nly living for your pleasure.
Still I knew, as a matter of fact, that this was not so, and very
unwillingly I took myself away.

* * * * *

As I walked home I meditated on the fate of a first-rate book in our
time. Holmes had expressed unaffected surprise that I spoke with the
gratitude which I felt about his "Life of Emerson." The book must have
cost him the hard work of a year. It is as remarkable a study as one
poet ever made of another. Yet I think he said to me that no one had
seemed to understand the care and effort which he had given to it.

Here is the position in the United States now about the criticism of
such work. At about the time that the "North American Review" ceased
to review books, there came, as if by general consent, an end to all
elaborate criticism of new books here.

I think myself that this is a thing very much to be regretted. In old
times, whoever wrote a good book was tolerably sure that at least one
competent person would study it and write down what he thought about
it; and, from at least one point of view, an author had a prospect of
knowing how his book struck other people. Now we have nothing but the
hasty sketches, sometimes very good, which are written for the daily
or weekly press.

[Illustration: O. W. HOLMES'S SUMMER RESIDENCE AT BEVERLY FARMS.]

So it happens that I, for one, have never seen any fit recognition of
the gift which Doctor Holmes made to our time and to the next
generation when he made his study of Emerson's life for the "American
Men of Letters" series. Apparently he had not. Just think of it! Here
is a poet, the head of our "Academy," so far as there is any such
Academy, who is willing to devote a year of his life to telling you
and me what Emerson was, from his own personal recollections of a near
friend, whom he met as often as once a week, and talked with perhaps
for hours at a time, and with whom he talked on literary and
philosophical subjects. More than this, this poet has been willing to
go through Emerson's books again, to re-read them as he had originally
read them when they came out, and to make for you and me a careful
analysis of all these books. He is one of five people in the country
who are competent to tell what effect these books produced on the
country as they appeared from time to time. And, being competent, he
makes the time to tell us this thing. That is a sort of good fortune
which, so far as I remember, has