speare's birth, we have astrology, vinous processes, and alembic projection, following upon one another as illustrations of the coming nativity. Nor have we any writer whose imagery is oftener strong and exquisite: as in the description of a snowy winter landscape."-E. C. Stedman.

"Lowell's prose writings are as remarkable as his poetry. The copiousness of his illustrations, the richness of his imagery, the easy flow of his sentences, the keenness of his wit, give to his reviews and essays a fascinating charm that would place him in the front rank of our prose writers, if he did not occupy a similar position among our poets."-George William Curtis.

"Nothing in his first volume, 'A Year's Life,' suggests the throng of subtle thoughts and images which almost confuse us by their multiplicity in The Cathedral.'"-E. P. Whipple.

"His ideality and plastic faculty gave to the train of weighty thought the graces of image and simile; and at length the sonorous sentences seemed moving to the sound of music, like a well-ordered army, glittering in sunlight."-F. H. Underwood.

ILLUSTRATIONS.

"Night has no silence like this of busy day. All the batteries of noise are spiked. We see the movement of life as a deaf man sees it, a mere wraith of the clamorous existence that inflicts itself on our ears when the ground is bare. The earth is clothed in innocence as a garment. Every wound of the landscape is healed; whatever was stiff has been sweetly rounded as the breasts of Aphrodite; what was unsightly has been covered gently with a soft splendor, as if, Cowley would have said, nature had cleverly let fall her handkerchief to hide it."-A Good Word for Winter.

"The most beautiful thing I have seen at sea, all the more so that I had never heard of it, is the trail of a shoal of fish through the phosphorescent water. It is like a flight of silver rockets or the streaming of northern lights through that silent nether heaven.

I thought nothing could go beyond that rustling star-foam which was churned up by our ship's bows or those eddies and disks of dreamy flame that rose and wandered out of sight behind us.' Leaves from My Journal at Sea.

Dryden, by his powerful example, by the charm of his verse, which combines vigor and fluency in a measure perhaps never reached by any other of our poets, and above all because it is never long before the sunshine of his cheerful good sense breaks through the clouds of rhetoric and gilds the clipped hedges over which his thought clambers like an unpruned vine, did more than all others combined to bring about the triumphs of French standards in taste and French principles in criticism."-Essay on Pope.

12. Colloquial Ease.-"Biglow, like Burns, makes the dialect he employs flexible to every mood of thought and passion, from good sense as solid as granite to the most bewitching descriptions of nature and the loftiest affirmations of conscience."-E. P. Whipple.

"He carried style absolutely into conversation, where indeed it freely disguised itself as intensely colloquial wit.". Henry James.

"It is with some apprehension that the present writer ventures to quote a stanza in the native dialect; though full of delicate feeling, expressed with the inimitable art of a great poet, the unlettered style suggests only what is ridiculous' to the general,' who can see nothing touching in the sentiment of a rustic, and are not softened by tears unless shed into a broidered handkerchief."—F. H. Underwood.

ILLUSTRATIONS.

66 Suppose we grant that winter is the sleep of the year-what then? I take it upon me to say that his dreams are finer than the best reality of his waking rivals. For my own part,

I think winter a pretty wide-awake old boy, and his bluff sincerity and hearty ways are more congenial to my mood and

more wholesome for me than any charms of which his rivals are capable."—A Good Word for Winter.

"We cannot have fine buildings till we are less in a hurry. We snatch our education like a meal at a railway station, just in time to make us dyspeptic. The whistle shrieks, and we must rush or lose our places in the great train of life. Our very villages seem in motion, following westward the bewitching music of some Pied Piper of Hamelin. We still feel the great push toward sundown given to the peoples somewhere in the gray dawn of history. The cliff-swallow alone of all animate nature emigrates eastward.”—A Moosehead Journal. "Were you ever alone with the sun? simple question; but I never was, in the full till I was held up to him one cloudless day on the broad buckler of the ocean. I suppose one might have the same feeling in the desert. I remember getting something like it years ago when I climbed alone to the top of a mountain, and lay face up on the hot gray moss, striving to get a notion of how an Arab might feel."-At Sea.

You think it a very

sense of the word,

"I confess that I come to the treatment of Pope with diffidence. I was brought up in the old superstition that he was the greatest poet that ever lived, and when I came to find out that I had instincts of my own and my mind was brought in contact with the apostles of a more esoteric doctrine of poetry, I felt an ardent desire for smashing the idols I had been brought up to worship."—Essay on Pope.

13. Homeliness."It [The Vision of Sir Launfal'] was woven of the homeliest, the most ungainly material."E. C. Stedman.

"Even his lectures on subjects comparatively dry and dull

• were brightened by the ceaseless flow of humor, which was often homely but never coarse. Indeed, no man drew more careful distinctions between what was homely and what was vulgar than the praised and abused author of 'The Biglow Papers.' The homeliness, or vulgarity, which the writer ingeniously defends, gave them ['The Big

low Papers'] half their charm with the half-educated masses.' -W. W. Story.

"They [the speakers in The Biglow Papers'] expressed their opinions upon topics in which they could not but be interested and in words which were habitual with them—in their simple, honest, homely, down right, every dayspeech."— R. H. Stoddard.

ILLUSTRATIONS.

"It has a good chance of being pretty; but, like most American towns, it is in a hobble-de-hoy age, growing yet; one cannot tell what may happen. A child of great promise of beauty is often spoiled by its second teeth... There is something

pokerish about a deserted dwelling even in daylight.”—A Moosehead Journal.

"The only event of the journey hither was a boy hawking exhilaratingly the last great railroad smash. Other details

of my dreadful ride I will spare you. Suffice it to say that I arrived here in safety, in complexion like an Ethiopian serenader half got-up, and so broiled and peppered that I was more like a devilled kidney than anything else I can think of.”—A Moosehead Journal.

"Who has never felt an almost irresistible temptation, and seemingly not self-originated, to let himself go? to let his mind gallop and kick and cavort and roll like a horse turned loose? in short, as we Yankees say, 'to speak out in meeting?' Who never had it suggested to him by the fiend to break in at a funeral with the real character of the deceased instead of that Mrs. Grundyfied view of him which the clergyman is so painfully elaborating in his prayer?"-Essay on Witchcraft.

HOLMES, 1809-1894

Biographical Outline.-Oliver Wendell Holmes, born at Cambridge, Mass., August 29, 1809; father an orthodox Congregational clergyman, mother descended from Evart Jansen Wendell, who came from Friesland in 1640; ancestors well-to-do; at fifteen Holmes enters Phillips Academy, Andover, where he remains one year; at sixteen he enters Harvard (1825) and is graduated in 1829; while at Andover he makes a spirited translation of a passage in Virgil; studies law one year; begins the study of medicine; goes to Europe in 1833, and spends nearly three years in the medical schools and hospitals of London and Paris; returns in 1836, and takes his M.D. at Harvard at the same commencement when he reads his " Metrical Essay" before Phi Beta Kappa; publishes his first volume of poems in 1836, including "Old Ironsides," which dates back to 1830; in 1837-39 aids in establishing the Tremont Medical School; is Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at Dartmouth College, 1839-40; returns to Boston in 1840, and practises medicine till 1847, when he accepts the Harvard professorship of Anatomy, which he holds actively till 1882 and as emeritus till his death; marries Amelia Lee Jackson in 1840; publishes "Homœopathy and its Kindred Delusions" in 1842 and successive volumes of poems in 1846, 1849, and 1850; in 1843 his "Boylston Prize Essays" gain him a great medical reputation; in 1849 he builds his summer home in Pittsfield, Mass.; in 1857, with the founding of the Atlantic Monthly, he begins his "Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table," which appeared as a volume in 1858; in 1860 he publishes "The Professor at the