"I've several things bothering me," he confessed one day. "First, I am anxious to find a suitable inscription for a child's porringer. I never wrote a poem to a child, I believe. I love children dearly; I always want to stop them on the street: but I have never written about them; nor have I ever written much about women. I don't know why, but I care too much to do the Tom Moore style of thing."
He was eager to frame a letter to President Eliot, and also one to President Cleveland, in order to advance some one in need of help; but the grasshopper had become a burden. "I feel such things now when I have to do them," he said; "nevertheless, when young men and maidens come skipping in with an air of saying, 'Please give me your autograph, and be quick about it; there may not be much time left,' I want to say, 'Take care, young folks; I may be dancing over your graves yet!'"
There was a clock which stood upon his table, the bequest of Dr. Henry J. Bigelow. This remembrance from his dying friend was one of his most valued possessions. He loved to talk of Dr. Bigelow, and in a published discourse he has said of him: "He read men and women as great scholars read books. He took life at first hand, and not filtered through alphabets….He would get what he wanted out of a book as dexterously as a rodent will get the meat of a nut out of its shell…. He handled his rapidly acquired knowledge so like an adept in book-lore that one might have thought he was born in an alcove and cradled on a book-shelf." Dr. Bigelow was so frequently in Dr. Holmes's thought in the latter days that one can hardly give a picture of his later life without rehearsing something of his expression with regard to him. He says further: "Dr. Bigelow was unquestionably a man of true genius…. Inexorable determination to have the truth, if nature could be forced to yield it, characterized his powerful intelligence."
The doctor would often look up when the little clock was striking musically on his writing-table, and say, "It always reminds me tenderly of my dead friend."
When the time came that writing was a burden, and indeed, except for limited periods, impossible, Dr. Holmes lived more and more in his affections. Often, as I entered his room on a dull afternoon, he would say, "Ah, now let's sit up by the fire and talk of all our friends." Then would begin a series of opinions, witty and tender by turns, and interspersed with tears and smiles. On one such occasion he said: "There are very few modern hymns which have the old ring of saintliness in them. Sometimes when I am disinclined to listen to the preacher at church, I turn to the hymn-book, and when one strikes my eye, I cover the name at the bottom, and guess. It is almost invariably Watts or Wesley; after those, there are very few which are good for much.
"'Calm on the listening ear of night'
is a fine hymn, but even that lacks the virility of the old saints."
Our minds that day were full of one thought,—the death of Phillips
Brooks,—and when, a moment later, he said:—
"'Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood'—
there is nothing like that," it seemed quite natural that his voice should break and the tears come as he added, without mentioning the bishop's name, "How hard it is to think he is gone! I don't like to feel that I must live without him."