"Charles Sumner, Longfellow, Greene, Dr. Holmes, came to dine. The latter sparkled and coruscated as I have seldom heard him before. We are more than ever convinced that no one since Sydney Smith was ever so brilliant, so witty, spontaneous, naïf, and unfailing as he."
In speaking of his own class in college he said: "There never was such vigor in any class before, it seems to me. Almost every member turns out sooner or later distinguished for something. We have had every grade of moral status from a criminal to a chief justice, and we never let any one of them drop. We keep hold of their hands year after year, and lift up the weak and failing ones till they are at last redeemed. Ah, there was one exception! Years ago we voted to cast a man out who had been a defaulter or who had committed some offense of that nature. The poor fellow sank down, and before the next year, when we repented of this decision, he had gone too far down and presently died. But we have kept all the rest!
"Every fourth man in our class is a poet. Sam. Smith belongs to our class, who wrote 'My Country 't is of Thee.' Sam. Smith will live when Longfellow, Whittier, and all the rest of us have gone into oblivion….
"Queer man, ——. Looked ten years older than he was, like Caliban. Calibans look always ten years older than they are. A perfect potato of a man. If five hundred pieces of a man had been flung together from different points and stuck, they could not have been more awkwardly concocted than he was.
"James Freeman Clarke was in our class. Ever read his history of the 'Ten Great Religions?' Very good book. Nobody knows how much Clarke is until he reads that book. How he surprises us from time to time. Came out well about 'bolting,' with regard to Butler the other day. Writes good verses, too,—not as good as mine, but good verses." … Holmes was abstemious and never ceased talking. "Most men write too much. I would rather risk my future fame upon one lyric than upon ten volumes. But I have said 'Boston is the hub of the Universe;' I will rest upon that."
He spoke also with great feeling of the women who came to him for literary advice and assistance. ——, he says, is his daughter in letters. He has only seen her once, but he has been a faithful correspondent and assistant to her.
Sumner said some one had called —— "an impediment in the path of science." What did he mean? "It means just this," said Holmes: "—— is no longer young, and I was reading the other day in a book on the Sandwich Islands of an old Fejee man who had been carried away among strangers, but who prayed that he might be carried home and his brains beaten out in peace by his son, according to the custom of those lands. It flashed over me then that our sons beat out our brains in the same way. They do not walk in our ruts of thought or begin exactly where we leave off, but they have a new standpoint of their own."
The talk went on for about four hours, when the company broke up.
One evening the doctor came in after the Phi Beta Kappa dinner at Cambridge. "I can't stop," he said. "I only came to read you my verses which I gave at the dinner to-day: they made such a queer impression! I didn't mean to go, but James Lowell was to preside, and sent me word that I really must be there, so I just wrote these off, and here they are. I don't know that I should have brought them in to read to you, but Hoar declares they are the best I have ever done." After some delay, and in the fading light of sunset reflected from the river, he read the well-known verses "Bill and Joe." He must have been still warm with the excitement of the first reading, for I can never forget the tenderness with which he recited the lines. They are still pleasant on the printed page, but to those who heard him they are divested of the passion of affection with which they were written and read.
Late in life he said to a friend who was speaking of the warm friendships embalmed in his poetry, and which would help to make it endure: "I don't know how that may be; but the writing of these poems has been a passionate joy."