hem here. The last time I was at that
table he sat alone there among those great memories; but he was as gay as
ever I saw him; his wit sparkled, his humor gleamed; the poetic touch was
deft and firm as of old; the serious curiosity, the instant sympathy
remained. To the witness he was pathetic, but to himself he could only
have been interesting, as the figure of a man surviving, in an alien but
not unfriendly present, the past which held so vast a part of all that
had constituted him. If he had thought of himself in this way, it would
have been without one emotion of self-pity, such as more maudlin souls
indulge, but with a love of knowledge and wisdom as keenly alert as in
his prime.

For three privileged years I lived all but next-door neighbor of Doctor
Holmes in that part of Beacon Street whither he removed after he left his
old home in Charles Street, and during these years I saw him rather
often. We were both on the water side, which means so much more than the
words say, and our library windows commanded the same general view of the
Charles rippling out into the Cambridge marshes and the sunsets, and
curving eastward under Long Bridge, through shipping that increased
onward to the sea. He said that you could count fourteen towns and
villages in the compass of that view, with the three conspicuous
monuments accenting the different attractions of it: the tower of
Memorial Hall at Harvard; the obelisk on Bunker Hill; and in the centre
of the picture that bulk of Tufts College which he said he expected to
greet his eyes the first thing when he opened them in the other world.
But the prospect, though generally the same, had certain precious
differences for each of us, which I have no doubt he valued himself as
much upon as I did. I have a notion that he fancied these were to be
enjoyed best in his library through two oval panes let into the bay there
apart from the windows, for he was apt to make you come and look out of
them if you got to talking of the view before you left. In this pleasant
study he lived among the books, which seemed to multiply from case to
case and shelf to shelf, and climb from floor to ceiling. Everything was
in exquisite order, and the desk where he wrote was as scrupulously neat
as if the sloven disarray of most authors' desks were impossible to him.
He had a number of ingenious little contrivances for helping his work,
which he liked to show you; for a time a revolving book-case at the
corn