the old ship was allowed to rest
secure in the keeping of a grateful nation. A few years later
Holmes published his first volume of poems, collected from various
periodicals, and gained medals for some essays on medical subjects.
For many years after this his literary work consisted chiefly of
fugitive poems, written very often for special occasions, such as
class anniversaries and dinners.

It was, however, by the publication of a series of essays in the
_Atlantic Monthly_, which was started in 1857, with James Russell
Lowell as editor, that Holmes began his career as the household
intimate of every lover of reading in America. These essays, which
are now collected in four volumes, appeared in the _Atlantic_, at
intervals between the series, between 1857 and 1859, and thus cover
almost the entire period of the author's life as a man of letters.

The first series--_The Autocrat at the Breakfast-Table_--struck the
key-note for the rest, a note which showed the author's heart attuned
in its broad yet subtle sympathy to the heart of his race, and created
such a friendship as rarely exists between author and reader. In the
Autocrat Holmes introduces a variety of characters which at intervals
flit throughout the rest of the series.

The papers are thrown into the form of talks at the breakfast-table
between the author and his fellow-boarders, and so strong is the
personal flavor that they seem to the reader like the home-letters
of an absent member of the family. The landlady and her son, Benjamin
Franklin, the sharp-eyed spinster in black, the young fellow "whose
name seems to be John and nothing else," and the school-teacher,
appear and disappear side by side with Little Boston, Iris, and the
characters of the other series, and emphasize the life-likeness of
the whole. It never seems in reading these papers that the _dramatis
personae_ are anything else than living human beings, with whom Holmes
actually converses around the boarding-house table or at his own
fireside. The series, besides _The Autocrat at the Breakfast-Table_,
includes _The Professor at the Breakfast-Table_, _The Poet at the
Breakfast-Table_, and _Over the Teacups_, the last being separated
from the others by an interval of thirty years.

One of the chief charms of these essays is found in the bits of
biography which stamp them in so many cases as personal history. One
may read here the nature of the man who could thus step back into the
realm of chi