The township of Pontoosuc, now Pittsfield, including some twenty-four thousand acres, was bought by Doctor Holmes' great-grandfather, Jacob Wendell, about the year 1734. It was on a small part of this large possession that "Canoe Place," the pleasant summer home of Doctor Holmes, was built. Hawthorne was then living at Lenox, which is only a few miles from Pittsfield, and in his contribution to Lowell's magazine, _The Pioneer_, in 1843, he describes in his _Hall of Fantasy_, the poets he saw "talking in groups, with a liveliness of expression, or ready smile, and a light, intellectual laughter which showed how rapidly the shafts of wit were glancing to and fro among them. In the most vivacious of these," he adds, "I recognized Holmes." Beside Hawthorne, there was Herman Melville, Miss Sedgwick and Fanny Kemble near by on those "maple-shadowed plains of Berkshire," while Bryant and Ellery Channing not unfrequently joined the brilliant circle in their summer trips to the Stockbridge hills. In the Boston home of Doctor Holmes, John Lothrop Motley was a welcome visitor--a man whose "generous sympathies with popular liberty no homage paid to his genius by the class whose admiring welcome is most seductive to scholars could ever spoil." Both young men were members of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and after the death of Motley, Holmes became his biographer. Charles Sumner formed another of this pleasant literary coterie, and is described by Doctor Holmes, after a short acquaintance, as "an amiable, blameless young man; pleasant, affable and cheerful." Years after, when Sumner was assaulted in the Senate, Doctor Holmes, at a public dinner in Boston, denounced in strong language, the shameful outrage as an assault not only upon the man, but upon the Union. At the Berkshire festivals, the poet was often called upon to furnish a song, and brimful of wit and wisdom they always were, though often composed upon the spur of the moment. Here is a part of one of them: Come back to your mother, ye children, for shame, Who have wandered like truants, for riches or fame! With a smile on her face, and a sprig in her cap, She calls you to feast from her bountiful lap. Come out from your alleys, your courts, and your lanes, And breathe, like young eagles, the air of our plains, Take a whiff from our fields, and your excellent wives Will declare it's all nonsense insuring your lives. Come you of the law, who can talk, if you please, Till the Man in the Moon will declare it's a cheese, And leave 'the old lady that never tell lies,' To sleep with her handkerchief over her eyes. Ye healers of men, for a moment decline Your feats in the rhubarb and ipecac line; While you shut up your turnpike, your neighbors can go The old roundabout road, to the regions below.