The _Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table_ was followed in 1859 by _The Professor_, a series of similar essays, in which we are introduced to "Iris" and "Little Boston," and begin to realize Doctor Holmes' inimitable skill in dramatic effect as well as in character painting. _The Story of Iris_ has been printed by itself in Rossiter Johnson's _Little Classics_, and reads like an exquisite prose poem; but after all, we like best to follow the delicate thread of narrative just as the professor himself has introduced it--a dainty aria whose harmony runs under and over and all through the deep philosophy and sparkling table talk of the book. It prepares us, too, for _Elsie Venner_, the "Professor's Story"--a novel whose weird conception holds us spell-bound from beginning to end, in spite of the sadness--"the pity of it." At the very first introduction to Elsie we have a hint of the strange hereditary curse that throws its blight over her whole nature: "Who and what is that," asks the new master, "sitting a little apart there--that strange, wild-looking girl?" The lady teacher's face changed; one would have said she was frightened or troubled. She looked at the girl doubtfully, as if she might hear the master's question and its answer. But the girl did not look up; she was winding a gold chain about her wrist, and then uncoiling it, as if in a kind of reverie. Miss Dailey drew close to the master and placed her hand so as to hide her lips. "Don't look at her as if we were talking about her," she whispered softly, "that is Elsie Venner." The more we read of her, the more her sad beauty fascinates us. "She looked as if she might hate, but could not love. She hardly smiled at anything, spoke rarely, but seemed to feel that her natural power of expression lay all in her bright eyes, the force of which so many had felt, but none perhaps had tried to explain to themselves. A person accustomed to watch the faces of those who were ailing in body or mind, and to search in every line and tint for some underlying source of disorder, could hardly help analyzing the impression such a face produced upon him. The light of those beautiful eyes was like the lustre of ice; in all her features there was nothing of that human warmth which shows that sympathy has reached the soul beneath the mask of flesh it wears. The look was that of remoteness, of utter isolation. There was in its stony apathy the pathos which we find in the blind who show no film or speck over the organs of sight; for Nature had meant her to be lovely, and left out nothing but love." The mother of Elsie, some months before the birth of her child, had been bitten by a rattlesnake. The instant use of powerful antidotes seemed to arrest the fatal poison, but death ensued a few weeks after the birth of her little girl.