discouraged, and as he supposed alone, and at the very beginning led him out of his darkest places.

I think it was on this that Doctor Holmes spoke with a good deal of feeling about the value of appreciation. He was ready to go back to tell of the pleasure he had received from persons who had written to him, even though he did not know them, to say of how much use some particular line of his had been. Among others he said that Lothrop Motley had told him that, when he was all worn out in his work in a country where he had not many friends, and among stupid old manuscript archives, two lines of Holmes’s braced him up and helped him through:

He was very funny about flattery. “That is the trouble of having so many 103 friends, everybody flatters you. I do not mean to let them hurt me if I can help it, and flattery is not necessarily untrue. But you have to be on your guard when everybody is as kind to you as everybody is to me.”

He said, in passing, that Emerson once quoted two lines of his, and quoted them horribly. They are from the poem called “The Steamboat:”

Emerson quoted them thus:

I was curious to know about Doctor Holmes’s experience of country life, he knows all nature’s processes so well. So he told me how it happened that he went to Pittsfield. It seems that, a century and a half ago, his ancestor, Jacob Wendell, had a royal grant for the whole township there, with some small exception, perhaps. The place was at first called Pontoosoc, then Wendelltown, and only afterward got the name of Pittsfield from William Pitt. One part of the Wendell property descended to Doctor Holmes’s mother. When he had once seen it he was struck with its beauty and fitness 104 for a country home, and asked her that he might have it for his own. It was there that he built a house in which he lived for eight or nine years. He said that the Housatonic winds backwards and forwards through it, so that to go from one end of his estate to the other in a straight line required the crossing it seven times. Here his children grew up, and he and they were enlivened anew every year by long summer days there.

He was most interesting and animated as he spoke of the vigor of life and work and poetical composition which come from being in the open air and living in the country. He wrote, at the request of the neighborhood, his poem of “The Ploughman,” to be read at a cattle-show in Pittsfield. “And when I came to read it afterwards I said, ‘Here it is! Here is open air life, here is what breathing the mountain air and living in the midst of nature does for a man!’ And I want to read you now a piece of that poem, because it contained a prophecy.” And while he was looking for the verses, he said, in the vein of the Autocrat, “Nobody knows but a man’s self how many good things he has done.”

So we found the first volume of the poems, and there is “The Ploughman,” written, observe, as early as 1849.

Now, in 1849, I, who remember, can tell you, every-day people did not much think that Faction was going to unbind her bandogs and set the country at war; and it was only a prophet-poet who saw that there was a chance that men might forge their ploughshares into swords again. But you see from the poem that Holmes was such a prophet-poet, and now, forty-four years after, it was a pleasure to hear him read these lines.

I asked him of his reminiscences of Emerson’s famous Phi Beta Kappa oration at Cambridge, which he has described, as so many others have, as the era of independence in American literature. We both talked of the day, which we remembered, and of the Phi Beta dinner which followed it, when Mr. Everett presided, and bore touching tribute to Charles Emerson, who had just died. Holmes said: “You cannot make the people of this generation understand the effect of Everett’s oratory. I have never felt the fascination of speech as I did in hearing him. Did it ever occur to you,—did I say to you the other day,—that when a man has such a voice as he had, our slight nasal resonance is an advantage and not a disadvantage?”

I was fresher than he from his own book on Emerson, and remembered 105 that he had said there somewhat the same thing. His words are: “It is with delight that one who remembers Everett in his robes of rhetorical splendor; who recalls his full-blown, high-colored, double-flowered periods; the rich, resonant, grave, far-reaching music of his speech, with just enough of nasal vibration to give the vocal sounding-board its proper value in the harmonies of utterance,—it is with delight that such a one recalls the glowing words of Emerson whenever he refers to Edward Everett. It is enough if he himself caught enthusiasm from those eloquent lips. But many a listener has had his youthful enthusiasm fired by that great master of