I believe that even cultivated readers have found more real satisfaction in the "One-Hoss Shay" than in many a more celebrated lyric.
Doctor Holmes lived amid a comparatively narrow circle of friends and acquaintances. He attended the Saturday Club, but Lowell appears to have been the only member of it with whom he was on confidential terms. He was rarely seen or heard of in Longfellow's house. In the winter of 1878 he met Mrs. L. Maria Child for the first time at the Chestnut Street Club. It appears that she did not catch his name when he was introduced to her, and stranger still did not recognize his face. When the Doctor inquired concerning her literary occupation she replied that she considered herself too old to drive a quill any longer, and then fortunately added: "Now, there is Doctor Holmes, I think he shows his customary good judgment in retiring from the literary field in proper season." What the Doctor thought of this is unknown, but he still continued to write.
At the age of seventy his alma mater conferred on Doctor Holmes an LL.D., and this was followed soon afterwards by Oxford and Cambridge, in England; but why was it not given ten or fifteen years earlier, when Holmes was in his prime? Then it might have been a service and a satisfaction to him; but when a man is seventy such tributes have small value for him. There had been an Atlantic breakfast for Doctor Holmes in Boston, and a Holmes breakfast in New York. He was in the public eye, and by honoring him the University honored itself. So Harvard conferred an LL.D. on General Winfield Scott just before the fatal battle of Bull Run,—instead of after his brilliant Mexican campaign. If the degree was not conferred on Holmes for his literary work, what reason could be assigned for it; and if he deserved it on that account, Emerson and Hawthorne certainly deserved it much more. Let us be thankful that no such mischief was contemplated. If honorary degrees are to be given in order to attract attention to a university, or worse still, for the purpose of obtaining legacies, they had better be abolished altogether.
During his last visit to England Doctor Holmes was the guest of F. Max
Muller at Oxford, and years afterwards Professor Muller wrote to an
American correspondent concerning him and others:
"Froude was a dear friend of mine, related to my wife; so was Kingsley— dear soul. Renan used to fetch books for me when we first met at the Bibliothique Royale. Emerson stayed at my house on his last visit here. But the best of all my American friends was Wendell Holmes. When he left us he said, 'I have talked to thousands of people—you are the only one with whom I have had a conversation.' We had talked about [Greek: ta megisthta]—the world as the logos, as the thought of God. What a pure soul his was—a real Serene Highness."
This is trancendentalism from the fountainhead; and here Doctor Holmes may fairly be said to have avenged himself on the Nation's excoriating critic.
FRANK W. BIRD, AND THE BIRD CLUB.
It is less than four miles from Harvard Square to Boston City Hall, a building rather exceptional for its fine architecture among public edifices, but the change in 1865 was like the change from one sphere of human thought and activity to another. In Boston politics was everything, and literature, art, philosophy nothing, or next to nothing. There was mercantile life, of course, and careworn merchants anxiously waiting about the gold-board; but there were no tally-ho coaches; there was no golf or polo, and very little yachting. Fashionable society was also at a low ebb, and as Wendell Phillips remarked in 1866, the only parties were boys' and girls' dancing-parties. A large proportion of the finest young men in the city had, like the Lowells, shed their blood for the Republic. The young people danced, but their elders looked grave.
At this time the political centre of Massachusetts and, to a certain extent of New England, was the Bird Club, which met every Saturday afternoon at Young's Hotel to dine and discuss the affairs of the nation. Its membership counted both Senators, the Governor, a number of ex- Governors and four or five members of Congress. They were a strong team when they were all harnessed together.
[Illustration: F. W. BIRD]