_Oliver Wendell Holmes._--“The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table” has already given evidence that it will outlast “Elsie Venner” and “The Guardian Angel”; yet if the miscellanies of Dr. Holmes (1809-94) possess more vitality than his novels, this is in some measure due to the “Autocrat’s” occasional employment of verse. In the “Breakfast-Table” series appeared “The Chambered Nautilus” and “The Wonderful ‘One-Hoss Shay,’” which, with his youthful “Old Ironsides,” and “The Broomstick Train,” have retained the firmest hold on the popular memory. Holmes was pleased to trace his ancestry back to Anne Bradstreet, the first American poetess. His own poetry commenced with a schoolboy rendering into heroic couplets from Virgil, and hardly ended with his tribute to the memory of Whittier in 1892. In the standard edition of his works his poems occupy three volumes. Many of them, corresponding to his turn for the novel, are narrative; for story-telling he had a knack amounting to a high degree of talent. His sense of order and proportion is stronger than that of other members of the New England school, and he has a command of at least formal structure. One may not unreasonably attribute this command in part to his studies in human anatomy. At the same time Holmes is beset with the temptation to value manner and brilliancy rather than substance, and he will go out of his way for a fanciful conceit or a striking expression. In the use of odds and ends of recondite lore his cleverness is amazing. He had a tenacious memory and a habit of rapid association, so that as a punster he is almost without a match. However, his glance is not deeply penetrating; he sees fantastic resemblances between things that are really far removed from one another, not so often the fundamental similarities in things whether near or apart. One may in vain search through Holmes for anything so truly poetic as Thoreau’s comparison of sex in human beings and flowers. Accordingly, his mind may be classed as fanciful rather than imaginative. It ought not to be misunderstood, and will not be unduly detracting from his great excellence, if we say that the poetry of Holmes does not always evince the highest moral seriousness--a lack that is not fully supplied when he attempts moral subjects, as in “The Chambered Nautilus,” where, though the comparison of the growing mollusk with the expanding human soul is beautiful, the preaching is a little trite.