en whose fragrance lingers so loving in his memory and is
enshrined with such tender grace in his pages is not a description,
but a breath of that far-away childhood which still shines for him
immortally beautiful; and the fire-flies flitting across the darkened
meadows bring once again to his mind the first flash of insight into
the wonder and meaning of the night.

In some charming pages he has told us of his love for trees,
particularly of the old elms which are the pride of the New England
villages, and in equally poetic vein he has emphasized the beauty of
the pond-lily, the cardinal flower, the huckleberry pasture, and the
fields of Indian corn.

Dr. Holmes is also known as a novelist as well as essayist and poet.
His three novels, _Elsie Venner_, _The Guardian Angel_, and _A
Mortal Antipathy_, are undoubtedly the results of his experience as
a physician, for each in turn is founded upon some mental trait
which sets the hero or heroine apart from the rest of mankind. In
the treatment of these characteristics Holmes has made apparent the
powerful effect of heredity upon the life of the human being. These
novels are chiefly valuable as character-studies by an earnest student
of moral science whose literary bias tempted him to throw them into
the form of fiction. While touched with the true Holmes flavor, they
cannot be called fiction of the highest order nor do they emphasize
Holmes's place in literature. They seem rather to show his versatility
as a writer and to illustrate his familiarity with those subtle
problems of character that have always puzzled mankind.

Holmes's medical and literary essays, poems, novels, and other
miscellany have been collected in thirteen volumes, the last of which,
_Over the Teacups_, appeared but a short time before his death.

He spent most of his life in Boston, his home there being the favorite
meeting-place for the most distinguished of his countrymen and a
recognized rallying-point for foreign guests. He was the last of that
brilliant circle which made New England famous as the literary centre
of America; in many senses he combined the excellences which have
given American letters their place in the literature of the world.

* * * * *

Beside the writers who founded American literature must be placed
many others whose work belongs to the same period. In history
and biography, besides the work of the great historians, we have
Hildreth's _Histo