with the _Collegian_ had a
most inspiriting effect on his fellow contributors, who found their
wits sharpened by contact with a mind that was forever buoyant and
overflowing with humor and good nature. In friendly rivalry, those
kindred intellects vied with one another, and no more brilliant
college paper was ever published than the _Collegian_, and this is
more remarkable still, when we come to consider the fact, that at that
time, literature in America was practically in its infancy. Nine years
before, Sydney Smith had asked his famous question, "Who reads an
American book? who goes to an American play?" And to that query there
was really no answer. Six numbers of the _Collegian_ were issued, and
they must have proved a revelation to the men and women of that day,
whose reading, hitherto, had almost been confined to the imported
article from beyond the seas, for Washington Irving wrote with the pen
of an English gentleman, Bryant and Dana had not yet made their mark
in distinctively American authorship, and Cooper's "Prairie" was just
becoming to be understood by the critics and people.

Shaking the dust of the law office from his shoes, Oliver Wendell
Holmes, abandoning literature for a time, plunged boldly into the
study of a profession for which he had always evinced a strong
predilection. The art and practice of medical science had ever a
fascination for him, and he made rapid progress at the university.
Once or twice he yielded to impulse, and wrote a few bright things,
anonymously, for the _Harbinger_,--the paper which Epes Sargent and
Park Benjamin published for the benefit of a charitable institution,
and dedicated as a May gift to the ladies who had aided the New
England Institution for the Education of the Blind. In 1833, Holmes
sailed for Paris, where he studied medicine and surgery, and walked
the hospitals. Three years were spent abroad, and then the young
student returned to Cambridge to take his medical degree at Harvard,
and to deliver his metrical Essay on Poetry, before the Phi-Beta-Kappa
Society. In this year too, 1836, he published his first acknowledged
book of poems,--a duodecimo volume of less than two hundred pages. In
this collection his Essay on Poetry appeared. It describes the art in
four stages, _viz._, the Pastoral or Bucolic, the Martial, the Epic,
and the Dramatic. In illustration of his views, he furnished
exemplars from his own prolific muse, and his striking poem of "Old
Ironsides"