McClure's Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 2, July, 1893

July, 1893.
Vol. I. No. 2
Copyright, 1893, by S. S. McClure, Limited. All rights reserved.

My first recollection of Doctor Holmes is seeing him standing on a bench at a college dinner when I was a boy, in the year 1836. He was full of life and fun, and was delivering—I do not say reading—one of his little college poems. He always writes them with joy, and recites them—if that is the word—with a spirit not to be described. For he is a born orator, with what people call a sympathetic voice, wholly under his own command, and entirely free from any of the tricks of elocution. It seems to me that no one really knows his poems to the very best, who has not had the good fortune to hear him read some of them.

But I had known all about him before that. As little boys, we had by heart, in those days, the song which saved “Old Ironsides” from destruction. That was the pet name of the frigate “Constitution,” which was a pet Boston ship, because she had been built at a Boston shipyard, had been sailed with Yankee crews, and, more than once, had brought her prizes into Boston Harbor.
We used to spout at school:
“Nail to the mast her holy flag,
Spread every threadbare sail,
And give her to the god of storms,
The lightning and the gale!”