He was filled with
righteous indignation, in reading Carlyle, to find a passage where,
hearing the door-bell ring one morning when he was very busy, he
exclaimed that he was afraid it was "the man Emerson!" Yet Dr. Holmes
was himself one of the most carefully guarded men, through his years
of actual production, who ever lived and wrote. His wife absorbed her
life in his, and mounted guard to make sure that interruption was
impossible. Nevertheless, he was eminently a lover of men, or he could
not have drawn them perpetually to his side.
His writings were never aimed too high; his sole wish was to hit the
heart, if possible; but if a shot hit the head also, he showed a
childlike pride in the achievement.
When the moment came to meet men face to face, what unrivaled gayety
and good cheer possessed him! He was king of the dinner-table during a
large part of the century. He loved to talk, but he was excited and
quickened by the conversation of others, for reverence was never
absent from his nature. How incomparable his gift of conversation was,
it will be difficult, probably impossible, for any one to understand
who had never known him. It was not that he was wiser, or wittier, or
more profound, or more radiant with humor, than some other
distinguished men; the shades of Macaulay, Sydney Smith, De Quincey,
and Coleridge rise up before us from the past, and among his
contemporaries we recall the sallies of Tom Appleton, the charm of
Agassiz, of Cornelius Felton, and others of the Saturday Club; but
with Dr.
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