IN SCHOOL-DAYS

Still sits the school-house by the road,
A ragged beggar sunning;

Around it still the sumachs grow,

And blackberry vines are running.

Within, the master's desk is seen,
Deep scarred by raps official;
The warping floor, the battered seats,
The jack-knife's carved initial;

The charcoal frescos on its wall;

Its door's worn sill, betraying

The feet that, creeping slow to school,
Went storming out to playing!

Long years ago a winter sun
Shone over it at setting;
Lit up its western window-panes,
And low eaves' icy fretting.

It touched the tangled golden curls,
And brown eyes full of grieving,
Of one who still her steps delayed

When all the school were leaving.

For near her stood the little boy
Her childish favor singled;
His cap pulled low upon a face

Where pride and shame were mingled.

Pushing with restless feet the snow

To right and left, he lingered;

As restlessly her tiny hands.

The blue-checked apron fingered.

10

15

20

25

He saw her lift her eyes; he felt
The soft hand's light caressing,
And heard the tremble of her voice,
As if a fault confessing.

"I'm sorry that I spelt the word:
I hate to go above you,

Because," the brown eyes lower fell,—
"Because, you see, I love you!"

Still memory to a gray-haired man
That sweet child-face is showing.
Dear girl! the grasses on her grave
Have forty years been growing!

He lives to learn, in life's hard school,
How few who pass above him
Lament their triumph and his loss,

Like her, because they love him.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

1809-1894

If Lowell is our chief critical essayist and Emerson our greatest philosophical thinker, Oliver Wendell Holmes is no less surely to be classed with Irving as one of our two greatest informal essayists. We think of Holmes first as a humorist and the author of The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, that unique book of informal, chatty talks or essays. But he is also a poet, if not of the very first rank among our American authors, certainly very near to it, for two or three of his lyrics, as well as much of his inimitable humorous poetry, will bear comparison with the best of their kind. Moreover, he is the most human, the most intimately personal, and the most consistently optimistic of all the New England school, and hence he is the favorite author of thousands of readers who would not think of classing his poetry or even his prose as the greatest produced in America. Though he was not autocratic in his disposition, we may call him the beloved "Autocrat" of American literature.

Holmes was born at Cambridge, Massachusetts, August 29, 1809, just two years later than Longfellow and Whittier, in the same year with Poe and Lincoln, and ten years earlier than Lowell and Whitman. He outlived practically all of his literary contemporaries, dying in 1894, two years. later than Whittier and Whitman, twelve years later than Longfellow and Emerson, and forty-five years later than Edgar Allan Poe. It seems almost unbelievable that Poe, who was born in the same year as Holmes had been dead eight years before Holmes began his famous "Autocrat" papers in the Atlantic Monthly.

He was descended from what he called the "Brahmin caste" of New England, on both sides of the house. His father, Abiel Holmes, the pastor of the First Congregational Church of Cambridge, traced his line of descent even beyond the John Holmes who came from England to Connecticut in 1686. His mother, Sarah Wendell, was the daughter of Oliver Wendell of Boston, for whom the poet was named, and she was directly connected with the Dudleys, Bradstreets, Quincys, and other distinguished New England