wonderful! how wonderful that I have been chosen to give this music to the world! Am I not greatly to be envied?” As the harp thus breathes its gratitude to the breeze that stirs it, so Dr. Holmes looked his gratitude to the pen that “helped” him; with something of the same wonder at personal success that made Thackeray exclaim: “Down on your knees, my boy! That is the house where I wrote ‘Vanity Fair’!” Do we not all love Thackeray and Holmes the better for caring so much about our caring for them? But it is growing late and dark. Across the river--one almost says across the bay--the lights are twinkling, and we must go. As the cool breeze touches our faces, how strange it seems to see the paved and lighted street, the crowding houses, the throng of carriages, and to realize that the great, throbbing, fashionable world has been so near to us all the afternoon while we have been so far from it! Now, as we go down the steps, a sudden consciousness strikes us of what very pleasant places Boston literary lines seem to fall into! Is it that literary people are more fortunate in Boston, or that in Boston only the fortunate people are literary? For as we think of brilliant names associated with Beacon Street, Boylston Street, Commonwealth Avenue, Newbury and Marlborough Streets, it certainly seems as if the Bohemia of plain living and high thinking--so prominent a feature of New York literary and artistic life--had hardly a foothold in aristocratic, literary Boston. Finally, if it seems wonderful that living almost exclusively in one locality, Dr. Holmes should have succeeded as few have succeeded in dealing with the mysteries of universal human nature, still more wonderful is it, perhaps, that dealing very largely with the foibles and follies of human nature, nothing that he ever wrote has given offence. True, this is partly owing to his in tense unwillingness to hurt the feelings of any human being. No fame for saying brilliant things that came to this gentlest of autocrats and most genial of gentlemen, tinged with a possibility that any one had winced under his pen, seemed to him of any value, or gave him any pleasure. But, as a matter of fact, no bore has ever read anything Dr. Holmes has written about bores with the painful consciousness, “Alas! I was that bore!” We may take to ourselves a good deal that he says, but never with a sense of shame or humiliation. On the contrary, we laugh the most sincerely of any one, and say “Of course! that is exactly it! Why, I have done that thing myself a thousand times!” And so the genial, keen-eyed master of human nature writes with impunity how difficult he finds it to love his neighbor properly till he gets away from him, and tells us how he hates to have his best friend hunt him up in the cars and sit down beside him, and explains that, although a radical, he finds he enjoys the society of those who believe more than he does better than that of those who believe less; and neighbor and best