" "The Professor at the Breakfast Table" and
"The Poet at the Breakfast Table" are less successful variations
of "The Autocrat." Neither professors nor poets are at their best
at this meal. Holmes wrote three novels--of which "Elsie Venner,"
a somewhat too medical story, is the best remembered--memoirs of
his friends Emerson and Motley, and many miscellaneous essays.
His life was exceptionally happy, and his cheery good opinion of
himself is still contagious. To pronounce the words Doctor Holmes
in any company of intelligent Americans is the prologue to a
smile of recognition, comprehension, sympathy. The word Goldsmith
has now lost, alas, this provocative quality; the word Stevenson
still possesses it. The little Doctor, who died in the same year
as Stevenson, belonged like him to the genial race of friends of
mankind, and a few of his poems, and some gay warm-hearted pages
of his prose, will long preserve his memory. But the Boston which
he loved has vanished as utterly as Sam Johnson's London.
James Russell Lowell was ten years younger than Holmes, and
though he died three years before the Doctor, he seems, for other
reasons than those of chronology, to belong more nearly to the
present.
Pages:
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200