talk of the autocrat,
his humor, always infectious, his logic, his strong common sense,
illumine every page. When he began to write, Dr. Holmes had no settled
plan in his head. In November, 1831, he sent an article to the _New
England Magazine_, published by Buckingham in Boston, followed by
another paper in February, 1832. The idea next occurred to the author
in 1857,--a quarter of a century afterwards, when the editors of the
_Atlantic Monthly_, then starting on its career, begged him to write
something for its pages. He thought of "The Autocrat," and resolved,
as he says, "to shake the same bough again, and see if the ripe fruit
were better or worse than the early windfalls." At a bound "The
Autocrat" leaped into popular favor. The reading public could hardly
wait for the numbers. All sorts of topics are touched upon from nature
to mankind. There is the talk about the trees, which one may read a
dozen times and feel the better for it. And then comes that charming
account of the walk with the school-mistress, when the lovers looked
at the elms, and the roses came and went on the maiden's cheeks. And
here is a paragraph or two which makes men think:

"Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The angel of life winds
them up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the
key into the hand of the Angel of the Resurrection. Tic-tac!
tic-tac! go the wheels of thought; our will cannot stop
them; they cannot stop themselves; sleep cannot still them;
madness only makes them go faster; death alone can break
into the case, and seizing the ever-swinging pendulum, which
we call the heart, silence at last the clicking of the
terrible escapement we have carried so long beneath our
wrinkled foreheads.

"If we could only get at them, as we lie on our pillows and
count the dead beats of thought after thought, and image
after image, jarring through the overtired organ! Will
nobody block those wheels, uncouple that pinion, cut the
string that holds those weights, blow up the infernal
machine with gun-powder? What a passion comes over us
sometimes for silence and rest!--that this dreadful
mechanism, unwinding the endless tapestry of time,
embroidered with spectral figures of life and death, could
have but one brief holiday! Who can wonder that men swing
themselves off from beams in hempen lassos?--that they jump
off from parape