Holmes

men and women. In The Guardian Angel more
normally inherited tendencies are the subject of
study. In A Mortal Antipathy the hero is a vic-
tim of the strange malady of "gynophobia."
When The Guardian Angel appeared, a critic in
the Nation was ready to charge Holmes with
"too often bearing on hard when only the light-
est touch would have been pleasing, not to say
sufferable; sternly breaking on his wheel the
deadest of bugs and butterflies." This critic went
on to declare: "When he had written the Auto-
crat of the Breakfast-Table Dr. Holmes would
have done well, as it has since appeared, had he
ceased from satire. ... He has never stopped
hammering at the same nail which he hit on the
head when he first struck. The Professor took
away something from the estimation in which
we had been holding the Autocrat; Elsie Venner
took away a little more; and The Guardian Angel
takes away a larger portion than was removed
by either of the others" (Nation,Nov. 14, 1867).
Contemporary critics might have complained
also of an excessive respect for the proprieties
which even forced "demonish" for "devilish"
into the vocabulary of a free-spoken character m
The Guardian Angel] and, equally, of the labori-
ous attempts to reproduce New England speech
in Elsie Venner by writing "haaf" for "half and
"graaat" for "great." For all their shortcom-
ings, however, the novels had in them enough of
the essence of Holmes to give them the distinc-
tive place in American letters which they took at
once and have retained. Of the three, Elsie Ven-
ner makes the strongest claim to survival.

To the list of Holmes's more substantial writ-
ings in prose six titles must be added: Sound-
ings from the Atlantic (1864), a book of essays;
John Lothrop Motley: a Memoir (1879), a biog-
raphy of a beloved friend based upon a sketch
prepared for the Massachusetts Historical Soci-
ety ; Medical Essays (1883) > Pages from an Old
Volume of Life (1883), a collection of essays
chiefly from the Atlantic Monthly; Ralph Waldo
Emerson (1885), a volume in the American
Men of Letters series; and Our Hundred Days
in Europe (1887), a record of a happy summer
passed with the author's daughter, Mrs. Turner
Sargent, in revisiting scenes first known more
than fifty years before, and in receiving many
tokens of admiration and respect, including the
bestowal of honorary doctorates by both Oxford
and Cambridge. Many addresses, lectures, and
essays on medical, civic, literary, and academic
subjects filled out the list of his publications in
prose.

In verse, apart from successive enlarged edi-
tions of the Poems of 1836, various pamphlets,

Holmes

and reprints from the works containing both
prose and verse, the chief volumes include Songs
in Many Keys (1862) ; Songs of Many Seasons
(1875) J The Iron Gate, and Other Poems
(1880); and Before the Curfew and Other
Poems (1887). The Complete Poetical Works
of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Cambridge edition,
a single convenient volume of more than three
hundred double-columned pages, appeared in
1895. The bulk of Holmes's poetical writing
was indeed considerable, and of wide range in
character and quality. The truly poetic, the
merely fanciful, the deftly humorous and whim-
sical, all were there. In his verses of the Civil
War period an intense patriotic feeling found
frequent and spirited expression. His prose ac-
count of the search he made for his son and
namesake, wounded at the battle of Antietam,
appearing in the Atlantic Monthly as early as
December 1862, under the title, "My Hunt after
the Captain," suggests something of the personal
meaning of the war to him. In the field of vers
d'occasion, where for a long period he was pre-
eminently the "poet laureate" of Boston and
Harvard, he occupied a place quite his own. The
remarkable series of Poems of the Class of '29
revealed his gifts as a weaver of felicitous after-
dinner verse at their best. A "Letter from the
Author," printed as a preface to the 1849 edition
of his "Poems," urges his publishers to "say that
many of the lesser poems were written for meet-
ings more or less convivial, and must of course
show something like the fire-work frames on the
morning of July 5th." Even so showing, the
best of them, like "Bill and Joe" and "The Boys/'
remain permanent models of what such verses
should achieve through a perfected blending of
sentiment and fun. Transcending the interests
of a single college class, the civic, literary, aca-
demic, and social occasions of Boston and Har-
vard celebrated by Holmes in verse were large
in number and various in character. In the body
of his verse one finds, therefore, the same un-
mistakable local flavor that marked his prose.
The character of "Little Boston" in The Pro-
fessor at the Breakfast-Table typified clearly the
capacity of Holmes to confer upon a figure, or
a topic, that seems irretrievably local a quality
with an appeal that has proved universal. It was
to Holmes that a critic has pointed as "another
witness, if one were needed, to the truth, that
identification with a locality is a surer passport
to immortality than cosmopolitanism is" (Life
and Letters, 1,211). In a hymn of such wide ac-
ceptance as his "Lord of all being! throned afar"
the appeal, as of course in many other pieces of

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