Holmes

1853 he delivered in Boston a Lowell Institute
course of twelve lectures on the English poets.
In these sympathetic talks to crowded assemblies
of friends and neighbors he instituted a prac-
tice which he was soon to apply with great suc-
cess to his "Breakfast-Table" papers—the prac-
tice of bringing his discourse to a close with an
original poem. The verses "After a Lecture on
Keats" and "After a Lecture on Shelley" (Com-
plete Poetical Works, Cambridge Edition, 1895,
p. 92) illustrate with special happiness to what
good purpose he could already supplement his
prose with verse.

As early as 1832, in the second of the "Auto-
crat" papers in the New England Magazine,
Holmes had written: "It is strange, very strange
to me, that many men should devote themselves
so exclusively to the study of their own particu-
lar callings. . . . The knowledge of a man, who
confines himself to one object, bears the same
relation to that of the liberal scholar, that the
red or violet ray of a prism does to the blended
light of a sunbeam." This wisdom of a youth of
twenty-three Holmes exemplified through life.
Besides joining literature to medicine, and verse
to prose, he was constantly making excursions
into fields that allured him. As a young physi-
cian he enjoyed especially the possession of a
chaise and a fast horse, of whose powers of speed
he took full advantage (Life and Letters, 1,158).
Living in the earlier years of his married life on
Montgomery Place (now Bosworth Street) and
through many later years at 296 Beacon St., he
dwelt, during the intermediate years, in close
proximity to his friend and publisher, James T.
Fields, on Charles Street, with the river at the
foot of his garden. In the several row-boats
which he kept moored within easy reach he took
an oarsman's delight. At a time when athletic
exercise had little of its later vogue, he, although
"a slender man," was a vigorous advocate of
it. "I am satisfied," he wrote with scorn in the
seventh of his Autocrat papers, "that such a set
of black-coated, stiff jointed, soft-muscled, paste-
complexioned youth as we can boast hi our At-
lantic cities never before sprang from loins of
Anglo-Saxon lineage." He himself took a hearty
Anglo-Saxon interest in the race-track and box-
ing-matches. Among his own intimate hobbies
were microscopy and photography, and the hand
stereoscope, with the invention of which he is
credited. Had the man of business in him been
more nearly on an equal footing with the man of
science, a comfortable fortune might well have
come to him from this once popular instrument
for introducing a sense of actual distance into
photographic scenes. For the scenes of nature

Holmes

itself he had a love seldom found in so confirmed
a city-dweller. Without such a love the faithful
pictures of nature in many of his poems could
hardly have been drawn. The accurate knowl-
edge revealed also in these poems owed much to
his spending seven summers (1849-56) on a
country place near Pittsfield, Mass., inherited
from his great-grandfather Wendell. Here, to
his heart's content, he could cultivate his devo-
tion to trees, beloved, as his readers will remem-
ber, for the characteristic reason that

"there's nothing that keeps its youth,
So far as I know, but a tree and truth."

All these diversions of a teacher of anatomy
—and the list of them would be quite incomplete
were the habit of discursive reading to go un-
mentioned—were clearly the pursuits of a hu-
manist They were proper also in the main to a
rationalist, and it was as such that Barrett Wen-
dell in his Literary History of America (pp. 418
ff.) ascribed to Holmes his distinctive place in
New England letters. Indeed the rationalist, in
constant rebellion against the eighteenth-century
theological view of life which shadowed his boy-
hood, spoke with a quiet insistence in much of
what he wrote as well as in much of his brilliant
talk. In the realm of talk, when conversation
was rated with the arts, Holmes appears to have
reigned almost, perhaps quite, supreme in Bos-
ton. Lowell and Agassiz and a .few others may
have crowded him a little at the top. Possibly
none of them took the art of talking quite so seri-
ously or consciously as he. "Now, James, let
me talk and don't interrupt me," he is found ex-
claiming to Lowell one day at the Saturday Club
(M. A. DeW. Howe, Memories of a Hostess,
1922, p. 33). What he himself called his "lin-
guacity" sometimes led him to monopolize the
conversation—but to such good purpose that few
found fault "I do not think any one enjoyed
praise more than he," said Howells (Literary
Friends and Acquaintance, 1900, p. 160). Yet
when, in the character of the "Autocrat," Holmes
says, "I never saw an author in my life—saving,
perhaps, one—that did not purr as audibly as a
full-grown domestic cat (Felis Catus, LINN) on
having his fur smoothed in the right way by a
skilful hand," the vanity lurking behind the re-
mark is quite neutralized by the accompanying
frankness. So it may well have been with
Holmes the talker.

His social gift, displayed chiefly in his talk,
bore a close relation to his sudden, extraordinary
success as a popular writer. The Saturday Club,
of which both Holmes and James Russell Lowell
were early lights, and the Atlantic Monthly,

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