lmes, and though he
died three years before the Doctor, he seems, for other reasons than
those of chronology, to belong more nearly to the present. Although by
birth as much of a New England Brahmin as Holmes, and in his later years
as much of a Boston and Cambridge idol, he nevertheless touched our
universal American life on many sides, represented us worthily in
foreign diplomacy, argued the case of Democracy with convincing power,
and embodied, as more perfect artists like Hawthorne and Longfellow
could never have done, the subtleties and potencies of the national
temperament. He deserves and reveals the closest scrutiny, but his
personality is difficult to put on paper. Horace Scudder wrote his
biography with careful competence, and Ferris Greenslet has made him
the subject of a brilliant critical study. Yet readers differ widely
in their assessment of the value of his prose and verse, and in their
understanding of his personality.

The external facts of his career are easy to trace and must be set down
here with brevity. A minister's son, and descended from a very old and
distinguished family, he was born at Elmwood in Cambridge in 1819. After
a somewhat turbulent course, he was graduated from Harvard in 1838,
the year of Emerson's "Divinity School Address." He studied law, turned
Abolitionist, wrote poetry, married the beautiful and transcendental
Maria White, and did magazine work in Boston, New York, and
Philadelphia. He was thought by his friends in the eighteen-fifties to
be "the most Shakespearian" man in America. When he was ten years out
of college, in 1848, he published "The Biglow Papers" (First Series), "A
Fable for Critics," and "The Vision of Sir Launfal." After a long visit
to Europe and the death of his wife, he gave some brilliant Lowell
Institute lectures in Boston, and was appointed Longfellow's successor
at Harvard. He went to Europe again to prepare himself, and after
entering upon his work as a teacher made a happy second marriage, served
for four years as the first editor of "The Atlantic," and helped his
friend Charles Eliot Norton edit "The North American Review." The Civil
War inspired a second series of "Biglow Papers" and the magnificent
"Commemoration Ode" of 1865. Then came volume after volume of literary
essays, such as "Among My Books" and "My Study Windows," and an
occasional book of verse. Again he made a long sojourn in Europe,
resigned his Harvard professorship, and in 1877 was ap