But we
have kept all the rest!
"Every fourth man in our class is a poet. Sam. Smith belongs to our
class, who wrote 'My Country 't is of Thee.' Sam. Smith will live when
Longfellow, Whittier, and all the rest of us have gone into
oblivion....
"Queer man, ----. Looked ten years older than he was, like Caliban.
Calibans look always ten years older than they are. A perfect potato
of a man. If five hundred pieces of a man had been flung together from
different points and stuck, they could not have been more awkwardly
concocted than he was.
"James Freeman Clarke was in our class. Ever read his history of the
'Ten Great Religions?' Very good book. Nobody knows how much Clarke is
until he reads that book. How he surprises us from time to time. Came
out well about 'bolting,' with regard to Butler the other day. Writes
good verses, too,--not as good as mine, but good verses." ... Holmes
was abstemious and never ceased talking. "Most men write too much. I
would rather risk my future fame upon one lyric than upon ten volumes.
But I have said 'Boston is the hub of the Universe;' I will rest upon
that."
He spoke also with great feeling of the women who came to him for
literary advice and assistance. ----, he says, is his daughter in
letters. He has only seen her once, but he has been a faithful
correspondent and assistant to her.
Sumner said some one had called ---- "an impediment in the path of
science." What did he mean? "It means just this," said Holmes: "----
is no longer young, and I was reading the other day in a book on the
Sandwich Islands of an old Fejee man who had been carried away among
strangers, but who prayed that he might be carried home and his brains
beaten out in peace by his son, according to the custom of those
lands.
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