Evening star., 1932-02-07

chief ornament of the Supreme Court.
Nor can much be told of his more solid
nouriShment, so vast is the menu. He
admireS ProuSt, Gabriel Tarde and Jean
Henri Fabre; he is the intellectual IA
miliar of Herbert Spencer; of Darwin,
Pepys, De Quincy, Wordsworth, Walpole
and scores of others, ancient and modern.
At 10 the Justice wrote to Owen Wis
ter, as recorded in Roosevelt: The
Story of a Friendship" that he was hav-
ing very little literature that Winter.
Zone of my favorite paradoXes," he
noted, lis that everything is dead in Is
COR 5O) years. The author no longer
says to you what he means to say If
he is original, his new truths have been
developed in improved form-his errors
exploded If he is not philosopher but
an artist, the emotional emphasis has
changed. But for all that, great man
is diScernible as great And the bottom
feelings don't change, even if the objects
of them do. I found the intensity of
Dantes spiritual rapture SO thrilling and
absorbing that I could think of little else,
and the song of his words is divine.
Shakespeare will say a few words now
road to Paradise CIn Belmont Lives a
Lady and so forth). But Dante does it
every 20 lines, and he carries you there,
too. .. He weeps, for he is Stin in
Purgatory, but he is q poet and a trOuba-
dour, and he goes singing through his
tears. However I must leave a little
room for RabelaiS. . I read the last
two books. What temperament, what
gusto Everything beginning to hum,
like culture in Chicago. An what seed
book, how many germs of Swift, Sterne,
perhaps even Thackeray -
While Wendell Holmes was still boy,
Emerson succeeded Theodore Parker as
lecturer at the old Music Hall, in BoS-
ton. DR.. Parker, whom Emerson called
one of the four great men of his time,
was an incendiary gospeller, and may
well have Influenced the young Holmes;
for DR.. Parker was militant abolitionist,
and said he wrote his sermons with a
pistol on his desk and a drawn sword
within easy reach. Emerson, when he
assembled the platform, delivered mes
SageS which, if less militant, were still
stirring enough, both religiOuSly and
politically, for his characterization
kept step with JefferSonian principles
in the governmental field.
After hearing an EmerSonian discourse
Wendell Holmes often ran out of the hall,
in the hope of a walk home with the
sage, and on such an occasion he con-
fided that he had begun to study Plato.
He was then IA years old.
You should hold Plato at arms
length" Emerson advised Say to him:
You have been pleasing the world for
1000 years; see whether you can please
me-"
1t was year later, perhaps, that the
youth wrote an essay on Plato, an essay
primarily intended to be critical, and
laid it respectfully on the knee Of the
master. Emerson read it attentively.
Yes" he mused, you have done very
well, but you haven't killed Plato. When
you shoot at king you must kill him."
Often in later years, Holmes meditated
this reproof. 1t seemed the more sig
niicent as time went on because Emer-
sons philosophy was so often compared
with Platonism. Not the transcendental-
iSt but the philoSophic lecturer infu-
enced the inquiring mind of Wendell
Holmes. The philosopher said that
buildings, customs, rituals, institutions
were perishable and ephemeral, that
thoughts we're things, were realities and
causes. We find the jurist in later years
urging his associates to think things"
Emerson's celebrated saying that "a
foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of
little minds, adored by little statesmen
and philosophers and divines," might al
most have been the test from which
Holmes was speaking in The Common
Law when he asserted. "The truth is