The issues of the Civil War--to return from the tea table to the breakfast room--showed that Holmes had not lost the spark for righteous indignation in the thirty years since the writing of "Old Ironsides." "The Statesman's Secret" was not as effective a protest at Webster's "Seventh of March Speech" (1850) as Whittier's "Ichabod," but it was quite as sincerely outspoken. "Non-Resistance" and "The Moral Bully" prove that Holmes was as little of a peace-at-any-price man as Lowell. "Brother Jonathan's Lament for Sister Caroline" was written in deep sorrow that the war had been precipitated, but "To Canaan" was militant to the highest degree. Two other poems, written in the years of the Autocrat and the Poet, both in lofty seriousness, came from "flowering moments of the mind" which lost fewest petals as they were recorded in verse. These were "The Chambered Nautilus" and "A Sun-Day Hymn." In all Holmes's writing, whatever the mood or the form, the prevailing method is cumulative. He is likely to start with an idea, proceed to a simple analysis of it, and expound it by a single analogy elaborated at length or a whole series of them more briefly presented. In the sixth "Autocrat" paper he says, with some show of self-restraint, "There are some curious observations I should like to make ... but I think we are getting rather didactic." Yet as a matter of fact Holmes's method was seldom anything but didactic, and his content was frequently such. He evidently saw at a flash how to communicate the idea, but, as he must have done hundreds of times in the classroom, he developed it with what was at once spontaneous and painstaking detail. His most famous satires, "My Aunt," "Contentment," and "The Deacon's Masterpiece," are all illustrations of this method. Thus in his "Farewell to Agassiz," before the naturalist left for South America, Holmes mentioned that the mountains were awaiting his approval, as were also five other natural objects. He wished the traveler safety from the tropical sun and twenty-two other dangers and that he might succeed in finding fossils and seven other things of interest. "Bill and Joe" contains sixty lines built up by the enumerative method on the truth that worldly distinctions disappear for a moment in the light of college friendships. "Dorothy Q" devotes thirty-two lines to the quaint fancy "What would I be if one of my eight great, great grandmothers had married another man?" and "The Broomstick Train" a hundred and forty-six lines to the conceit "The Salem Witches furnish the power for the trolley cars." In prose, as a final illustration, his well-known discussion of the typical lecture audience in the sixth "Autocrat" is about eight hundred words long: Audiences help formulate lectures. The average is not high. They are awful in their uniformity--like communities of ants or bees--whether in New York, Ohio, or New England--unless some special principle of selection interferes. They