for thirty-five years. He retired in 1882, at the age of seventy-three, and survived as a venerated and happy old man till 1894. His works are not voluminous; and, though he had published some of his best verses before he was thirty, he was nearly fifty Deore he began the series of essays wnich really made him famous. Few popular authors have had a narrower escape from obscurity. He would, in any case, have been remembered in his own circle as a brilliant talker, and there would have been some curiosity as to the writer of the "Last Leaf" and two or three other poems. But had it not been for the judicious impulse given by his friend Lowell which induced him to make his appearance as the "autocrat," his reputation would have resembled that of Wolfe, of "not a drum was beat" celebrity. Who, it would have been asked, was the author of the few lines which we all know by heart? and we should have turned up the article devoted to him in a biographical dictionary. But he would not have revealed himself with that curious completeness upon which all his critics have remarked. He often heard, as he says in an interesting letter, that he "had unlocked the secret of some heart which others, infinitely more famous, infinitely more entitled to claim the freedom, have failed to find opening for them." He cannot help believing that "there is some human tone in his written voice which sometimes finds a chord not often set vibrating." The secret of this gift is not hard to penetrate, though this biography will enable readers to understand it a little more fully. He remarks in the same letter that his life was "rather solitary than social;" and the society which he did frequent was not in one of the greatest centres of intellectual movement. In certain ways, too, even Bostonians must admit that the social atmosphere was of a kind to nip some of the luxuriant growths congenial to older abodes of art and letters. Holmes's attachment to his surroundings was as keen as if the conditions had been of the most genial. Indeed, he illustrates what has become a commonplace. Americans, as Colonel Chester proved, often take with special enthusiasm to genealogy; although the interest of the study would at first sight appear to be less in a country where the claims of long descent are supposed to be ridiculous. This perhaps illustrates the principle which accounts for Scottish skill in gardening. The materials to be mastered are not so multitudinous, and when you cannot trust to nature your own energy may be stimulated. So Holmes cherished whatever could be called historically interesting in his own country, because the supply of the appropriate material was so limited. Men who live in the shadow of Westminster Abbey or go to universities which the great men of many centuries have filled with associations, are apt to become a little bored with the topic. Holmes loved the old "gambrel-roofed house" in which he was born all the more because a house which existed at the time of Washington represented exceptional antiquity in America. The deluge of growing civilization sweeps away such relics of the past so rapidly that their scarcity gives them exceptional value. The buildings of Andover Academy and of the Harvard University are not, in themselves, comparable to Eton or to King's College, Cambridge. But they represent the only persistent thread of historical continuity in the country, and the affection which they excite is proportioned, not to their absolute grandeur or antiquity, but to the degree in which they have to satisfy whatever instinctive affections there may be in their alumni. Holmes certainly loved his old home, and cherished his school and college associations as ardently as if he had been born in a Norman manor-house or played his boyish games under the statue of Henry VI. As he grew up his patriotism did not diminish in intensity. All that happened was that he became qualified to catch its comic aspects. When the "young fellow they call John" laid down the famous proposition that "Boston State House is the hub of the solar system," and adds that "you couldn't pry that out of a Boston | One point, however, has to be noticed. man if you had the tire of all creation Holmes, like others, had revolted staightened out for a crowbar," the autocrat accepts the "satire of the remark," and admits that the "axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each and every town and city." But he does not pretend to conceal that the sentiment, outrageous if literally accepted, tickles his fancy agreeably. When we drink a man's health after dinner, we often express an estimate of his virtues which we might sometimes shrink from maintaining in cold blood. Yet our sentiment may be essentially genuine, though we have dropped some implied qualifications. Holmes as a man shares the young fellow's enthusiasm, though he wishes us to understand that he is aware in cold blood that it is not quite the whole truth. The little deformed gentleman in the "Professor" gives a still more vigorous mouthpiece of the same sentiment. "A new race, and a whole new world for the newborn hu man soul to work in! And Boston is the brain of it, and has been any time these hundred years! That's all I claim for Boston, that it is the thinking centre of the continent and therefore of the planet!"-in which respect its superiority to Philadelphia and New York is easily demonstrated. The little gentleman is one of Holmes's most spirited characters, and makes a very convenient organ for the utterance of opinions not to be turned into serious dogmas-but also not to be overlooked. Boston is an ideal as well as a real city; it represents "the American principle," whatever that may precisely be. It is the three-hilled city as opposed to the seven-hilled city or reason against Rome. Democratic America has a different humanity from feudal Europe "and so must have a new divinity." Religion has to be "Americanized," and Boston is in the van of the struggle. This might suggest a good many remarks for which Holmes would, perhaps, leave his deformed gentleman to reply. He has not committed himself to an unreserved support of a personage who reflects only one of his moods. against Calvinism as represented by the Westminster Confession. Many pages in his essays are directed against the old-fashioned creed; and, as we are told, made him the object of warm denunciations by the orthodox. Young people, Mr. Morse informs us, were forbidden to read the "Autocrat," and "Elsie Venner" was regarded as a dangerous manifesto. This, it must be admitted, sounds strange at the present day. Were any books ever more obviously harmless? People who remember certain English controversies about Maurice, which happened a little before the appearance of the "Autocrat," may succeed in understanding why, in the country of the Puritans, Holmes should have passed for a heresiarch. Yet it now requires an effort to put oneself in that position, and certainly Holmes's remarks would now hardly excite a shudder in the best regulated families. Still they represented what seems to have been the most important passage of his mental history. The old Puritanism, one may guess, appeared to him in a new light when he had sat at the feet of Parisian professors. The old Boston, at any rate, was not quite the "hub of the universe” in the physiologist's point of view; and he fancied, when the old and the new currents met, a good deal of the sediment of old-fashioned dogma would be precipitated. Still, the old problem which Calvinism had answered in its own way came up in a new form. The doctrine of hereditary sin might be abandoned, but the problems of scientific "heredity" took its place. Jonathan Edwards's discussions of moral responsibility have a serious meaning when they are dissociated from the ghastly visions of hell-fire. Holmes gave more place to these controversies than some of his readers liked; and I need say nothing as to the merit of his own conclusions. They interest us chiefly because they gave rise to that provoking book, "Elsie Venner." I call it "provoking" merely because it will not square nicely with any orthodox canons of criticism. In the first place, it has an air of being didactic, or is a book with a tendency, or, in the old-fashioned phrase, is a novel with a purpose. I confess that I should have no objection to it upon that ground. I always found "Sanford and Merton" a delightful work in my childhood, and I partly preserve that degrading taste. I like books with a moral. Some authors, it is true, are cramped by their morals, and occasionally tripped up into flat absurdity. Still, a writer often gets a certain unction from the delusion that he is preaching as well as story-telling; and so long as any one is working with a will, and defying the critics and all their ways, he has the root of the matter in him. Holmes, it must be remarked, did not suppose that he was proving anything in "Elsie Venner;" he recognized the truth of the axiom propounded in the "Rose and the Ring" that blank verse is not argument; and the imaginary behavior of an impossible being cannot possibly lead to any conclusion. When we meet a being who is half woman and half a snake it will be time to settle the moral code for judging her. Holmes, in fact, says in his prefaces that he only took an imaginary case in order to call attention to the same difficulty in the common course of things. To that I can see no objection. Clearly, every great tragedy involves some interesting question of casuistry; and casuistry may repay the debt by suggesting a good plot for a novel. The only question is, whether the extravagant hypothesis, be it purely fantastic or contrived to illustrate a point in ethics, has really been turned to good account. Here I confess to a conflict of feeling which, I suspect, is shared by others. The book makes me read it just whenever I take it up, and yet I am never satisfied. Perhaps it is that I want more rattlesnake; I want to have the thrill which my ancestors felt when they told legends of werewolves; I wish the snake-woman to be as poetical as Coleridge's Geraldine, to tremble while I read, and to be encouraged in my belief by such an infu sion of science as will reconcile me to the surroundings of the nineteenth century in New England. That is, no doubt, to wish at the lowest that Holmes could have been combined with Hawthorne-not to suggest the creator of Caliban-and that their qualities could have coalesced with as little interference as those of Elsie and the snake. So much is suggested that one wants a more complete achievement. The fact is simply, I suppose, that Holmes had not the essential quality of the inspired novelist. He did not get fairly absorbed in his story and feel as though he were watching, instead of contriving, the development of a situation. That, for example, is the way in which Richardson declares himself to have written, and which partly explains the fascination to our forefathers of his moralizing and longwinded narratives. Holmes is distinctly a spectator from outside, and his attention is too easily distracted. I do not, in the least object to a novelist discoursing or supplying comments if it be his natural vein; I am not simple-minded enough to care for the loss of the illusion. But the novelist should not give an analysis in place of a concrete picture, or wander into irrelevant remarks. Now, Holmes's intellect is so lively and unruly that the poor snake-lady gets too often squeezed into the background. He is struck by the peculiarities of New England villages, their houses, or their "cólations," or their "hired men," and is immediately plunged into vivacious descriptions and disquisitions. We have to change moods too rapidly; to feel on one page a shudder at the uncanny being, with something not human looking out of her eyes; and, on the next, to be laughing at the queer social jumble of a village gathering. If, in spite of these artistic defects, the book somehow takes so firm a grasp of one's memory, it is the stronger proof of the excellence of the materials which form so curious a mosaic. After all, the writer never goes to sleep, and that is a merit which redeems a good many faults of design. One condition of the excellence of the "Autocrat" and its successors is of course that in them this irrepressible vivacity and versatility finds in him a thoroughly appropriate field. They have, as we see at once, the merits of the best conversation. Mr. Morse, in speaking of this, assures us that Holmes's talk was still better than his writing. We have unfortunately to take such statements on faith. No one, except Boswell, has ever succeeded in the difficult task of giving us a convincingly accurate report of conversation, or rather of something better than a report-a dramatic presentation of the position which would be lost in a detailed account. Would the talk at the "club" have been as impressive as it appears if we could have it reproduced by phonograph? Locke, it is said, once wrote down the actual words of Shaftesbury and some great men of the day, to show them how trivial it looked on paper. The moral was, if I remember rightly, that they ought to talk about the origin of ideas instead of discussing their hands at cards. But I fear that the test, if applied to the very best of talk, would have a depressing effect. The actual words would be depressingly flat when dribbled out at a century's distance. The brilliant things, even of the most brilliant talker, are exceptional flashes; they are the few diamonds among a mass of pebbles, and generally want a good deal of polishing before they get moulded into the famous gems which we admire. The actual talk includes all the approximations and the ramblings round about the point. The "master-bowman," as Tennyson puts it, may come at last and hit the target in the centre; but even he generally wastes a good many arrows in the process. Then, of course, half the effect of most good talk is dramatic: its success depends not only upon what is said, but upon what is omitted and upon the mental attitude at the moment of the other players in the game. As Holmes says himself, "the whole force of conversation depends on how much you can take for granted"-that is, in your nearers. I have no doubt of the excellence of Holmes's talk; but it was, I guess, partly due to the fact that it was part of a spontaneous concert. Talking is, as Holmes said, "one of the tine arts," and it is one which requires above all things a harmonious co-operation. The hearers must join themselves, and must also act as an effective sounding-board. They must catch the ball quickly, and return it nimbly, or the best performer will flag. Holmes found his best co-operators in his famous "Saturday Club." He was always referring to it fondly, and Mr. Morse produces various testimonies to its merits. Lowell said that he had never seen equally good society in London. Colonel Higginson observes that Holmes and Lowell were the most brilliant talkers he ever heard, but suggests a qualification of this comparison. They had not, he says, "the London art of repression," and monopolized the talk too much. They could, he intimates, overlook the claims of their interlocutors. He once heard Lowell demonstrating to the author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" that "Tom Jones" was the best novel ever written; while Holmes was proving to her husband, the divinity professor, that the pulpit was responsible for all the swearing. Dr. and Mrs. Beecher Stowe, it is implied, must have been reduced to ciphers before they could be the passive recipients of such doctrine. In spite of this, I can easily believe that the club deserved its fame. The "art of repression," I fancy, is very often superfluous in London. Conversation in ever-shifting crowds requires stimulation more often than restraint, and it is sometimes as hard to set talk going in the fortuitous concurrence of human atoms at a large party as to start a real exchange of ideas in an excursion train. The best talk that I have ever heard has certainly been in obscure corners, where a few friends meet habitually, and distribute their parts instinctively. A society which included all the best scholars and men of genius within reach of Boston had abundance of the raw material of talk. They might be compared in point of talent even with the men who met Johnson at the "Turk's Head," and certainly had as great a variety of interests in men and books. They had, it would seem, fewer jealousies, or, as the sneerer would put it, were readier for "mutual admiration;" and such admiration, when it has a fair excuse, is the best security for forming the kind of soil in which the flower of talk grows spontaneously. Talk, said Holmes, is "to me only spading up the ground for crops of thought." He was half the time "interviewing himself" and looking for his own thoughts, "as a schoolboy turns his pockets inside out to find what is in them." The "Autocrat" is the outcome of this investigation. It might have been more amusing to watch the actual process: but a reader may be content to get the fine extract. Holmes, as he intimates himself, was his own Boswell. He had a quaint satisfaction in following the career of Johnson, whose age differed by exactly a century from his own, and missed an old companion when he outlived his parallel. It would be absurd to make a comparison, as a Johnson fused with a Boswell would have been a singularly different person. Indeed, the most obvious peculiarity of Holmes's mind is one to which his ponderous predecessor could make no pretension. Johnson went into conversation like a gladiator into the arena; and if Holmes could have met him the pair would have been like a Spanish bull encountered by a dexterous picador. Holmes would have been over his head and behind his back, and stabbing him on the flank with all manner of ingenious analogies, and with squibs and crackers of fancy, instead of meeting the massive charge face to face. To invent an imaginary conversation between the two is altogether beyond my powers, and I can only hope that it is taking place somewhere in Elysium. Holmes's most pe culiar excellence is foreshadowed in a passage which Boswell quotes from Barrow's sermons as applicable to Wilkes. "Facetiousness," as Barrow says, among other things, "raiseth ad miration as signifying a nimble sagacity of apprehension, a special felicity of invention, a vivacity of spirit and reach of wit more than vulgar; it seeming to argue a rare quickness of parts, that one can fetch in remote conceits applicable; a notable skill that he can dexterously accommodate them to the purpose before him; together with a lively briskness of humor, not apt to damp those sportful flashes of imagination. Whence in Aristotle" but there I had better stop. Barrow probably knew Holmes as pre-existing in one of the ancestors who transmitted to him the power of "fetching in remote conceits." The "Autocrat" might suggest a series of riddles or problems for some future examiner in English literature. Why is controversy like the Hydrostatic Paradox? Why is a poem like a meerschaum? What is the "very obvious" resemblance between the pupil of the eye and the mind of the bigot? In what respects may truths be properly compared to dice and lies to marbles? Why should a trustworthy friend be like a cheap watch? How does the proper treatment for Guinea-worm illustrate the best mode of treating habitual drunkards? The answers to these and many equally ingenious parallels illustrate Holmes's power of perceiving analogies; and show, too, how his talent had been polished in the conversational arena. The commonest weakness of popular writers in the eyes of severe critics is that they resemble barristers addressing dull juries. Such an one feels that he must not simply state a reason, but pound it into a thick head by repetition. If a joke seems to be answering, he makes it again and again till the stare of puzzled suspicion that the man may be not quite serious passes into the broad grin of steady conviction that he is actually making a joke. The instrument upon which Holmes had performed, the circle of congenial friends, was, of course, far more responsive. Still an after-dinner criticism requires to be played with and flashed in different lights if it is to win the ear of the party. In that act of dexterously manipulating a subtle anal |