pretty nearly) and the Little Parlor, and the study and the old books in uniforms as varied as those of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company used to be, if my memory serves me right, and the front yard with the stars of Bethlehem growing, flowerless, among the grass, and the dear faces to be seen no more there or anywhere on this earthly place of farewells." Again he writes, "We Americans are all cuckoos make our homes in the nests of other birds. We lose a great deal in living where there are so few permanent homes."

we

But I was not talking of the son, nor of the old home but of the poet's father. He is depicted to us as one of the loveliest characters-full of learning, but never distressing others by showing how learned he was, "a gentleman, a scholar, and a Christian" who for forty years walked these classic streets and taught a loving and respecting people the lessons that he first learned. himself. He drew children to him by his kindly manner, and when he appeared before them his cane. never frightened them, for they knew that his pockets. were filled with sweets for them, and his mouth with pleasant words. One of his last acts was to give a good book to each member of his Sunday-school as they passed before the pulpit where he stood.

Of such a father and of such a mother, in the old

gambrel-roofed house, Oliver Wendell Holmes was born, on the twenty-ninth of August, 1809.* It seems to me that he fulfils the conditions of "the man

of family," as he is described in the Atlantic Monthly for November, 1859, by the "Autocrat of the Breakfast-table." "The man who inherits family traditions and the cumulative humanities of at least four or five generations. Above all things, as a child, he should have tumbled about in a library." Every surrounding circumstance gave Dr. Holmes in his youth tendencies towards the culture, wisdom, geniality, and love of books, which he has since exhibited.

He went to school in Cambridge, was fitted for college at the Academy founded by Mr. Phillips in Andover, and took his bachelor's degree at Harvard in 1829. It is not necessary, however, to make the last statement, for all the world knows that he belongs to the class of 1829, he has celebrated it so

*I am very sure of this date, for I have seen the record of the important fact, that was made by the father at the time. It is on one of those little old "Almanacks" that were then so commonly used for such purposes. Under the date of August 29, 1809, I found these words (or letters): "Son b." When old Dr. Holmes wrote them he threw a little sand upon the ink, and there it still glistens as the paper is turned to the sunlight! The map of Europe has been made over since that day, nations have risen and fallen, the United States has passed through three wars, and yet the little grain of sand, the emblem of things changeable and fleeting, glistens unchanged upon the poet's birth-record!

often in his poems. It must have been a remarkable class to have so thoroughly inspired the Doctor's muse. He likes to laugh at the regularity with which, since 1851, he has produced poems for its meetings. A few years ago, he spoke of himself thus ;

"It's awful to think of how, year after year,
With his piece in his pocket he waits for you here;
No matter who's missing, there always is one

To lug out his manuscript, sure as a gun.

Why won't he stop writing?' Humanity cries:

The answer is, briefly,' He can't if he tries;

He has played with his foolish old feather so long,
That the goose-quill, in spite of him, cackles in song.'

After graduation Dr. Holmes studied law for a year at the Dane Law School, of Harvard College. During this time, he wrote many poems for the college periodical, called "The Collegian," among which were "The Height of the Ridiculous," "Eveningby a Tailor," and "The Last of the Dryads," the last having reference to a general and severe pruning of the trees around the college. At the year's end, however, he left this study for that of medicine, which he followed until the spring of 1833. He then went to Europe where he still pursued his medical studies, principally in Paris, until the autumn of 1835, when he returned. In 1836 he was in Cambridge, prepared to take his degree as Doctor of Medicine. It

was in the summer of that year that he delivered, be fore the Phi Beta Kappa society, the remarkable poem, entitled "Poetry: A Metrical Essay," beginning

"Scenes of my youth! awake its slumbering fire!
Ye winds of Memory, sweep the silent lyre!"

In this poem, he illustrates pastoral and martial poetry, by his lines on the Cambridge churchyard to which I have already referred, and those stirring ones entitled "Old Ironsides," which are in all collections. The government had prepared to break up the old frigate Constitution, and when Dr. Holmes read his verses, into which he put all possible vigor, he excited his hearers as if with an electric shock. I wish that I might have heard him as he exclaimed with indignant and vehement sarcasm:

"Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!"

These stirring verses had been published in the Boston Advertiser several years before (I have told you how they were written), and from its columns had been copied by the newspapers all over the country. They had been circulated on hand-bills at Washington, and had caused the preservation of the old vessel. This is one of the marked cases in which poetry has

shown its power to stir a people's heart, and to accomplish something that prose would have failed to do.

In 1839, Dr. Holmes became Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at Dartmouth College, and ever since that time he has been lecturing to medical students upon subjects which you would think could not be made interesting; but Dr. Holmes always makes people attentive to what he says, and I have been told that there is no professor whom the students so much like to listen to. When you read his works you will find that he says that every one of us is three persons, and I think that if the statement is true in regard to ordinary men and women Dr. Holmes himself is, at least, half a dozen persons. He lectures so well on Anatomy that his students never suspect him to be a poet, and he writes verses so well that most people do not suspect him of being an authority among scientific men. I ought to tell you that, though he illustrates his medical lectures by quotations of the most appropriate and interesting sort from a wonderful variety of authors, he has never been known to refer to his own writings in that way. I will say here all that I wish to about his medical

career.

He did not stay long so far away from Cambridge