"Who rides a beetle which he calls a 'sphinx.' And O what questions asked in club-foot rhyme Of Earth the tongueless, and the deaf-mute Time! Here babbling 'Insight' shouts in Nature's ears His last conundrum on the orbs and spheres; There Self-inspection sucks its little thumb, With 'Whence am I?' and 'Wherefore did I come?'" Curiously enough, the author of these lines lived to write an appreciative life of the poet who wrote the _Sphinx_. There was a good deal of toryism or social conservatism in Holmes. He acknowledged a preference for the man with a pedigree, the man who owned family portraits, had been brought up in familiarity with books, and could pronounce "view" correctly. Readers unhappily not of the "Brahmin caste of New England" have sometimes resented as snobbishness Holmes's harping on "family," and his perpetual application of certain favorite shibboleths to other people's ways of speech. "The woman who calc'lates is lost." "Learning condemns beyond the reach of hope The careless lips that speak of soap for soap. . . . Do put your accents in the proper spot: Don't, let me beg you, don't say 'How?' for 'What?' The things named 'pants' in certain documents, A word not made for gentlemen, but 'gents.'" With the rest of "society" he was disposed to ridicule the abolition movement as a crotchet of the eccentric and the long-haired. But when the civil war broke out he lent his pen, his tongue, and his own flesh and blood to the cause of the Union. The individuality of Holmes's writings comes in part from their local and provincial bias. He has been the laureate of Harvard College and the bard of Boston city, an urban poet, with a cockneyish fondness for old Boston ways and things--the Common and the Frog Pond, Faneuil Hall and King's Chapel and the Old South, Bunker Hill, Long Wharf, the Tea Party, and the town crier. It was Holmes who invented the playful saying that "Boston Statehouse is the hub of the solar system."