y excited by this vigorous
onslaught, the ripe result of thirty years' study and experience, and
disclaimed all responsibility for its sentiments.

"Throw out opium," said Dr. Holmes: "throw out a few specifics
which a physician is hardly needed to apply; throw out wine, which
is a food, and the vapors of ether producing anaesthesia; and then
sink the whole materia medica, _as now used_, to the bottom of the
sea: the result would be all the better for mankind, and all the
worse for the fishes."

Of his life-long battle against the Calvinistic theology all his readers
know. He has never lost an opportunity of declaring his antipathy to the
theology of his fathers, and of pouring sarcasm and ridicule upon it.
His father was a Calvinistic divine of the strictest sect; but Dr.
Holmes himself has been a life-long Unitarian, and an aggressive one. He
owns a pew in King's Chapel and is a regular attendant. Perhaps he is a
little of a fatalist. At any rate he always has eyes for--

THE TWO STREAMS.

Behold the rocky wall
That down its sloping sides
Pours the swift rain-drops, blending as they fall
In rushing river-tides.

Yon stream, whose sources run
Turned by a pebble's edge,
Is Athabasca, rolling toward the sun
Through the cleft mountain-ledge.

The slender rill had strayed,
But for the slanting stone,
To evening's ocean, with the tangled braid
Of foam-flecked Oregon.

So from the heights of will
Life's parting stream descends,
And, as a moment turns its slender rill,
Each widening torrent bends.

From the same cradle's side,
From the same mother's knee,--
One to long darkness and the frozen tide,
One to the Peaceful Sea.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

In the old manor-house of Elmwood in Cambridge, close to what is now
mount Auburn Cemetery, our finest representative man of letters, James
Russell Lowell, was born and bred. His father and his grandfather before
him lived here, the former a Unitarian clergyman of the old school, well
read, earnest, somewhat narrow, but an essentially religious man. His
mother was a gifted woman, and a woman of high culture for those days.
She read foreign languages, was a musician, and a woman of high
breeding, and she stamped her own individuality strongly upon at least
three of her children.

The house is a large three-story structure, built o