Oliver Wendell Holmes

Theres Holmes, who is matchless among y on for wit A Leyden-jar always full-charged, from which flit The electrical tingles of hit after hit In long poems t is painful sometimes, and invites A thought of the way the new Telegraph writes, Which pricks down its sharp little sentences spitefully As if you got more than youd title to rightfully, And you find yourself hoping its wild father Lightning Would flame in for a second and give you a frightning. He has perfect sway of what I call a sham metre, But many admire it, the English pentameter, And Campbell, I think, wrote most commonIy worse, With less nerve, swing, and fire in the same kind of verse, Nor eer achieved aught in t so worthy of praise As the tribute of Holmes to the grand Narseillabe. You went crazy last year over Bulwers ilTe u Tinton-Why, if B., to the day of his dying, should rhyme on, Heaping verses on verses and tomes upon tomes, IIe could neer reach the best point and vigor of Holmes. lIis are just the fine hands, too, to weave you a lyric Full of fancy, fun, feeling, or spiced with sati ic, I 2 OLIVEK WENDELL HOLh4ES. In a measure so kindly, you doubt if the toes That are trodden upon are your own or your foes. LOWELL.-A Fable for Critics. 0 LIVER WENDELL HOLMES was born on August 29th, 1809, in the historic town- we called it then a village -of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Cambridge then differed very widely from what it is to-day Lowell, ten years the junior of Holmes, has described in his Fireside Travels the Cambridge of his boyhood and from his descriptions we can easily conjure up a picture of the country village, with its own habits and traditions, yet with some of that cloistered quiet which characterises alluniversity towns. Let those who are greatly interested in the early life of Oliver Wendell Holmes turn to the first pages of The Poet at the B eeakfast Table and there reread the beautiful story of the Gambrel-roofed House - my birthplace, the home of my childhood, and earlier and later boyhood. The father of Oliver Wendell was the Reverend Abdiel Holmes, pastor of the first Congregational Church in Cambridge, who had entered into the gambrel-roofed house two years before the birth of his third child and first son in the annus l Its population, which was then under 4000, in 1880 was upwards of 52,000. Literary Essays, vol. i. collected edition of his works. THE MAN. 3 mirubilis of the nineteenth century. The poets grandfather, Doctor David Holmes, had served in the French and Indian wars and as a surgeon in the American army during the struggle for independence his grandfather was one of the original settlers of TVoodstock county, and was descended from Thomns Holmes, n lawyer of Grays Inn, London. Holmess mother was a daughter of Oliver Wendell, a lawyer, of Dutch de centa, n d vas connected vith the intellectual aristocracy of New England-the Wendells, the Olivers, the Quinceys, and the Bradstreets. The last-named family included Anne Dudley Bradstreet, who l 1809 was also the birth year of Darwin, Gladstone, Tennyson, and Lincoln...