kling with droll analogies, sudden puns,
and unexpected turns of rhyme and phrase. Among the best of them are
_Nux Postcoenatica_, _A Modest Request_, _Ode for a Social Meeting_,
_The Boys_, and _Rip Van Winkle, M.D_. Holmes's favorite measure, in
his longer poems, is the heroic couplet which Pope's example seems to
have consecrated forever to satiric and didactic verse. He writes as
easily in this meter as if it were prose, and with much of Pope's
epigrammatic neatness. He also manages with facility the anapaestics
of Moore and the ballad stanza which Hood had made the vehicle for his
drolleries. It cannot be expected that verses manufactured to pop with
the corks and fizz with the champagne at academic banquets should much
outlive the occasion; or that the habit of producing such verses on
demand should foster in the producer that "high seriousness" which
Matthew Arnold asserts to be one mark of all great poetry. Holmes's
poetry is mostly on the colloquial level, excellent society-verse, but
even in its serious moments too smart and too pretty to be taken very
gravely; with a certain glitter, knowingness, and flippancy about it,
and an absence of that self-forgetfulness and intense absorption in its
theme which characterize the work of the higher imagination. This is
rather the product of fancy and wit. Wit, indeed, in the old sense of
quickness in the perception of analogies, is the staple of his mind.
His resources in the way of figure, illustration, allusion, and
anecdote are wonderful. Age cannot wither him nor custom stale his
infinite variety, and there is as much powder in his latest
pyrotechnics as in the rockets which he sent up half a century ago.
Yet, though the humorist in him rather outweighs the poet, he has
written a few things, like the _Chambered Nautilus_ and _Homesick in
Heaven_, which are as purely and deeply poetic as the _One-Hoss Shay_
and the _Prologue_ are funny. Dr. Holmes is not of the stuff of which
idealists and enthusiasts are made. As a physician and a student of
science, the facts of the material universe have counted for much with
him. His clear, positive, alert intellect was always impatient of
mysticism. He had the sharp eye of the satirist and the man of the
world for oddities of dress, dialect, and manners. Naturally the
transcendental movement struck him on its ludicrous side, and in his
_After-Dinner Poem_, read at the Phi Beta Kappa dinner at Cambridge in
1843, he h