the moral and intellectual forces of a country in a single focus. London is still the metropolis of the British as Paris of the French race. We admit this readily enough as regards Australia or Canada, but we willingly overlook it as regards ourselves. Washington is growing more national and more habitable every year, but it will never be a capital till every kind of culture is attainable there on as good terms as elsewhere. Why not better than elsewhere? We are rich enough, Bismarck's first care has been the Museums of Berlin. For a fiftieth part of the money Congress seems willing to waste in demoralizing the country, we might have had the Hamilton books and the far more precious Ashburnham manuscripts. Whatever place can draw together the greatest amount and the greatest variety of intellect and character, the most abundant elements of civilization, performs the best function of a university. London was such a centre in the days of Queen Elizabeth. And think what a school the Mermaid Tavern must have been !"

And this in another vein :

"The sea was meant to be looked at from shore, as mountains are from the plain. Lucretius made this discovery long ago and was blunt enough to blurt' it forth, romance and sentiment in other words, the pretence of feeling what we do not feel being inventions of a later day. I rather think Petrarch was the first choragus of that sentimental dance which so long led young folks away from the realities of life like the Piper of Hamelin, and whose succession ended, let us hope, with Chateaubriand. I know nothing so tedious at once and so exasperating as that regular slap of the wilted sails when the ship rises and falls with the slow breathing of the sleeping sea, one greasy, brassy swell following another, slow, smooth, unmitigable as the series of Wordsworth's Ecclesiastical Sonnets.' Fancy an existence in which the coming up of a clumsy finback whale, who says Pooh! to you solemnly as you lean over the taffrail, is an event as exciting as an election on shore! The dampness seems to strike into the wits as into lucifer matches, so that one may

scratch a thought half a dozen times and get nothing at last but a faint sputter. I have seen men driven to five meals a day for mental occupation. I sometimes sit and pity Noah; but even he had this advantage over all succeeding navigators, that, wherever he landed, he was sure to get no ill news from home. He should be canonized as the patron saint of newspaper correspondents, being the only man who ever had the very last authentic news from everywhere."

XXVIII

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

THE survivor of what may be called the Cambridge group of writers had, like the others, his distinctive personality and his own acre which he cultivated. The last, geographically considered, was situated somewhere on a line drawn from the State House to Harvard College through Beacon street. It was always in the greater Boston, to him the centre of the universe. Intellectually the plat which he worked over was of similiar extent, but wonderfully productive. People of the provincial town — as distinguished from Lowell's back-countrymen, - ideas of a reactionary period to be smiled at, with the exception of the liberal movement in religion, combined with certain professional theories, made up the possibilities of his output. His chief opportunities were successive numbers of the "Atlantic Monthly," to which he gave the name, and anniversary celebrations at Harvard.

Ancestry.

He may be said to have been born for these last occasions, since on Commencement Day, 1809, his father, Rev. Abiel Holmes, wrote in his almanac opposite Aug. 29, "Son b.," and sprinkling sand upon the ink probably started for the "exercises,” which were in those days of greater interest to city and country than an ordination or a circus of the period. He was a man of renown, son-in-law and biographer of President Stiles of Yale and author of the "Annals of America,"

besides being pastor of the first parish in Cambridge, notwithstanding his New Haven education. Son Oliver Wendell would have dwelt longer on his descent from the fine old families represented by these two names than can be done here, for it was one of the cardinal points of his belief that a man should be very careful in selecting his ancestors. His own were the best that New England could furnish.

Early Verse.

It was inevitable that the boy of sixteen should enter Harvard, and from a rhyming tendency already shown that he should deliver poems before the Hasty Pudding Club at junior exhibition and at the Commencement of 1829. His first printed collection of verse, written while a law student, is called "Runaway Ballads," possibly from one on a proposed elopement, which contains this:

"Get up! get up! Miss Polly Jones, the tandem 's at the door;
Get up and shake your lovely bones, it's twelve o'clock and more;
The chaises they have rattled by and nothing stirs around,
And all the world but you and me are snoring safe and sound.”

But at this date he could also write something as good as " Old Ironsides," and thus foreshow the twofold direction in which his poetic gift would win its triumphs. As a testimony to the practical value of his early verse it should be added, that this burst of reverent patriotism inspired the universal protest which saved the old "Constitution" from being broken up.

Holmes found the study of medicine, for which he had abandoned that of the law, still less congenial to the poetic muse, notwithstanding two years of study and travel in Europe. Nothing that he saw there made him forget his beloved Boston, to which he

Occasional
Poetry.

returned in 1835 to take his degree as a poet by reading at Harvard the next year a long poem entitled "Poetry, a Metrical Essay," the first of over fifty which he delivered on similar occasions during his life. He was preëminently the poet of occasion-celebrations, anniversaries, and public festivals. He was always ready and goodnatured, being at length beyond the unpoetical suggestions of the dissecting-room or at least accustomed to them. It was in the days of the " Autocrat " that he remarks: "My friend the poet tells me he has to leave town whenever the anniversaries come round. What's the difficulty? Why, they all want him to get up and make speeches or songs or toasts, which is just the very thing he does n't want to do. But they tease him and coax him and by pressure on the weak spot of his head stupefy him to the point of acquiescence." And then he explains how the poet goes into his garden and pulls up a handful of violets and weeds with the earth sticking to them, which is his idea of a postprandial performance of which this is the first stanza of an example:

"Brave singer of the coming time,

Sweet minstrel of the joyous present,
Crowned with the noblest wreath of rhyme,
The holly leaf of Ayshire peasant,
Good-by! Good-by! Our hearts and hands,
Our lips in honest Saxon phrases,
Cry, God be with him till he stands

His feet among the English daisies!"

Holmes always had the rare talent of writing in his library just what would fit the after-dinner mood of the company. There was champagne in his brain. He says himself: "Song intoxicates the poet. His brain rings with it for hours or days or weeks after it has chimed itself