558 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 



Harvard, and in 1886 an LL. D. by Edinburgh, a Litt. D. by Cam- 

 bridge, England, and a D. C. L. by Oxford. Not the least of the 

 marks of the regard in which he was held by his fellows is the fact 

 that when he died, as full of years as of honors, his death was felt as 

 a national loss. 



According to a remark credited to Longfellow, — thongh one finds 

 it hard to conceive that he ever can have made it, — " Autobiography 

 is what biography ought to be." True as this is of any man, it is well- 

 nigh a truism of a man of letters. For, like the evening paper, the 

 autobiographer chronicles little that is not already told. In the case 

 of a man of action, even though that action take the intellectual form 

 of prying into nature's laws, it is possible to catalogue the subject's 

 deeds or "discoveries. But with a writer who, instead of doing, said 

 all that made his life important, a biographer has the doubtful choice 

 between apologetically transcribing his original, or boldly taking him 

 for a text to some disquisition of his own. If he have nothing to say, 

 he embraces the former alternative ; if something, the latter. Prop- 

 erly speaking, there is in the way of facts not much beyond the un- 

 avoidable birth and death, and usually unavoided marriage, together 

 with a list of dated honors duly bestowed. The real life of the 

 man was lived within, not without, and that the man has himself 

 already revealed in the best of all ways, — unsuspectingly. Espe- 

 cially is this true of Holmes. His biography is his own books. 

 There one shall find his life told better than any other will ever be 

 able to tell it. 



One point I shall mention and only one, for it seems to me peculi- 

 arly to distinguish the man. Holmes's genius was that of broad- 

 minded localism. The term local may seem at first to carry with it 

 the inference of the limited, but in truth it involves no more circum- 

 scription than individuality itself, the one applying to the man, the 

 other to the community. An individual to be anybody must first of 

 all be himself. In like manner, one who represents a place must, to 

 start with, be permeated with the spirit of the place. In this sense he 

 must be local, and in this sense Holmes was. It was the local that 

 made the essence of the man, — the broad-mindedness that based it 

 inseparably upon the universal, and made it not a part-truth, but a 

 part of all truth. What is thus in the true sense local, tliough builded 

 in one place, is builded for all time, taking on, from the fact that it 

 once was, brevet of immortality. Thus did Holmes represent New 

 England during the middle of the nineteenth century. He was him- 

 self New Englander to the core ; so essentially so that he seemed not 



