young "Brahmin," however, saw the chance for contributing to the progress of a budding science, and made his decision with quiet disregard of social prejudice.