y but the form of verse might render
us timely service. The controlling couplet might stay with a touch a
modern grief, as it ranged in order the sorrows of Canning for his son.
But it should not be attempted without a distinct intention of submission
on the part of the writer. The couplet transgressed against, trespassed
upon, shaken off, is like a law outstripped, defied--to the dignity
neither of the rebel nor of the rule. To Letters do we look now for the
guidance and direction which the very closeness of the emotion taking us
by the heart makes necessary. Shall not the Thing more and more, as we
compose ourselves to literature, assume the honour, the hesitation, the
leisure, the reconciliation of the Word?

DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

It is good to go, now and again--let the American phrase be
permitted--'back of' some of our contemporaries. We never desired them
as coevals. We never wished to share an age with them; we share nothing
else with them. And we deliver ourselves from them by passing, in
literature, into the company of an author who wrote before their time,
and yet is familiarly modern. To read Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, then,
is to go behind the New Humorist--into a time before he was, or his
Humour. Obviously we go in like manner behind many another, but the
funny writer of the magazines is suggested because in reference to him
our act has a special significance. We connect him with Dr. Holmes by a
reluctant ancestry, by an impertinent descent. It may be objected that
such a connection is but a trivial thing to attribute, as a conspicuous
incident, to a man of letters. So it is. But the triviality has wide
allusions. It is often a question which of several significant
trivialities a critic shall choose in his communication with a reader who
does not insist that all the grave things shall be told him. And, by the
way, are we ever sufficiently grateful for that reader, whom the last few
years have given to us, or to whom we have been given by the last few
years? A trivial connexion has remote and negative issues. To go to Dr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes's period is to get rid of many things; to go to
himself is especially to get rid of the New Humour, yet to stand at its
unprophetic source. And we love such authors as Dickens and this
American for their own sake, refusing to be aware of their corrupt
following. We would make haste to ignore their posterity, and to assure
them that we