670 Clasp, Angel of the backward look
And folded wings of ashen gray
And voice of echoes far away,
The brazen covers of thy book;
The weird palimpsest old and vast,
Wherein thou hid'st the spectral past;
Where, closely mingling, pale and glow
The characters of joy and woe;
The monographs of outlived years,
Or smile-illumed or dim with tears,

Green hills of life that slope to death, And haunts of home, whose vistaed trees Shade off to mournful cypresses

With the white amaranths underneath.
Even while I look, I can but heed

The restless sands' incessant fall,
Importunate hours that hours succeed,
Each clamorous with its own sharp need,
And duty keeping pace with all.
Shut down and clasp the heavy lids;
I hear again the voice that bids

690 The dreamer leave his dream midway
For larger hopes and graver fears;
Life greatens in these later years,
The century's aloe flowers to-day!

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES (1809-1894)

Holmes was born at Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 29 August, 1809. He himself has described in Elsie Venner "the Brahmin caste of New England" to which he belonged-a caste formed "by the repetition of the same influences, generation after generation," and composed of those whose ancestors have been college trained and have been lawyers, physicians, or clergymen. The Brahmin's eye "is bright and quick-his lips play over the thought much as a pianist's fingers dance over their music— and his whole air, though it may be timid, and even awkward, has nothing clownish." And the Brahmin "will take to his books as a pointer or setter to his field work." Holmes's father was a clergyman, his grandfather a physician, and a more remote ancestor-whom he shared with R. H. Dana, the author of Two Years before the Mast-was the colonial poetess Anne Bradstreet. The boy was brought up in the atmosphere of books, and he almost "lisped in numbers," delighting from a very early time in the verses of Pope and making rhymes before he knew how to write. In 1825 he entered Harvard, and was graduated four years later. He then spent a year ostensibly in study of the law, but largely in the writing of verse, and thereupon concluded that the law was not for him. Many years later he could not recall precisely why he had so concluded, nor why he had determined to become a medical man, but, at any rate, he did now undertake the study of medicine, first in a private school in Boston, and then in Paris. He was abroad from April, 1833, to October, 1835. In 1836 he took his degree of doctor of medicine, and in the same year issued his earliest volume of poems. In the following year he published a medical treatise. By this time he was settled in the practice of his profession in Boston, his motto being "the smallest fevers thankfully received." In 1839 he was appointed to the professorship of anatomy and physiology at Dartmouth College, but retained that post only a couple of months, continuing instead with his practice in Boston. In the following year he married Amelia Lee Jackson. In 1847 he published his second volume of verse, and also was made Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology in the Medical School of Harvard. This post he held until 1882. By the middle of the century he had attained an established position as a man of science, he was in demand as a lecturer in and around Boston, and he was well known as a writer of excellent occasional verse, who could be counted on at any gathering for something at once genial and witty. But it was not until 1857 that he began to be known also as a writer of genial and witty prose. When Lowell assumed the editorship of The Atlantic Monthly he made it one of the conditions of his acceptance of the post that Holmes should be a frequent contributor to the new periodicaland The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table was the immediate result. It was a complete success, and it is hardly too much to say that it at once made the fortunes of the Atlantic. That series of essays was followed by others, and Holmes also wrote three "medicated novels" which are not novels but which, at least, have their passages of inimitable writing which no lover of Holmes would wish to have missed. The only real break since his young manhood in Holmes's life in his dearly loved "hub of the universe" took place in 1886, when he and his daughter made a journey to Europe. In England they were cordially welcomed, and were, indeed, almost overwhelmed by a continuous succession of luncheons, dinners, receptions, and the like, though Holmes found time to go to the Derby with the Prince of Wales. Returning to America, he continued still to delight readers of the Atlantic as late as 1890. In 1894 he died, on 7 October.

Holmes once said, "I have always been good company for myself," and his readers know that he is good company for them. No one is likely to contend that Holmes occupies an important place in serious literature. The greater part of his verse is strictly occasional in character, and its interest has passed with memory of the occasions which called it forth. Much of his prose, too, has no qualities which can long preserve it from oblivion. But in The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table he produced a series of light personal essays, full of genial wisdom and pleasant wit, which are singularly charming and are likely long to remain capital reading. And, again, he produced a small body of familiar verse -vers de société, as it is called-which is of so high a quality that it can bear comparison with the best that has been done in that difficult species of poetry. These are not the greatest kinds of literature in fact they are the lightest-but Holmes has, at the least, made for himself a secure place in both. He remains "good company" for his readers, who should be grateful.

Holmes's more important volumes, with their dates, are: Poems (1836); Homeopathy, and its Kindred Delusions (1842); The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever (1843, reissued in enlarged form in

1855); Poems (1847); The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858); The Professor at the Breakfast-Table (1860); Elsie Venner (1861); Songs in Many Keys (1862); Soundings from the Atlantic (1864); The Guardian Angel (1867); The Poet at the Breakfast-Table (1872); Songs of Many Seasons (1875); John Lothrop Motley, A Memoir (1879); The Iron Gate, and Other Poems (1880); Medical Essays (1883); Pages from an Old Volume of Life (1883); Ralph Waldo Emerson (1885); A Mortal Antipathy (1885); Our Hundred Days in Europe (1887); Before the Curfew, and Other Poems (1888); Over the Teacups (1891).

OLD IRONSIDES2

Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
That banner in the sky;
Beneath it rung the battle shout,

And burst the cannon's roar;-
The meteor of the ocean air

Shall sweep the clouds no more.

Her deck, once red with heroes' blood,
Where knelt the vanquished foe,
When winds were hurrying o'er the flood,
And waves were white below,
No more shall feel the victor's tread,

Or know the conquered knee;-
The harpies of the shore shall pluck
The eagle of the sea!

Oh, better that her shattered hulk
Should sink beneath the wave;
Her thunders shook the mighty deep,
And there should be her grave;
Nail to the mast her holy flag,

Set every threadbare sail,
And give her to the god of storms,
The lightning and the gale!

THE BALLAD OF THE
OYSTERMAN 3

ΙΟ

20

Ir was a tall young oysterman lived by the river-side,

His shop was just upon the bank, his boat was on the tide;

The daughter of a fisherman, that was so straight and slim,

Lived over on the other bank, right opposite to him.

2 Written in 1830. The poem was occasioned by a recommendation of the Secretary of the Navy that the frigate Constitution, then useless from age, should be destroyed. Holmes's feelings were aroused, and the poem was written rapidly and published in the Boston Daily Advertiser. It was widely copied in other newspapers, and even circulated in Washington as a broadside, with the result that the ship was not destroyed. Written in 1830.