lin, and preached in the Brattle Street Church to Dr. Holmes' ancestors. This home is very elegant, and Dr. Holmes evidently enjoys it very much. Should you not like to see him writing at that table? I can imagine him engaged in that way. I suppose that he has just come in from a lecture where he has been delighting the medical students with his lucid exposition of some anatomical subject. He warms his feet before the fire awhile, and then remembers that some editor has been urging him for a poem. His eyes glance out at the window, he sees the Memorial Tower; he remembers the old parsonage below it, his mind travels over time as his eye has over space, and he peoples the house and the neighborhood with the men, women and children of many long years ago. He hears the notes of a musical instrument, that came out of the windows looking towards the church of those days, and his imagination is fixed in words, thus:

"In the little southern parlor of the house you may have seen, With the gambrel roof, and the gable looking westward to the green,

At the side towards the sunset, with the window on its right,
Stood the London-made piano I am dreaming of to-night!
Ah, me! how I remember the evening when it came !
What a cry of eager voices, what a group of cheeks in flame !
When the wondrous box was opened that had come from

over seas,

With its smell of mastic varnish and its flash of ivory keys.
Then the children all grew fretful in the restlessness of joy,
For the boy would push his sister, and the sister crowd the boy,
Till the father asked for quiet in his grave, paternal way,

But the mother hushed the tumult with the words, "Now, Mary, play."

Does this not show that our poet has never forgotten that home, nor the great excitement caused in the family circle by the arrival of the imported Clementi piano, which was such a wonder in those days? Is there not something delightfully cordial in the introduction that this gives us to the family circle-to father and mother, brother and sisters, and even to his little "Catherine," who ran in to listen to the wondrous music, as you will learn if you read the other verses of the "Opening of the Piano"?

Suppose, however, that Dr. Holmes, instead of looking so far for his subject, had cast his eyes down upon the Charles. Then he might have written thus as he did last winter :

"Through my north window, in the wintry weather,

My airy oriel on the river shore,—

I watch the seafowl as they flock together,

Where late the boatman flashed his dripping oar.

How often, gazing where a bird reposes,

Rocked on the wavelets, drifting with the tide,

I lose myself in strange metempsychosis,

And float, a sea fowl, at a sea fowl's side.

A voice recalls me.-From my window turning,
I find myself a plumeless biped still;

No beak, no claws, no sign of wings discerning, -
In fact, with nothing birdlike but my quill."

This poem was in the Atlantic for January last. It contains a touch that is very characteristic of one so kindly in his feelings as Dr. Holmes. As he calls our attention to the fowl he loves to see on the water, he takes advantage of a moment when one of the ducks is diving, to tell us that it is not valuable to the hunter a remark which of course he could not make

in the fowl's presence !

By knowing so much as we have now learned of the homes of Dr. Holmes, we get an introduction to his mind and heart, and understand something of how his poems have grown out of his life and have been moulded by his surroundings. It is not necessary for us to wander into the other apartments of his present house, though he will gladly show us his drawing-room, just across the hall from the library, and let us feast our eyes upon some of the works of art there. He will call our attention especially to some remarkable reproductions of paintings of the old masters, made by a new process. Here I will say, by way of parenthesis, that we owe to the ingenuity of our poet the stereoscope in its present available shape,

which he gave to the public without burdening it with the additional cost which it would have had if it had been patented. It is one of the few inventions of value that are not patented.

Thus far we have studied Dr. Holmes as a successful professional student, writer and poet. Twentyfive years ago he appeared in a new character. He began to lecture on contemporary poets, and showed that he was a most acute literary critic. He knew human nature and was able to manage audiences of a mixed kind as well as those composed of students. Twenty years ago last autumn a new magazine was started in Boston. It was to be of the very highest literary character, and the poet James Russell Lowell, now our minister at Madrid, was called to its editorial chair. He said that he would not accept unless his friend Oliver Wendell Holmes would agree to be one of the contributors. Dr. Holmes was reluctant to promise. He remembered that he had been writing for thirty years, and felt that a new generation of readers as well as writers had grown up, and thought that he ought to be allowed to rest. Now, as he looks back, he sees that he was mistaken, and believes that the new magazine came for his fruit just as it was ripe for the gathering. "It seems very strange to me," he says with his quaint frankness, "as I look back and