OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.

Cromwell Argus, Volume XXVI, Issue 1323, 28 August 1894, Page 6

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.

Dr Oliver Wendell Holmes belongs to that little group of chosen men who will be looked back to in future centuries as the creators of American literature. Of that bright, particular band he alone remains. Howells, Julian Hawthorne, James, &c., belong already to the second and not the first period. The first period stands for the dawn of culture in America. It was heralded in by Washington Irving. Before him American literature did not exist, Bryant, Longfellow, Emerson, Bancroft, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Whittier, Lowell—all, all are now gone. Dr Oliver Wendell Holmes, who is incapable even of growing old, still remains. He is one of those authors whose personality pierces. He is as good as his books —I had (says Rev. H. R. Haw’eis, in The Young Mart) almost said better, and that is indeed high praise. Emerson says that we must not take our gods from their pedestals, and must look at our great men from a distance ; but Oliver Wendell Holmes can afford to come off his pedestal. He has that peculiar quality possessed in the highest degree by Balzac, which made him the universal confidant and confessor of all French womanhood. Balzac saw deep, vibrated intuitively, portrayed faithfully, and the women turned to him with trust and gratitude, as to one who knew their sufferings and admitted their grievances, loved them generously and could read their hearts out loud for them, whilst standing apart, himself unsubdued, living in an ideal world created by an almost necromantic imagination. As we read “The Professor at the Breakfast Table,” we are at once in contact with a person who is dow'ered with suchlike electric affiuities; but he is sweeter, simpler, yet not less subtle than the great French novelist. He has never attempted so much, but he has done more good, although, like all marked writers, his pressure is not equal upon all souls, and his attractive power is largely conditioned by the natures that drift within the radius of his influence. We must always remember, as he | reminds us somewhere, that the very qualities in us which attract some repel others. I have known people who could not read Carlyle, others who could not grapple with Emerson, and only the other day I met a very intelligent person of the dry-as-dust school who thought Dr Holmes a mere slipshod trifle in literature, and could not imagine what charm people could find in such poor wandering stuff. Ah, dear master, do we so often find a soul, sensible to human pains and joys, and the subtle fluctuations ofthe heart, as an Hilolian harp in the wind, that we can afford to dismiss thee with a shallow sneer?