Very sincerely yours, OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. SONNET. Yes, home is sweet! and yet we needs must sigh, Restless until our longing souls have found Some realm beyond the fireside's narrow bound, Where slippered ease and sleepy comfort lie, Some fair ideal form that cannot die, By age dismantled and by change uncrowned, Else life creeps circling in the self-same round, And the low ceiling hides the lofty sky. Ah, then to thee our truant hearts return, Dear mother, Alma, Casta--spotless, kind! Thy sacred walls a larger home we find, And still for thee thy wandering children yearn, While with undying fires thine altars burn, Where all our holiest memories rest enshrined. POEM READ BY DOCTOR HOLMES AT THE WHITTIER CELEBRATION. I believe that the copies of verses I've spun, Like Scheherazade's tales, are a thousand and one, You remember the story--those mornings in bed-- 'Twas the turn of a copper--a tale or a head. A doom like Scheherazade's falls upon me In a mandate as stern as the Sultan's decree; I'm a florist in verse, and what _would_ people say If I came to a banquet without my bouquet? It is trying, no doubt, when the company knows Just the look and the smell of each lily and rose, The green of each leaf in the sprigs that I bring, And the shape of the bunch and the knot of the string. Yes, 'the style is the man,' and the nib of one's pen Makes the same mark at twenty, and threescore and ten; It is so in all matters, if truth may be told; Let one look at the cast he can tell you the mould. How we all know each other! No use in disguise; Through the holes in the mask comes the flash of the eyes; We can tell by his--somewhat--each one of our tribe, As we know the old hat which we cannot describe. Though in Hebrew, in Sanscrit, in Choctaw, you write, Sweet singer who gave us the Voices of Night, Though in buskin or slipper your song may be shod, Or the velvety verse that Evangeline trod. We shall say, 'You can't cheat us--we know it is you-- There is one voice like that, but there cannot be two. _Maëstro_, whose chant like the dulcimer rings; And the woods will be hushed when the nightingale sings. And he, so serene, so majestic, so true, Whose temple hypæthral the planets shine through, Let us catch but five words from that mystical pen We should know our one sage from all children of men. And he whose bright image no distance can dim, Through a hundred disguises we can't mistake him, Whose play is all earnest, whose wit is the edge (With a beetle behind) of a sham-splitting wedge.