, where one of the company brought tears
of homesickness into the eyes of his _sodales_ by saying that the
tinkle of the ice in the champagne-glasses reminded him of the
cow-bells in the rocky old pastures of New England. In 1836 he printed
his first collection of poems. The volume contained, among a number of
pieces broadly comic, like the _September Gale_, the _Music Grinders_,
and the _Ballad of the Oyster-man_--which at once became widely
popular--a few poems of a finer and quieter temper, in which there was
a quaint blending of the humorous and the pathetic. Such were _My
Aunt_ and the _Last Leaf_--which Abraham Lincoln found "inexpressibly
touching," and which it is difficult to read without the double tribute
of a smile and a tear. The volume contained also _Poetry: A Metrical
Essay_, read before the Harvard Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society,
which was the first of that long line of capital occasional poems which
Holmes has been spinning for half a century with no sign of fatigue and
with scarcely any falling off in freshness; poems read or spoken or
sung at all manner of gatherings, public and private, at Harvard
commencements, class days, and other academic anniversaries; at
inaugurations, centennials, dedications of cemeteries, meetings of
medical associations, mercantile libraries, Burns clubs, and New
England societies; at rural festivals and city fairs; openings of
theaters, layings of corner-stones, birthday celebrations, jubilees,
funerals, commemoration services, dinners of welcome or farewell to
Dickens, Bryant, Everett, Whittier, Longfellow, Grant, Farragut, the
Grand Duke Alexis, the Chinese embassy, and what not. Probably no poet
of any age or clime has written so much and so well to order. He has
been particularly happy in verses of a convivial kind, toasts for big
civic feasts, or post-prandial rhymes for the _petit comite_--the snug
little dinners of the chosen few; his

"The quaint trick to cram the pithy line
That cracks so crisply over bubbling wine."

And although he could write on occasion a _Song for a Temperance
Dinner_, he has preferred to chant the praise of the punch bowl and to

"feel the old convivial glow (unaided) o'er me stealing,
The warm, champagny, old-particular-brandy-punchy feeling."

It would be impossible to enumerate the many good things of this sort
which Holmes has written, full of wit and wisdom, and of humor lightly
dashed with sentiment and spar