Fame waits on worth and work. is in it dying with a sense of incompleteness - probably expected it to be, and more than he could have asked. In spite, then, of the most reckless career, the work a man really accomplishes - both for what it self and for what it reveals of the author's gift — in the end will be valued exactly at its worth. Does the poet, the artist, demand some promise that it also may be made to tell during our working life, and even that life be lengthened till the world shall learn to honor it? Let him recall the grave, exalted words which Poe took at hazard for his "Ligeia," and stayed not to dwell upon their spiritual meaning: "Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his own feeble will." CHAPTER VIII. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. I. Fashion, or Vogue, in Art. torian DISCUSSION of any art or artist readily enough might begin with a chapter on Fashion. Of this I ask no livelier illustration than the experience of a poet whose time-honored method is just now fresh in favor, as if he were at matins instead of even-song. It is somewhat strange that the Greeks - at least. 150. those late Athenians who spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing should have left vacant the seat in their hemicycle to which their gay inheritors have directed that puissant goddess, La Mode. The dullest know that to her are sacred, as the school-books say, not only dress and manners, but styles of furniture, decoration, and all that caters to the lust of the eye and the pride of life. But the adept perceive that fashion often decides our taste in literature, our bent of study, and even of religious thought; how much it has to do with the spirit, no less than the outcome, of human effort. Progress comes by experiment, and this from ennui ennui that leads to voyages, wars, revolutions, and plainly to change in the arts of expression; that cries out to the imagination, and is the nurse of the invention whereof we term necessity the mother. The best of modes is not above challenge. No stroke can always hold the trophy. Pretty much the same instinct that makes a woman accept the later, perhaps the uglier, style of dress, secures a trial, even a vogue, to some new method in art or letters. Few demur longer than Taglioni's sister, who stared at a bonnet, the last new thing from Paris, then laughed outright and said, "How very ridiculous you look, my dear. ... Can you get me one like it?” In fact, we must have discovery, and that by licensing the fashions of successive times, most of them defective, many retrogressive, a few on the path to higher use and beauty. These few may return again and again; they go out of sight, but on an elliptic orbit. Contemporary judgment is least of all judicial. The young forestall novelty itself. The old mistrust or look backward with a sense of loss. It is hard for either to apply tests that are above each fashion, yet derived from all. I suppose that in vicious, and in barren, periods of our English song, men's faculties were much the same as ever; Revival of that a sense of beauty was on the alert. There is an old time modes. exhortation to critical humility when some despised style of a past century suddenly appears fit and attractive; when, from caprice or wholesome instinct, we pick up the round-bowed spectacles of our forbears and see things as they saw them. Their art, dress, accent, quaintly rebuke us; their dainty spirit lives again, and we adopt, as lightly as we formerly contemned, a fashion which we avow that at last we rightly interpret. It is wholly natural, then, that a poet like Dr. Holmes should have been in vogue and out of vogue; one who easily can afford to regard either position. with tranquillity, but at times, it may be, and solely as to his metrical theories, thought somewhat too antiquated by wits of the new dispensation. At this moment, - the favorite both of Time, to whom thanks A POET OF THE OLD SCHOOL. for touching him so gently, and of a tide that again bears him forward, he is warmly appreciated by verse-makers of the latest mode. As a scientific homilist, his popular gauge has been less subject to fluctuations. Science has but one fashion to lose nothing once gained; and Holmes's pluck and foresight kept him ahead till his neighbors caught up and justified him. His verse, however, puts us on terms with a man of certain tastes and breeding; it is the result of qualities which may or may not be fashionable at a given date. Just now they connect him with the army of occupation, — a veteran, it is true, but, despite his ribbons and crosses, assuredly not retired." 66 275 method a survival, renais sance. The distinction between his poetry and that of the Holmes's new makers of society-verse is that his is a survival, theirs the attempted revival, of something that has and not a gone before. He wears the seal of "that past Georgian day" by direct inheritance, not from the old time in England, but from that time in England's lettered colonies, whose inner sections still preserve the hereditary language and customs as they are scarcely to be found elsewhere. His work is as emblematic of the past as are the stairways and hand-carvings in various houses of Cambridge, Portsmouth, and Norwich. Some of our modern verse is a symptom of the present renaissance, which itself delights in going beyond its models. More spindles, more artifice, more furbelows and elaborate graces. Its originals were an imitation, as we find them in the villas of Pope and Walpole, in Hogarth's toilet-party, in architecture, gardening, costume, furniture, manners. Here were negro pages, gewgaws, silks and porcelain from China (as now from Japan) - a mixture of British, Gallic, and Oriental fashions and decorations. Now we are working in much the same spirit, and The new vogue. Holmes, of his class. even more resolutely, with novelties added from regions then unfamiliar, but reviving in both life and literature the manner of that day. A new liking for the Georgian heroics and octosyllabics is queerly blended with our practice in the latest French forms, themselves a revival of a far more ancient minstrelsy. Such things when first produced, the genuine expression of their time, may yield a less conscious pleasure, but are of more worth; they have the savor of honest purpose, which their imitation lacks. Among the leader living old-style poets, Dr. Holmes, the least complex and various, seems most nearly to the manner born; his work, as I say, being a survival, and not an experiment. It is freshened, however, by the animation which, haplessly for compilers of provincial literature, was wanting in the good Old Colony days. The maker wears the ancestral garb, and is a poet in spite of it. His verses have the courtesy and wit, without the pedagogy, of the knee-buckle time, and a flavor that is really their own. There are other eighteenth-century survivors, whose sponsors are formality and dulness; but Holmes has the modern vivacity, and adjusts without effort even the most hackneyed measures to a new occasion. Throughout the changes of fifty years he has practised the method familiar to his youth, thinking it fit and natural, and one to which he would do well to cling. The conservative persistency of his muse is as notable in matter as in manner. On the whole, so far as we can classify him, he is at the head of his class, and in other respects a class by himself. Always a poet. Though the most direct and obvious of the CamUniversity bridge group, the least given to subtilties, he is our typical university poet; the minstrel of the college that bred him, and within whose liberties he has taught, |