II

The contrast in their writings is equally marked. Hawthorne was almost exclusively a novelist; Holmes wrote novels, but he wrote also poetry, essays, scientific treatises, and biographies. Hawthorne was never satisfied until he had probed into the inner motive; Holmes dealt with surfaces. Both were highly imaginative, but Hawthorne used only images that illustrated, while Holmes followed every butterfly of fancy.

To drop from Hawthorne's serious thoughtfulness to Holmes's complacent volubility, and to reflect that they were for more than half a century contemporaries, with social and literary opportunities much the same, is to realize that what one takes from the sea of life depends upon the shape as well as upon the size of one's cup.

III

He was the son of the Rev. Abiel Holmes, a Cambridge clergyman who married the daughter of President Ezra Stiles of Yale college, and had written a biography of his father in-law, but by a second wife. He was born Aug. 29, 1809, the same year

with Poe, Tennyson, Gladstone, Darwin, and Abraham Lincoln. After graduating from Harvard in 1829 and some coquetting with the law, he spent three years in Paris. studying medicine. He took his degree in 1836, was for a time professor of anatomy and physiology at Dartmouth, and in 1840 settled in Boston to practise medicine. In 1847 he was made professor of anatomy and physiology in the Harvard medical school, which place he held until 1883. Except that during the war he went to the front to find his son, who had been wounded at Ball's Bluff, and for a second trip abroad in 1886, he rarely left the city of Boston, which on public occasion usually put him forward as her typical representative.

IV

He stood in high repute as a physician, though he gave up active medical practice in 1849. He was the author of several medical works, and his "puerperal fever as a private pestilence", which upon its appearance brought bitter attacks upon him, led to the present universal recognition of puerperal fever as contagious. His essays contain fre

quent reference to the medical profession, its ethics, its weaknesses, its quacks, all of a kind to dignify a calling in which he thoroughly believed. His essay on "Mechanism in thought and morals" attracted wide attention. He was also the inventor of the stereoscope, an optical instrument not only in itself of great value but a basis for many other important inventions. He declined to patent it, giving it freely to the world.

V

His literary work was at first incidental. In 1830 there was talk of breaking up the frigate Constitution, and it stirred him to write and send to the Advertiser "Old Ironsides". Though he was but 21, the poem saved the ship, which lies to-day in the harbor at Portsmouth. In 1836 he published a volume of poems; but his reputation was still local when in 1857 he began to contribute to the Atlantic Monthly "The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table". These papers ensured the success of the magazine, and made him famous. In 1859 he began "The Professor" and in 1873 "The Poet" at the breakfast table, and many of his best poems ap

Contrast with Hawthorne

233

peared in these papers. "The Professor's Story" was "Elsie Venner", a novel which appeared in 1861; and "The Guardian Angel" was the chief attraction of the Atlantic in 1867. "A Moral Antipathy" (1885) was the third of these novels.

VI

As a novelist his contrast with Hawthorne may be continued. Hawthorne was a student of human nature, and painted it as he saw it, naught extenuating nor setting down aught in malice. Holmes paints his characters with the broad strokes of Dickens; the most indifferent reader must classify them into sheep and goats, and in the end the sheep are always well-fed and the goats cast into the open. Moreover, all of them are amplifications of a physician's study of certain phenomena. "Elsie Venner"in his own words" contained an alien element introduced into the blood of a human being before that being saw the light, which showed a human nature developing itself in conflict with the ophidian characteristics and instincts impressed upon it during the prenatal period". In "A Guardian Angel" he

sought to show the successive evolution of some inherited qualities in the character of Myrtle Hazard 5. "A Moral Antipathy" was the story of a man who as an infant had been seized by a strikingly handsome young woman of seventeen, and dropped accidently some distance into a thorn plant, which gave him an antipathy for handsome young women to be over-come only when just the right handsome young woman became his sweetheart. In all three the art of the novelist is subordinate to the demonstration of the physician. In fact, in "A Mortal Antipathy" the author introduces essays on various subjects that happen to be in his portfolio, and even pauses to talk about his last classpoem and to give it.

VII

In

Like most little men, he was fond of imagining the valiant deeds of big men. "Elsie Venner" the schoolmaster's physical prowess makes him the victor in a contest where the modern school story would make him win by brains. In "The Guardian Angel" the hero plunges after a boat which is going over the falls and bids the heroine