This emancipation in
expression did not extend altogether into the practical working of his
life. Conventionalities had a strong hold upon him. He loved to avoid
the great world when it was inconvenient, and to get a certain freedom
outside of it; but once in the current, the manners of the Romans were
his own. He reminded one sometimes of Hawthorne's saying that "in
these days men are born in their clothes," although Dr. Holmes's
conventions were more easily shuffled off than a casual observer would
believe. Nothing could be farther from the ordinary idea of the
romantic "man of genius" than was his well-trimmed little figure, and
nothing more surprising and delightful than the way in which his
childlikeness of nature would break out and assert itself. He declared
one morning that he had discovered the happiest animal in creation--
"next to a poet, of course, if we may call him an animal; it is the
acheron, the parasite of the honey-bee. And why? Because he attaches
himself to the wing of the bee, is carried without exertion to the
sweetest flowers, where the bee gathers the honey while the acheron
eats it; and all the while the music of the bee attends him as he is
borne through the air."
He met Hawthorne for the first time, I think, in this informal way.
Holmes had been speaking of Renan, whose books interested him.
"A long while ago," he began, "I said Rome or Reason; now I am half
inclined to put it, Rome or Renan.
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