panacea, is no better than any other form except as the virtue and wisdom of the people make it so, and that when men undertake to do their own kingship, they enter upon the dangers and responsibilities as well as the privileges of the function. Above all, it looks as if we were on the way to be persuaded that no government can be carried on by declamation. It is noticeable also that facility of communication has made the best English and French thought far more directly operative here than ever before. Without being Europeanized, our discussion of important questions in statesmanship, in political economy, in æsthetics, is taking a broader scope and a higher tone. It had certainly been provincial, one might also say local, to a very unpleasant extent. Perhaps our experience in soldiership has taught us to value training more than we have been popularly wont. We may possibly come to the conclusion, one of these days, that self-made men may not be always equally skillful in the manufacture of wisdom, may not be divinely commissioned to fabricate the higher qualities of opinion on all possible topics of human interest. HOLMES, born in 1809, and dying in 1894, was the descendant of a scholarly New England ancestry. After graduating at Harvard, he began life as a professor and practitioner in medicine; he was married in 1840, and lived all his life in Boston. He twice visited Europe, first as a young fellow of one-and-twenty, and again, after more than half a century, as a veteran of letters, known and loved in both hemispheres. Of all our writers, he is the sunniest, the wittiest, the most discursive, and one of the least uneven. Until 1857, Holmes had written nothing beyond occasional poems, excellent of their kind, but not of themselves sufficient to make a reputation. But in that year, the Atlantic Monthly was started, and Holmes contributed to it a series of unique essays entitled, "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table." They had the form of familiar dialogues between a group of diverse but common types in a boarding-house, upon all manner of topics. They immediately caught the fancy of all readers, and lifted Holmes to a literary altitude where he ever after remained. Two years later "Elsie Venner," his first novel, a study in heredity and in American village character, was published; it is good, but not in the same class with the best imaginative work. The same criticism must be passed on "The Guardian Angel," his second effort in fiction, which appeared in 1867. Both have so much merit. that one wonders not to find them better. But they make it plain that Holmes's proper field was the discursive essay and the occasional poem; and here his fame is solid and secure. Wit rather than humor characterizes Holmes; yet he has the tenderness which usually accompanies only the latter. His mind is swift in movement, and catches remote analogies; he brings together the near and the far, with the effect of a pleasing surprise. His thought tends to shape itself in epigram; he says more "good things"--which are not merely good, but often wise-than any of his contemporaries. The habit of his mind was discursive and independent, rather than deeply original; he had opinions on all subjects; he stated them so brightly and aptly that they often seemed new; but in truth Holmes is orthodox. His quick sympathies and excellent taste, combined with the harmony of nature which creates the synthetic attitude, make him a poet whose productions not seldom reach a high plane, as for example in "The Chambered Nautilus." He is an optimist, and a moralizer, and turns both characteristics to sound literary advantage. The comic bias of his general outlook upon life leads him to be so constantly funny and acute, that the reader is in some danger of losing the fine edge of appreciation; the writer becomes his own rival. Once in a while, however, as in "Old Ironsides," the fervor of his patriotism, or of some other high emotion, thrills him into seriousness, and then he strikes a pure and lofty note. There is something lovable in all that he has done; and no man of letters among us has been the object of more widespread personal affection than has Holmes. We return from other appreciations to the Autocrat series -for he wrote a number of books of a character similar to these first essays. The untrammeled plan of them suits his genius; he can spring here and there as chance or humor suggests, and entertain us in a hundred different ways one after another. He preaches charming lay sermons, on a score of texts at once, and unless unintermittent entertainment can be tedious, tediousness is impossible to Holmes. He opens no unknown worlds, but he makes us see the world we know better. He penetrates beneath the surface of human nature, though he falls short of creative insight. After reading him, we rise with a kindlier feeling towards men and things, and a wiser understanding of them. THE CHAMBERED NAUTILUS. THIS is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign, The venturous bark that flings On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings, And coral reefs lie bare, Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair. Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl; And every chamber'd cell, Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell, Its iris'd ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unseal'd! Year after year beheld the silent toil That spread his lustrous coil; Still, as the spiral grew, He left the past year's dwelling for the new, Stole with soft step its shining archway through, Built up its idle door, Stretch'd in his last-found home, and knew the old no more. Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee, Child of the wandering sea, Cast from her lap, forlorn! From thy dead lips a clearer note is born Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn! While on mine ear it rings, Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings: Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low-vaulted past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea! THE THREE JOHNS. (From "The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table.") WHEN John and Thomas are talking together, it is natural enough that among the six there should be more or less confusion and misapprehension. [Our landlady turned pale;-no doubt she thought there was a screw loose in my intellects, and that involved the probable loss of a boarder. A severe-looking person, who wears a Spanish cloak and a sad cheek, fluted by the passions of the melodrama, whom I understand to be the professional ruffian of the neighboring theatre, alluded, with a certain lifting of the brow, drawing down of the corners of the mouth, and somewhat rasping voce di petto, to Falstaff's nine men in buckram. Everybody looked up. I believe the old gentleman opposite was afraid I should seize the carving-knife; at any rate, he slid it to one side, as it were carelessly.] I think, I said, I can make it plain to Benjamin Franklin here, that there are at least six personalities distinctly to be recognized as taking part in that dialogue between John and Thomas. Three Johns. 1. The real John; known only to his Maker. 3. Thomas's ideal John; never the real John, nor John's John, but often very unlike either. |