Dr. Holmes is also known as a novelist as well as essayist and poet. His three novels, Elsie Venner, The Guardian Angel, and A Mortal Antipathy, are undoubtedly the results of his experience as a physician, for each in turn is founded upon some mental trait which sets the hero or heroine apart from the rest of mankind. In the treatment of these characteristics Holmes has made apparent the powerful effect of heredity upon the life of the human being. These novels are chiefly valuable as character-studies by an earnest student of moral science whose literary bias tempted him to throw them into the form of fiction. While touched with the true Holmes flavor, they cannot be called fiction of the highest order nor do they emphasize Holmes's place in literature. They seem rather to show his versatility as a writer and to illustrate his familiarity with those subtle problems of character that have always puzzled mankind.
Holmes's medical and literary essays, poems, novels, and other miscellany have been collected in thirteen volumes, the last of which, Over the Teacups, appeared but a short time before his death.
He spent most of his life in Boston, his home there being the favorite meeting-place for the most distinguished of his countrymen and a recognized rallying-point for foreign guests. He was the last of that brilliant circle which made New England famous as the literary centre of America; in many senses he combined the excellences which have given American letters their place in the literature of the world.
Beside the writers who founded American literature must be placed many others whose work belongs to the same period. In history and biography, besides the work of the great historians, we have Hildreth's History of the United States, Lossing's Field Book of the Revolution, Schoolcraft's studies and researches among the Indian tribes, the carefully written biographies of Sparks, the Peter Parley and Abbott stories for the young, and numerous other contributions which throw valuable light upon the early history of the United States.
In fiction the pictures of Southern life by Sims, and the romances of Dutch life in New York by Hoffman, preserve the colonial traditions, and with many other writers of lesser note supplement the work of the great novelists.
The philosophy of Emerson has found expression in the writings of Bronson Alcott, Theodore Parker, and Margaret Fuller. In poetry, the still honored names of Fitz-Greene Halleck, Joseph Rodman Drake, Elizabeth Kinney, Alice and Phœbe Cary illustrate the place that they held in the popular heart. Chief among these minor singers stands John Howard Payne, whose immortal song has found a home in nearly every land.