The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1894-04-27


fleet that the year 1909, which gave Glad
stone to the world also gave us Tenny-
son, Darwin, Lincoln, Edgar Allen Poe
and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Two only
of this illustmous group are living, and
both are relatively Grand Old Men, says
the New York World.
1t was in 1857 that DR.. Holmes flashed
upon the American public. There are a
great many of US who can remember
the delightful surprise with which we
greeted the ~'Autocrat of the Breakfast
Table" that brilliant series of articles
which brought the Atlantic Monthly
into immediate vogue. Before that the
doctor had given his life both to law
and to medicine, with occasional dips
into poetry. With the "Autocrat of the
Breakfast Table he became the most
popular writer in America. Those pa
pers were unique; they embodied in a
new way the authority of DR.. Johnson
and the rollicking humor Of Father
Prout. They were as sweet as Gold
smith, as dainty as Leigh Hunt and as
tender as Washington Irving. There
were no chunks of humor to be cut out
and pasted away, but a pervasive
sparkle and bloom covered the whole
series. In those papers there shone out
for the first time that perennial gayety
of heart and that vital exuberance
which are still undimned in the old age
of the autocrat
AS he himself has said, health and
longevity are not matters of diet, but
of temperament.
In the well-knewn house on Beacon
street he still sits, in comparatively
good health, with unbroken faculties at
eighty-four; still writes down his
4 III
callers, and still treats them all with
the genial kindness OF old. When we
stop to consider his contemporaries, and
look for the brilliant men that he drew
about him on the Atlantic Monthly, we
must regard him as the last of the
most celebrated group of writers our
country has produced.
SEEN IN HIS STUDY.
I saw him for a moment as he came
down the steps of the Beacon street
house, muff1ed and leaning upon the
arm OF his son, the judge. 1t was n
brisk spring day, but he seemed to
enjoy it, and stepped with much more
vigor than is usual at his age. 1 could
not help thinking of what some one had
said-that he resembled shrivelled lit
tie winter apple. Seen, however, in his
own cosy study, the inner fire warns
up the frost-bitten surface and you
F
ence- of wonderfully preserved spirits
They tell me that his life now is one of
unceasing hygienic vigilance. and that
he attributes his good health to the
extreme care he has taken of himself
He never was very robust man, but
he had an unfailing source of nervous
power, which in many orga MIA tons
supplies the place of vital ruggedness.
believe 1t is matter of pride with
him to live to be a hundred, if he can
just to show how attention to details
will save mans life. He lives strictly
by rule, his time being scrupulously di-
Vided and apportioned out in daily
routine. He writes according to sched-
ule, he exercises by rule and eats and
reads according to a law of his own
He has fallen into this regimen and
pursues it witout any irksomeness. One
thing he is little afraid of, and that
is pneumonia, brought on by a sudden
cold. To prevent this his rooms are
equipped with barometers, thermom-
eters, aerometers. He never gets out of
bed or takes his bath until the atmos-
/ phere and the water are right. He never
tires himself with visitors, but has a
graceful way of cutting them off when
/ they begin to exhaust him
| But, as he himself has said. all this is
quite subsidiary to the perennial font of
/ a gay heart, which has preserved him
fresh and elastic up to this time. He has
! lived on into peSsimistic era and re-
tanned much of the old philosophy and
/ old faith that have made so many green
ages. L is this sunny disposition that
/ has overlooked into all his literature
and endeared him to the American peo-
! pie. No one has so large a correspond
ence as he, and most of his letters are
| from strangers. l believe if his daily
/ schedule were seen, there would be
! found place on it like this: Half an
/ hour to write autographs and send
them" He is overloaded with manu-
! scripts that are sent from all over the
! country with a request that he shall
read and pass upon their merits AS
: very many of these are merely poems
/ he usually complies.
! At his summer home at Beverly
/ Farms DR.. Holmes has spent the great
( er and the pleasanter part of his ma
4 ture life. 1t is a plain country home
stead, standing a little way back from
the road, with a bed of flowers in front
and a great rock behind covered with
/ clambering vines. 1t is the typical New
| England home, without obtrusive ele-
gance, but everywhere betokening sub
stantial comfort. Beside a broad open
/ fireplace in the study is the poets ia
vorite chair, and near it is another. al
ways awaiting the eXpectant guest.
LAST OF A FAMOUS COTERIE.
/ The group of Americans to which
/ Holmes belongs includes Hawthorne.
I Longfellow, Thoreau, Emerson, Lowell,
/ Whittier and Margaret Fuller. He is the
last OF this great company, and it is
perhaps too soon to fix with accuracy
his relative place in that group. But it
| is not too soon to say that none of them
! has had more readers, and few of them
| have been so universally enjoyed. Pos
terity will probably not rank him with
! Longfellow and Lowell as a poet. nor
! give him credit for the same ascetic
love of nature that distinguished Tho
reau. His novels, elsie Venner" and
THE Guardian Angel" can hardly be
placed in the same category with Iayy-
thorne's best work. and he was not the
man of affairs that Lowell was
| Notwithstanding all rhis he had a
| sparkle, a versatility. I, gracious philos-
ophy and a fund of knoWla Ice chat car
ried him over a wider held than per-
haps any of them attempted. "Flgie
| Venner' failed to be as great a novel
as Hawthorne has written simply be-
cause DR.. Holmes treated a psycholog-
zeal mystery from scientific and not
from g. mystical standpoint. He tried
to work out in his imagination young
girl whose mother while pregnant had
been bitten by a rattlesnake, and the
child when born possessed some mys-
FERROUS qualities of the serpent.
This motif is strange, fanciful and
far-fetched. nor is it made plausible by
the art of the artist or the skill of the
scientific physician. 1t can never by
any possibility be placed by the side Of
lHawthorne's Marble Faun" 1t is said
! that DIR. Holmes wrote nothing with
greater satisfaction than Zone Hundred
Days in Europe. - He was so Hospital
bly, received over there; so feted and
admired in the most distinguished Eng.