ith a very human enjoyment of a fight,
whose youth was cast in an age of theological controversy, he has
always had his fling at Calvinism and has prolonged the slogans of old
battles into a later generation; sometimes, perhaps, insisting upon
them rather wearisomely and beyond the limits of good taste. He had,
even as an undergraduate, a reputation for cleverness at writing comic
verses, and many of his good things in this kind, such as the
_Dorchester Giant_ and the _Height of the Ridiculous_, were contributed
to the _Collegian_, a students' paper. But he first drew the attention
of a wider public by his spirited ballad of _Old Ironsides_--

"Ay! Tear her tattered ensign down!"--

composed about 1830, when it was proposed by the government to take to
pieces the unseaworthy hulk of the famous old man-of-war,
"Constitution." Holmes's indignant protest--which has been a favorite
subject for school-boy declamation--had the effect of postponing the
vessel's fate for a great many years. From 1830-35 the young poet was
pursuing his medical studies in Boston and Paris, contributing now and
then some verses to the magazines. Of his life as a medical student in
Paris there are many pleasant reminiscences in his _Autocrat_ and other
writings, as where he tells, for {488} instance, of a dinner party of
Americans in the French capital, where one of the company brought tears
of home-sickness into the eyes of his _sodales_ by saying that the
tinkle of the ice in the champagne-glasses reminded him of the cowbells
in the rocky old pastures of New England. In 1836 he printed his first
collection of poems. The volume contained among a number of pieces
broadly comic, like the _September Gale_, the _Music Grinders_, and the
_Ballad of the Oysterman_--which at once became widely popular--a few
poems of a finer and quieter temper, in which there was a quaint
blending of the humorous and the pathetic. Such were _My Aunt_ and the
_Last Leaf_--which Abraham Lincoln found "inexpressibly touching," and
which it is difficult to read without the double tribute of a smile and
a tear. The volume contained also _Poetry: A Metrical Essay_, read
before the Harvard Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, which was the
first of that long line of capital occasional poems which Holmes has
been spinning for half a century with no sign of fatigue and with
scarcely any falling off in freshness; poems read or spoken or sung at
all manner of gatheri