"I gave two dinners to two parties of old gentlemen just before I left town," he said, the year before his death; and then added, "our baby was seventy-three!"
His letters in the later years were full of feeling. He says in one of them, written on a Christmas day, speaking of an old friend: "How many delightful hours the photographs bring back to me!… Under his roof I have met more visitors to be remembered than under any other. But for his hospitality I should never have had the privilege of personal acquaintance with famous writers and artists whom I can now recall as I saw them, talked with them, heard them, in that pleasant library, that most lively and agreeable dining-room. How could it be otherwise, with such guests as he entertained, and with his own unflagging vivacity and his admirable social gifts? Let me live in happy recollections to-day."
Only two years before Dr. Holmes's death he said in a letter received by me in Italy: "But for this troublesome cold, which has so much better come out than I feared, I have been doing well enough—kept busy with letters and dictation of my uneventful history. It is strange how forgotten events and persons start out of the blank oblivion in which they seem to have been engulfed, as I fix my memory steadily on the past. I find it very easy, even fascinating, to call up the incidents, trivial oftentimes, but having for me a significance of their own, which lie in my past track like the broken toys of childhood. It seems as if the past was for each of us a great collection of negatives laid away, from which we can take positive pictures when we will—from many of them, that is; for only the Recording Angel can reproduce the pictures of every instant of our lives from these same negatives, of which he must have an infinite collection, with which sooner or later we are liable to be confronted."
In another letter from Beverly Farms, when he was eighty-three, he says:—
Where this will find you, in a geographical point of view, I do not know; but I know your heart will be in its right place, and accept kindly the few barren words this sheet holds for you. Yes; barren of incident, of news of all sorts, but yet having a certain flavor of Boston, of Cape Ann, and, above all, of dear old remembrances, the suggestion of any one of which is as good as a page of any common letter. So, whatever I write will carry the fragrance of home with it, and pay you for the three minutes it costs you to read it…. I find great delight in talking over cathedrals and pictures and English scenery, and all the sights my traveling friends have been looking at, with Mrs. Bell. It seems to me that she knew them all beforehand, so that she was journeying all the time among reminiscences which were hardly distinguishable from realities.
My recollections are to those of other people around me who call themselves old,—the sexagenarians, for instance,—something like what a cellar is to the ground-floor of a house. The young people in the upper stories (American spelling, story) go down to the basement in their inquiries, and think they have got to the bottom; but I go down another flight of steps, and find myself below the surface of the earth, as are the bodies of most of my contemporaries. As to health, I am doing tolerably well. I have just come in from a moderate walk in which I acquitted myself creditably. I take two-hour drives in the afternoon, in the open or close carriage, according to the weather; but I do not pretend to do much visiting, and I avoid all excursions when people go to have what they call a "good time."
I am reading right and left—whatever turns up, but especially re- reading old books. Two new volumes of Dr. Johnson's letters have furnished me part of my reading. As for writing, when my secretary— Miss Gaudelet—comes back, I shall resume my dictation. No literary work ever seemed to me easier or more agreeable than living over my past life, and putting it on record as well as I could. If anybody should ever care to write a sketch or memoir of my life, these notes would help him mightily. My friends too might enjoy them—if I do not have the misfortune to outlive them all. With affectionate regards and all sweet messages to Miss Jewett.
Always your friend,
O. W. HOLMES.
This letter gives a very good picture of his life to the end. Few incidents occurred to break the even current of the order he describes. He still dined out occasionally, and I find a few reminiscences of his delightful talk which linger with me.