That Holmes suffers but little by the persistence of his ‘juvenilia’ and ‘early verses’ is due to their frankly comic and grotesque character. The reader is spared faded sentiment, and he is heartily amused by the ingenuity of the conceits, the sparkle of the rhymes, the satire, the epigrammatic wit. There is mirth still in that brilliant essay in verbal gymnastics ‘The Comet’ (a dyspeptic’s dream), in ‘The September Gale’ (a boy’s lament for his Sunday breeches, blown from the line one fatal wash-day and never recovered), in ‘The Spectre Pig’ (a parody on Dana’s ‘Buccaneer’), in ‘The Height of the Ridiculous,’ ‘Daily Trials,’ ‘The Treadmill Song,’ ‘The Dorchester Giant,’ ‘The Music-Grinders,’ and the heartlessly funny poem entitled ‘My Aunt.’
Holmes was the readiest and the happiest of ‘occasional’ poets. No one was so apt as he in meeting the needs of the moment, in brightening with rhymed felicities the banquet, the class reunion, or in greeting the distinguished stranger. He had rare skill in fitting the word to the audience; it was impossible for him to be dull, and being good-humored, it was difficult for him to say ‘No’ when committees were importunate. Of his three hundred and twenty-seven poems, nearly one half are poems of occasion. He wrote the greeting to Charles Dickens, to the Prince Imperial, a poem for the Moore celebration, for the dedication of the Stratford Fountain, for the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Harvard College. His poems for the Class of 1829, forty-four in number, reflect the history of the times as well as the mood of the writer. The most famous of them is ‘The Boys’ (1859). Its motive, that boy-nature never quite dies in the man, and its defiant optimism were calculated to have rejuvenating effect on a group of classmates then thirty years out of college.
This art requires a quality of mind akin to that of the improvisatore. Holmes was Boston’s poet laureate. His power to put an idea into self-singing measure saved the battle-ship ‘Constitution,’ and did much to save the ‘Old South’ Church.
In his finer work there is a delicious blending of thoughtfulness and humorous fancy. Only Holmes could have given the lines on ‘Dorothy Q.’ their most original touch,—asking what would have been the result for him had prospective great-grandmother said ‘No’ instead of ‘Yes’:—
Should I be I, or would it be
One tenth another to nine tenths me?
Half the pathos in that fragile and beautiful piece of workmanship, ‘The Last Leaf,’ derives from the humor, from the blending of laughter and tears. Even in the exquisite piece, attributed to Iris, ‘Under the Violets,’ a description of a young girl’s burial-place, the lighter touch is not wholly wanting:—
When, turning round their dial-track,
Eastward the lengthening shadows pass,
Her little mourners, clad in black,