6 NORTH SHORE BREEZE and Reminder 
life, and of you in the centre of everything, yourself a 
centre, I smile at the contrast, and wonder whether you 
still remember there is such a corner of the universe as 
that from which I am writing.” 
In the New England Magazine of June 1910, is an 
interesting short sketch of Dr. Holmes by William H. 
Rideing. In a letter to the latter Dr. Holmes gives a de- 
tailed account of his home: 
“The village of Beverly Farms is remarkable for its 
great variety of surface, its picturesque rock-ledges and 
bowlders, the beauty and luxuriance of its woods, espe- 
cially of its pines and oaks; the varied indentations of its 
shore and the great number of admirable situations for 
residences along the shore and on the hills which over- 
look it. 
“Driving is the one great luxury of the place. The 
roads are excellent; they lead to and through interesting 
villages and open a vast number of fine prospects over 
the land and the ocean, and among other frequent objects 
of admiration noble old elms in large numbers. There 
is a good deal of riding as well as driving and there are 
ladies among us who follow the beagles as bravely as 
those who sit astride their horses’ backs. 
“There is an infinite number of pleasant walks, but I 
do not think there is a great deal of walking. I have 
never asked the shoemakers, but I doubt if sole leather 
suffers a great deal with us during the summer. I walk 
somewhat myself—pretty regularly, indeed—but I meet 
‘few people moving on their own feet. 
“How other persons amuse themselves here I can 
hardly tell you. I think there is a little gayety among 
the younger fashionable people, but the atmosphere is 
not that of Newport or Lenox. 
“The ‘meet’ for the hunt is the least solemn diversion 
on which I have looked during my ten or a dozen sum- 
mers here. A solitary bather splashes in the sea now 
and then, and I have even seen two or three in a state of 
considerable hilarity, but the water is cold and the air is 
cool, and the temptation to disport in the chilling waves 
is not overwhelming. Still, young persons like it, and a 
few years ago I liked it well enough myself. 
“The wind at Beverly Farms blows over the water a 
great part of the time, and is deliciously refreshing to 
those who come from the hot city. Delicate persons will 
be apt to find the climate too cold, and some may be 
better off on any of our southern shores; but to those of 
the right temperament nothing can be better than our 
cool, bracing air. 
“In short, it is a healthy, quiet, charming summer 
residence, and deserves all its reputation as one the love- 
liest spots on the New England coast. But going there, as 
going to any country place, you must pack the spirit of 
contentment and a desire for tranquil restfulness with 
your clothes and dressing case, or you will not find the 
happiness you are after.” 
His friendship with Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, 
our Gloucester summer resident, is interestingly shown in 
some of his letters to her, written from Beverly Farms. 
In one, written in July after she had been ill and had 
just reached her summer abode, he wrote: ‘Be a vege- 
table,—a flower, I mean, of course,—taking nourishment 
from the earth via its most nourishing products, and look- 
ing into the sleepy and contented eyes of the cattle and 
all creatures that live without worded thought,—not into 
those of the worrying stars which have no eyelids and 
stare you into asking questions they will not answer.” 
Again: “I must say a word before pulling up my 
tent-pegs and pitching my tent once more on the shore 
of the Charles. . . . My vacation is over, and I only 
June 22,1917. 
regret that it has not been as idle as it ought to have 
been.” 
In another: “My visit to Gloucester was the most 
delightful incident of my summer. The weather was per- 
fect, and I enjoyed the long drive very much. When I 
got to your new place and looked around me, I was en- 
chanted. It is a most remarkable and a most lovely pros- 
pect you have before you and all round you. Your home 
is an ideal, so truly realized that I had to rub my eyes to 
know whether I was dreaming or awake,—looking at a 
true landscape or reading a story-book.” . 
To John Lothrop Motley he wrote many letters. A 
particularly “gossipy” one from Nahant where the 
Holmeses stayed one summer contains this: 
“I write, you see, from Nahant, where I have been 
during July and August, staying with my wife in the cot- 
tage you must remember as Mr. Charles Amory’s. : 
Many of your old friends are our neighbors. Longfellow 
is hard by, with Tom Appleton in the same house, and 
for a fortnight or so Sumner was his guest. I have 
dined since I have been here at Mr. George Peabody’s 
with Longfellow, Sumner, Appleton and William Amory; 
at Cabot Lodge’s with nearly the same company; at Mr. 
James’s with L. and §S., and at Longfellow’s en famille 
pretty nearly. Very pleasant dinners. I wish you could 
have been at all of them. I find a:singular charm in the 
society of Longfellow,—a soft voice, a sweet and cheerful 
temper, a receptive rather than an aggressive intelligence, 
the agreeable flavor of scholarship without any pedantic 
ways, and a perceptible soupcon of humor, not enough to 
startle or surprise or keep you under the strain of over- 
stimulation, which I am apt to feel with very witty peo- 
ple. I have been twice at your brother Edward’s, 
who seems to have everything charming about him. 
“Nahant is a gossipy Little Pedlington kind of a 
place. As Alcibiades and his dog are not here, they are 
prattling and speculating and worrying about the cost 
of Mr. J ’s new house, which, externally at least, is 
the handsomest country house I ever saw, and is gener- 
ally allowed to be a great success.” 
Mrs. Fields says in her “Authors and Friends:” 
“Any record of Dr. Holmes’s life would be imperfect 
which contained no mention of the pride and pleasure he 
felt in the Saturday Club. Throughout the forty years 
of its prime he was not only the most brilliant talker of 
that distinguished company, but he was also the mosi 
faithful attendant. He was seldom absent from the 
monthly dinners either in summer or in winter, and he 
lived to find himself at the head of the table where Agas- 
siz, Longfellow, Emerson, and Lowell had in turn pre- 
ceded him.” 
In one of his letters to John Lothrop Motley he paid 
a tender little tribute to the wife of Agassiz: “Yesterday 
I went out to Cambridge and called on Mrs. Agassiz— 
the first time I have seen her since her husband’s death. 
She was at work on his correspondence, and talked in a 
very quiet, interesting way about her married life. What 
a singular piece of good fortune it was that Agassiz, com- 
ing to a strange land, should have happened to find a 
woman so wonderfully fitted to be his wife that it seems 
as if he could not have bettered his choice if all woman- 
kind had passed before him, as the creatures filed in pro- 
cession by the father of the race!” 
The life-long battle of Dr. Holmes against the cal- 
vinistic theology of his fathers is known to all his readers. 
The author of his “Life and Letters,” John T. Morse, Jr., 
who was a nephew of Mrs. Holmes, says, after speaking 
of his membership in King’s Chapel in Boston: 
“Yet he went also to the ‘meeting-house’ in Beverly 
Farms, about which certainly no associations of history 
‘ 
