OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 197 the more surprising in connection with the quaint humor in the description of the old man who is the subject of the poem. There is a delicious Irish character in this, as in many other pieces of Holmes, reminding us of the familiar couplet of Moore "Erin, the smile and the tear in thine eyes Blend like the rainbow that hangs in thy skies." " The Last Leaf," from which the stanza is quoted, was written over fifty years ago, when the author was a little more than twenty-one. There are a few others of the same period which may have been considered trifles at first but which seem to have slowly acquired consistence, so that while they are still mar- vels of airy grace, they are as firm as the carved foliage on a Gothic capital. Not many writers live long enough to see themselves recognized as classics ; the benign judgment is more frequently tardy ; and then it happens, as De Mus- set says, that " Fame is a plant which grows upon a tomb." It takes years of repetition to impress new ideas in literature into the hearts and memories of men ; and, as literary cycles move, the age of Holmes is still new. The noblest poetry in the language, from the unborrowed splendor of Shakespeare to the sparkling reflections of Gray, doubtless gave to contemporaries a. sense of strangeness at first. Time was needed to harden the fresh lines, as well as to win for them a place among the elder and accepted models. Holmes's father was minister to the Congregational church in Cambridge, a man of ability and author of some historical works. He lived in a venerable house of the ante-Revolutionary period, which stood near the college grounds, and was demolished a few years ago to make room for a new academic building. One of Holmes's most characteristic articles is his description of " The Old Gambrel- roofed House." In the time of his youth there were people in Cambridge who remembered the march of the British troops on their way to Lexington and Con- cord in 1775. The speech and the manners of the colonists long retained the old English stamp, and the earliest of them had been contemporaries of Bunyan and almost of Shakespeare; and so Holmes must have heard, as I when a boy heard in another county, phrases and tones which could not have differed much from those of Shakespeare's common* people. The influence of this is seen in his mas- tery of what is called the Yankee dialect, development of old chimney-corner English. For the same reason there is visible in his writings also some of that homely astuteness which seems to have died out with the polish of modern manners. After completing his classical and medical studies, Dr. Holmes spent two years in Europe, principally in Paris, and then settled in Boston as a practising physician. Later he became a professor of anatomy, and remained in service un- til within a few years. Thus his duties took him away from his native Cambridge although his heart never migrated and turned him from the pursuit of poetry, except as a recreation. His recreation, however, must have been quite steadily indulged in, since his occasional poems had grown to a goodly volume before he was forty years of age. The great popularity of his later works has somewhat
