THE HOUSE IN RUE MONSIEUR LE PRINCE WHERE DOCTOR HOLMES LIVED FOR TWO YEARS WHEN STUDYING MEDICINE IN PARIS.
Holmes. And I had then never read but one of them. It was a mere piece of encyclopædia learning of mine.
I. What I shall try to do in my address is to show that Emerson would not have touched all sorts of people as he did, but for this matter-of-fact interest in his daily surroundings—if he had not gone to town-meetings, for instance. Was it you or Lowell who called him the Yankee Plato?
Holmes. Not I. It was probably Lowell, in the “Fable for Critics.” I called him “a wingèd Franklin,” and I stand by that. Matthew Arnold quoted that afterwards, and I was glad I had said it.
I. I do not remember where you said it. How was it?
Doctor Holmes at once rose, went to the turning book-stand, and took down volume three of his own poems, and read me with great spirit the passage. I do not know how I had forgotten it.
“Where in the realm of thought, whose air is song,
Does he, the Buddha of the West, belong?