It was the latter, also, who was called upon to name the new magazine. Thus was the Atlantic Monthly launched upon the great sea of literature—a periodical that has never lost its first high prestige.
When Doctor Holmes sat down to write his first article for the new magazine, he remembered that some twenty-five years before, he had begun a series of papers for a certain New England Magazine, published in Boston, by J. T. & E. Buckingham, with the title of Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. Curious, as he says, to try the experiment of shaking the same bough again and finding out if the ripe fruit were better or worse than the early wind-falls, he took the same title for his new articles.
"The man is father to the boy that was," he adds, "and I am my own son, as it seems to me, in those papers of the New England Magazine."
To show the reader some family traits of this "young autocrat," we quote from these earlier articles the following fine extracts:
"When I feel inclined to read poetry, I take down my dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. The author may arrange the gems effectively, but their shape and lustre have been given by the attrition of ages. Bring me the finest simile from the whole range of imaginative writing, and I will show you a single word which conveys a more profound, a more accurate, and a more eloquent analogy.
"Once on a time, a notion was started that if all the people in the world would shout at once, it might be heard in the moon. So the projectors agreed it should be done in just ten years. Some thousand shiploads of chronometers were distributed to the selectmen and other great folks of all the different nations. For a year beforehand, nothing else was talked about but the awful noise that was to be made on the great occasion. When the time came everybody had their ears so wide open to hear the universal ejaculation of boo—the word agreed upon—that nobody spoke except a deaf man in one of the Fejee Islands, and a woman in Pekin, so that the world was never so still since the creation."
At the close of the year when the twelve numbers of The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table were completed in the Atlantic Monthly and published in book form, the British Review wrote of the illustrious author as follows:
"Oliver Wendell Holmes has been long known in this country as the author of some poems written in stately classic verse, abounding in happy thoughts and bright bird-peeps of fancy, such as this, for example:
The punch-bowl's sounding depths were stirred,
Its silver cherubs smiling as they heard.