In this community Holmes early took his place as the accepted humorist, and for the first twenty-five years he wrote almost entirely in verse. The fact that two of his earliest and most famous poems were anything but funny reënforces the point rather than gainsays it. For the humorist, in contrast to the joker, is a serious man with a special method which he employs usually but not always. If Holmes had not been capable of blazing with the indignation of "Old Ironsides" or glowing with the sympathy of "The Last Leaf," he would have been a clever dispenser of jollities but not a commentator on life. Much of his youthful composition was of the lighter variety--pleasant extravagances on the level of the "Croaker Papers," not quite up to _Salmagundi_ (see pp. 116, 134). "The Music Grinders," "The Comet," "Daily Trials," and "The Stethoscope Song" belong in this class. More humorous and less jocose are the verse with a definite satirical turn. "The Ballad of the Oysterman" was a gibe at the sentimental lays to be found in all the Annuals. "My Aunt" hit off the Apollinean Institute type of Young Lady Finishing School to which he returned in a chapter of "Elsie Venner"; the sort of subject to which he returned too in his shafts at the Latter-Day Adventists, in "Latter-Day Warnings," and at the decline of Calvinism, in "The Deacon's Masterpiece." At the same time Holmes won a place as the local laureate,--for his class of 1829, for Harvard, and for every kind of occasion, grave and gay, on which some appropriate verse could point a moral and adorn the program. This is an easy accomplishment for those who have the gift, but both difficult and dull in the hands of many a poet who is capable of higher things. It demands fluency of pen, ready inventiveness, informality, and a confident good humor in its oral delivery. These all belonged to Holmes, and not least of them a gracious social manner. It is far easier to depreciate this kind of verse than it is to be consistently effective in it.