"I well remember," he said, "the first time I saw Doctor Holmes. It was long ago; not as our Autocrat expresses it, 'in the year eighteen hundred and ever so few;' nor, as Thackeray has it, 'when the present century was in its teens.' It was just after the close of the last half century, and on a cold winter's afternoon, when the sun was fast setting behind the then ungilded dome of the State House, and it was in old Bromfield street. It was not in the Bromfield Street Methodist Church, nor in the contiguous Methodist inn, known as the Bromfield House, which, for many years, might have been the convenient resort of good Methodist elders, and of the peripatetic presiding elders, who were called by the genial Bishop Wainwright, the 'bob-tailed bishops' of their flocks and districts.... I was in the large stable adjoining the Bromfield House, endeavoring to secure a sleigh, when there entered a gentleman apparently of my own age. He came in quickly, and with impatience demanded the immediate production of a team and sleigh, which, though ordered for him, had somehow been forgotten. The new-comer, it was evident, was not to be trifled with. There was no nonsense about him, and I was not surprised, when, a few years later, I learned that he had become an Autocrat. "On that particular night he had a long drive before him, for he was to lecture at Newburyport, or Nantasket, or Nantucket, or some other then unannexed suburb of Boston. I doubt if the horse survived the drive, and I am quite sure he is not now living. But the driver lives, and the young New Yorker who then admired him, and would fain have driven with him on that cold winter night, has since, in common with thousands of other New Yorkers, been filled with grateful admiration for what that driver has done for literature, and for the happiness and improvement of the world." In 1838 Doctor Holmes wrote the _Boylston Prize Dissertation_, and in 1842, _Homoeopothy and its kindred Delusions_. The Boylston prizes were established in 1803, by Ward Nicholas Boylston. Doctor Holmes gained three of these prizes, and the _Dissertations_, one of which was upon Intermittent Fever, were published together in book form in 1838. When, in February of the same year (1842), the young men of Boston gave a dinner to Charles Dickens, Doctor Holmes welcomed the distinguished visitor in the following beautiful song: The stars their early vigils keep, The silent hours are near, When drooping eyes forget to weep-- Yet still we linger here; And what--the passing churl may ask-- Can claim such wondrous power, That Toil forgets his wonted task, And Love his promised hour? The Irish harp no longer thrills, Or breathes a fainter tone; The clarion blast from Scotland's hills Alas! no more is blown. And Passion's burning lip bewails Her Harold's wasted fire, Still lingering o'er the dust that veils The Lord of England's lyre.