Philadelphia and
Boston, almost alone among the larger American cities, yield the
sense of intimacy, or what the Autocrat would call "the
cumulative humanities. "
Young Holmes became the pet and the glory of his class of 1829 at
Harvard. It was only in 1838 that their reunions began, but
thereafter they held fifty-six meetings, of which Holmes attended
fifty and wrote poems for forty-three. Many of "the Boys" whom he
celebrated became famous in their own right, but they remain "the
Boys" to all lovers of Holmes's verses. His own career as a poet
had begun during his single year in the Law School. His later
years brought him some additional skill in polishing his lines
and a riper human wisdom, but his native verse-making talent is
as completely revealed in "Old Ironsides," published when he was
twenty-one, and in "The Last Leaf," composed a year or two later,
as in anything he was to write during the next half-century. In
many respects he was a curious survival of the cumulative
humanities of the eighteenth century. He might have been, like
good Dr.
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