So he wrote, in scores of passages of filial devotion, concerning the
village of his boyhood and the city of Boston. His best-known prose
sentence is: "Boston State House is the hub of the Solar System." It is
easy to smile, as indeed he did himself, at such fond provinciality,
but the fact remains that our literature as a whole sadly needs this
richness of local atmosphere. A nation of restless immigrants, here
today and "moved on" tomorrow, has the fibres of its imagination
uprooted, and its artists in their eager quest of "local color" purchase
brilliancy at the cost of thinness of tone, poverty of association.
Philadelphia and Boston, almost alone among the larger American cities,
yield the sense of intimacy, or what the Autocrat would call "the
cumulative humanities."

Young Holmes became the pet and the glory of his class of 1829 at
Harvard. It was only in 1838 that their reunions began, but thereafter
they held fifty-six meetings, of which Holmes attended fifty and wrote
poems for forty-three. Many of "the Boys" whom he celebrated became
famous in their own right, but they remain "the Boys" to all lovers of
Holmes's verses. His own career as a poet had begun during his single
year in the Law School. His later years brought him some additional
skill in polishing his lines and a riper human wisdom, but his native
verse-making talent is as completely revealed in "Old Ironsides,"
published when he was twenty-one, and in "The Last Leaf," composed
a year or two later, as in anything he was to write during the next
half-century. In many respects he was a curious survival of the
cumulative humanities of the eighteenth century. He might have been,
like good Dr. Arbuthnot, an ornament of the Augustan age. He shared with
the English Augustans a liking for the rhymed couplet, an instinctive
social sense, a feeling for the presence of an imaginary audience of
congenial listeners. One still catches the "Hear! Hear!" between his
clever lines. In many of the traits of his mind this "Yankee Frenchman"
resembled such a typical eighteenth century figure as Voltaire. Like
Voltaire, he was tolerant--except toward Calvinism and Homeopathy. In
some of the tricks of his prose style he is like a kindlier Sterne. His
knack for vers de societe was caught from Horace, but he would not have
been a child of his own age without the additional gift of rhetoric and
eloquence which is to be seen in his patriotic poems and his hymns. For
Holmes po