tter," as often in Europe as in Massachusetts, while the
Doctor hardly left the Hub even for a vacation; there was nothing
beyond it that was of great import to him. He was the sublimation of
Yankee wit as Lowell was of Yankee humor and human nature, and he
made of witticism a study; polished, refined, and prepared his "_bons
mots_", and, at the best moment, led the conversation round to the
point at which it was opportune to fire them off. He had a large
medical knowledge of human nature and intellectual pathology, but I
could never realize that he was a physician; I should not have trusted
myself to his doctoring. As with Longfellow, his family affections
were absorbing, and his love for his son, the present Mr. Justice
Holmes, and his pride in him, were very pleasant to see, and they ran
on the surface of his nature like his love for Boston; but I could
never feel that his feeling for his outside friends was more than a
mild, sunny glow of kindliness and vivid intellectual sympathy. Of
course I judge him from a difficult standard, that of the Cambridge
circle, in which the personal relations were very warm, and especially
comparing him with Lowell and the Nortons, with whom friendship was a
religion.

Holmes and Lowell were the antitheses of the New England intellect,
and this more in their personality than in their writing. If Lowell
could have acquired Holmes's respect for his work, he would have left
a larger image in the American Walhalla; but he never gave care to the
perfection of what he wrote, for his mind so teemed with material that
the time to polish and review never came. Holmes, like a true artist,
loved the _limae labor_. He was satisfied, it seemed to me, to do the
work of one lifetime and then rest, while Lowell looked forward to a
succession of lifetimes all full of work, and one can hardly conceive
him as ever resting or caring to stop work. Lowell's was a generous,
widely sympathizing nature, from which radiated love for humanity, and
the broadest and most catholic helpfulness for every one who asked
for his help, with a special fund for his friends. Holmes drew a line
around him, within which he shone like a winter sun, and outside of
which his care did not extend. The one was best in what he did, the
other in what he was. Holmes always seemed to me cynical to the
general world; Lowell to have embodied the antique sentiment, "I am a
man, and hold nothing human as indifferent to me." Both were ador