certain glitter, knowingness and flippancy about it and
an absence of that self-forgetfulness and intense absorption in its
theme which characterize the work of the higher imagination. This is
rather the product of fancy and wit. Wit, indeed, in the old sense of
quickness in the perception of analogies is the staple of his mind.
His resources in the way of figure, illustration, allusion and anecdote
are wonderful. Age cannot wither him nor custom stale his infinite
variety, and there is as much powder in his latest pyrotechnics as in
the rockets which he sent up half a century ago. Yet, though the
humorist in him rather outweighs the poet, he has written a few things,
like the _Chambered Nautilus_ and _Homesick in Heaven_, which are as
purely and deeply poetic as the _One-Hoss Shay_ and the _Prologue_ are
funny. {491} Dr. Holmes is not of the stuff of which idealists and
enthusiasts are made. As a physician and a student of science, the
facts of the material universe have counted for much with him. His
clear, positive, alert intellect was always impatient of mysticism. He
had the sharp eye of the satirist and the man of the world for oddities
of dress, dialect and manners. Naturally the transcendental movement
struck him on its ludicrous side, and in his _After-Dinner Poem_, read
at the Phi Beta Kappa dinner at Cambridge in 1843, he had his laugh at
the "Orphic odes" and "runes" of the bedlamite seer and bard of mystery

"Who rides a beetle which he calls a 'sphinx,'
And O what questions asked in club-foot rhyme
Of Earth the tongueless, and the deaf-mute Time!
Here babbling 'Insight' shouts in Nature's ears
His last conundrum on the orbs and spheres;
There Self-inspection sucks its little thumb,
With 'Whence am I?' and 'Wherefore did I come?'"

Curiously enough, the author of these lines lived to write an
appreciative life of the poet who wrote the _Sphinx_. There was a good
deal of toryism or social conservatism in Holmes. He acknowledged a
preference for the man with a pedigree, the man who owned family
portraits, had been brought up in familiarity with books, and could
pronounce "view" correctly. Readers unhappily not of the "Brahmin
caste of New England" have sometimes resented as snobbishness Holmes's
harping {492} on "family," and his perpetual application of certain
favorite shibboleths to other people's ways of speech. "The woman who
calc'lates is lost."

"Learning condemns be