Take him, green Erin, to thy breast!
Keep him, gray London—for a while!
In him we send thee of our best,
Our wisest word, our blithest smile—
Our epigram, alert and pat,
That kills with joy the folly hit—
Our Yankee Tzar, our Autocrat
Of all the happy realms of wit!
Take him and keep him—but forbear
To keep him more than half a year....
His presence will be sunshine there,
His absence will be shadow here!"
We delight to recall with what distinguished honors he was received abroad from the highest dignitaries of church and state, as well as from his own literary compeers. It was during this visit in England that the London Spectator wrote, "No literary American—unless it be Mr. Lowell, and we should not except even him—occupies precisely the same place as Doctor Holmes in Englishmen's regard. They have the feeling for him which they had for Charles Lamb, Charles Dickens, and John Leech, in which admiration somewhat blends into and is indistinguishable from affectionateness."
The Universities of Edinburgh, Oxford, and Cambridge all conferred their honorary degrees upon him, and he has given us his own inimitable description of the manner in which he was entertained by Carlyle and by Tennyson.
At a club dinner given to him in London, he said to the bishop of Gloucester:
"I think we are all unconsciously conscious of each other's brain waves at times. The fact is that words and even signs are a very poor sort of language, compared with the direct telegraphy between souls. The mistake we make is to suppose that the soul is circumscribed and imprisoned by the body. Now, the truth is, I believe I extend a good way outside my body. Well, I should say at least three or four feet all round, and so do you, and it is our extensions that meet. Before words pass or we shake hands, our souls have exchanged impressions, and they never lie."
In reply to a toast at the farewell banquet given him in Liverpool by the Medical Society of London, he said:
"I cannot do justice to the manner in which I have been everywhere received. Any phrase of mine would be a most inadequate return for the months of loving and assiduous attentions through which I have been living. You need not ask me, therefore, the almost stereotyped question, how I like England and Scotland. I cannot help loving both, and I only regret I could not accept the welcome awaiting me from my friends in warmhearted Ireland."
Fresh in mind still is the enthusiastic ovation given to our beloved Autocrat when the hundred days had passed, and "Wind and Wave" brought safely home again "our wisest word, our blithest smile."
But grim Death, that had "rained through every roof save his," was soon to send a cruel shaft into the poet's happy home. On the 6th of February, 1888, the dear companion and helpmeet of his life for nearly half a century—
"Stole with soft step the shining archway through
And left the past years' dwelling for the new."