overs the rest. He chose to figure us younger
men, in touching upon the literary circumstance of the past and present,
as representative of modern feeling and thinking, and himself as no
longer contemporary. We knew he did this to be contradicted, and we
protested, affectionately, fervently, with all our hearts and minds; and
indeed there were none of his generation who had lived more widely into
ours. He was not a prophet like Emerson, nor ever a voice crying in the
wilderness like Whittier or Lowell. His note was heard rather amid the
sweet security of streets, but it was always for a finer and gentler
civility. He imagined no new rule of life, and no philosophy or theory
of life will be known by his name. He was not constructive; he was
essentially observant, and in this he showed the scientific nature. He
made his reader known to himself, first in the little, and then in the
larger things. From first to last he was a censor, but a most winning
and delightful censor, who could make us feel that our faults were other
people's, and who was not wont

"To bait his homilies with his brother worms."

At one period he sat in the seat of the scorner, as far as Reform was
concerned, or perhaps reformers, who are so often tedious and ridiculous;
but he seemed to get a new heart with the new mind which came to him when
he began to write the Autocrat papers, and the light mocker of former
days became the serious and compassionate thinker, to whom most truly
nothing that was human was alien. His readers trusted and loved him; few
men have ever written so intimately with so much dignity, and perhaps
none has so endeared himself by saying just the thing for his reader that
his reader could not say for himself. He sought the universal through
himself in others, and he found to his delight and theirs that the most
universal thing was often, if not always, the most personal thing.

In my later meetings with him I was struck more and more by his
gentleness. I believe that men are apt to grow gentler as they grow
older, unless they are of the curmudgeon type, which rusts and crusts
with age, but with Doctor Holmes the gentleness was peculiarly marked. He
seemed to shrink from all things that could provoke controversy, or even
difference; he waived what might be a matter of dispute, and rather
sought the things that he could agree with you upon. In the last talk I
had with him he appeared to have no grudge left, except for the puri