The Holmes boys were lively and frolicsome, not unlike what we have been accustomed to hear of ministers' sons in general, and some of their pranks were remembered in Cambridge for many a year. In one of Dr. Holmes's college poems he hints at some of these "high old times:"-- "I am not well to-night; methinks the fumes Of overheated punch have something dimmed The cerebellum or pineal gland, Or where the soul sits regnant." Still, there was nothing worse than boyish fun in any of their larks, and they were studious beyond their years. Among their schoolmates was Margaret Fuller. Dr. Holmes says of her:-- "Her air to her schoolmates was marked by a certain stateliness and distance, as if she had other thoughts than theirs, and was not of them. I remember her so well, as she appeared at school and later, that I regret that she had not been faithfully given to canvas or marble in the day of her best looks. None know her aspect who have not seen her living. Margaret, as I remember her at school and afterwards, was tall, fair-complexioned, with a watery aquamarine lustre in her light eyes, which she used to make small, as one does who looks at the sunshine. A remarkable point about her was that long flexible neck, arching and undulating in strange sinuous movements, which one who loved her would compare to those of a swan, and one who loved her not, to those of the ophidian who tempted our common mother. Her talk was affluent, magisterial, _de haut en bas_, some would say euphuistic, but surpassing the talk of women in breadth and audacity." In due time young Holmes was graduated from Harvard, with a class which he has helped to make well known by his annual college poems. The boys of '29 were a noble and talented set of men, and quite a number of them still live, among our most honored citizens. Some of his well-known humorous poems were written for the college papers, among them "The Dorchester Giant," "Evening, by a Tailor," "The Spectre Pig," and "The Height of the Ridiculous." For a few years after he left college he went on "writing as funny as he could," then discontinued his literary work for some time, and only permanently renewed it with the starting of the "Atlantic Monthly" in 1857. Here he began "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," and followed it with that brilliant series of papers and of novels which made him known the world over, as one of our most original and characteristic writers. Long before this he had been married, and settled down for life in the city of Boston. His wife, to whom he was united in 1840, was Amelia Lee Jackson, daughter of Judge Jackson of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. They lived in one house for over twenty years, in Montgomery Place, near Bromfield Street. Holmes says of it, in "The Professor at the Breakfast Table:"--