At one of the Saturday Club dinners, when fewer members than usual were present, Doctor Holmes remarked, "This room is full of ghosts to me. I can see so many faces here that used to be here years ago, and that have since passed from this life. They are all real to me here, and I think if I were the only living person at one of these dinners, I could sit here and talk to those I see about me, and dine pleasantly, even alone." Bryant, Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier and Lowell--all lifelong friends of Holmes--had already "passed on." To other dearly-loved comrades, also, the great last summons had come. Ticknor, Prescott, Fields, Benjamin Pierce, James Freeman Clarke, Francis Parkman--all were gone. "I feel," he often said with a sigh, "that I am living in another age and generation." Little, indeed, did the young Oliver realize when he wrote that pathetic poem, "The Last Leaf," that he was the one of our five great poets destined to be the "last upon the tree!" Upon his eightieth birthday, he remarked, "I have worn well, but you cannot cheat old age. The difficulty with me now in writing is that I don't like to start on anything. I always feel that people must be saying, 'Are you not rash at eighty years of age to write for young people who think a man old at forty?'" But in his delightful series of papers, "Over the Teacups," we mark the same brilliant flashes of wit, the same keen intuition, the same warmhearted sympathy with all phases of human nature, that our beloved Autocrat showed in the Breakfast Table chats. As Doctor Holmes himself says: "In sketching the characters, I have tried to make just the difference one would naturally find in a breakfast and a tea table set." Another volume of poems, "Before the Curfew," and a series of essays entitled "Our New Portfolio," were published soon after. The last poem of Doctor Holmes printed in the _Atlantic Monthly_ was written in his eighty-fourth year and dedicated to the memory of Francis Parkman. Some of its verses, however, pay a loving tribute also to his old friends Prescott and Motley: "One wrought the record of a royal pair Who saw the great discoverer's sail unfurled, Happy his more than regal prize to share, The spoils, the wonders of the sunset world. There, too, he found his theme; upreared anew Our eyes beheld the vanished Aztec shrines, And all the silver splendors of Peru That lured the conqueror to her fatal mines. Nor less remembered he who told the tale Of empire wrested from the strangling sea; Of Leyden's woe, that turned his readers pale, The price of unborn freedom yet to be; Who taught the new world what the old could teach; Whose silent hero, peerless as our own, By deeds that mocked the feeble breath of speech Called up to life a State without a throne.