it, being a man who took
pleasure in most sorts of experience. He did not affect me, for that one
time, with such a sense of pleasure as Mr. Lowell did--Mr. Lowell, whom I
knew so much better, and who was so big, strong, humorous, kind, learned,
friendly, and delightfully natural.

Dr. Holmes, too, was a delightful companion, and I have merely tried to
make a sort of photographic "snap-shot" at him, in a single casual
moment, one of myriads of such moments. Turning to Dr. Holmes's popular,
as distinct from his professional writings, one is reminded, as one often
is, of the change which seems to come over some books as the reader grows
older. Many books are to one now what they always were; some, like the
Waverley novels and Shakespeare, grow better on every fresh reading.
There are books which filled me, in boyhood or in youth, with a sort of
admiring rapture, and a delighted wonder at their novelty, their
strangeness, freshness, greatness. Thus Homer, and the best novels of
Thackeray, and of Fielding, the plays of Moliere and Shakespeare, the
poems of--well, of all the real poets, moved this astonishment of
admiration, and being read again, they move it still. On a different
level, one may say as much about books so unlike each other, as those of
Poe and of Sir Thomas Browne, of Swift and of Charles Lamb.

There are, again, other books which caused this happy emotion of wonder,
when first perused, long since, but which do so no longer. I am not much
surprised to find Charles Kingsley's novels among them.

In the case of Dr. Holmes's books, I am very sensible of this
disenchanting effect of time and experience. "The Professor at the
Breakfast Table" and the novels came into my hands when I was very young,
in "green, unknowing youth." They seemed extraordinary, new, fantasies
of wisdom and wit; the reflections were such as surprised me by their
depth, the illustrations dazzled by their novelty and brilliance.
Probably they will still be as fortunate with young readers, and I am to
be pitied, I hope, rather than blamed, if I cannot, like the wise thrush--

"Recapture
The first fine careless rapture."

By this time, of course, one understands many of the constituents of Dr.
Holmes's genius, the social, historical, ancestral, and professional
elements thereof. Now, it is the business of criticism to search out and
illustrate these antecedents, and it seems a very odd and unlucky thing,
that the result