OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 561 



than blurt out bluntly what he means, he prefers to constrain consent 

 by a process of easy analogical admission. This may or may not take 

 the form of the comic. In the average Yankee it usually does so, but 

 his parabolic cast of thought is really something distinct from humor. 

 Witness the landlord in Fitz Adam's story, who described his son as 



" A long slab-sided youngster with a gun," 



and whose recipe for cooking birds was 



" Jes' scare 'em with the coals, — that 's my idee." 



Of course this deviation from directness easily passes into the hyper- 

 bolic, as when we are told that a thing is as difficult as hunting in the 

 dark for a black hat which is n't there. Such hyperbolic intent is not 

 to be confounded with the conversational curve of pursuit — -but non 

 attainment — of the unconsciously blundering bull. 



But though Holmes's wit was based on the broad foundations of his 

 country's wit, his was no rescript of it such as we are presented with 

 in real or fictitious dialect tales. These too are national in an ob- 

 jective sense. Holmes was subjectively so. He was always himself, 

 but that self was essentially the outcome of his surroundings. He 

 was typical and typical of the best, — the national poet of the edu- 

 cated class of his countrymen, to a degree which I do not recall ever 

 to have been matched. 



New England air is conducive to a shi-ewd sort of philosophizing. 

 There is much pithy wisdom, if there be naught else, to be gleaned 

 from the hillsides of the boulder-strewn New England farm. All 

 this was Holmes's inheritance ; genius and culture did the rest. We 

 are given it capitalized in the " Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," 

 and on in delightful instalments, till we sit with him at last " Over 

 the Teacups " in the sunset of his life. These books of practical 

 philosophy are probably without a peer in the world as a combination 

 of wisdom with wit. But their characteristic that most impresses one 

 is. like the poems, their remarkably genuine ring. They are delight- 

 fully humorous, without a hint of burlesque. You feel as you i-ead on 

 that this is no travesty of life seen through an astigmatic eye, however 

 keen-sighted, but the real thing mirrored in a singularly pellucid retina 

 that reflects without distortion. These books are most fittingly com- 

 memorative of their author. Poet always, his volumes of verse are 

 beautiful mosaics ; his essays are his monoliths. 



In this brief attempt at tribute to one we shall all miss so long as 

 we live, I have tried simply to point out what seems to me the essence 



VOL. XXX. (X. S. XXII.) 36 ■ 



