I suppose it was with some such motives as these that I recently opened the “Autocrat” after the pages had been closed to me for over a quarter of a century. To recover as far as possible the spirit of the old days, I got out the identical numbers of the “Atlantic” in which I had first read those sparkling sentences. Life to me had the freshness and buoyancy of the morning hours in those first years of the great Boston magazine. I recall how impatiently I waited for each number to appear, and how, on one occasion at least, I ran all the way home from the post-office with the new issue in my hand, so eager was I to be alone with it in my room. I remember, too, how I resented the criticism of a schoolmate, then at Harvard College, who said that Holmes was not the great writer I fancied him to be, but only a _Boston_ great writer. Well, I found places in the “Autocrat” that would not bear much pressure,--thin places where a lively rhetoric alone carried the mind over. And I found much that was sound and solid, that would not give way beneath one under any pressure he could bring. When Dr. Holmes got hold of a real idea, as he often did, he could exploit it in as taking a way as any man who has lived; but frequently, I think, he got hold of sham or counterfeit ideas; and these, with all his skill in managing them, will not stand the pressure of time. (His classing poems with meerschaum pipes, as two things that improve with use, is an instance of what I mean by his sham ideas.) As a writer Dr. Holmes always reminded me of certain of our bird songsters, such as the brown thrasher or the catbird, whose performances always seem to imply a spectator and to challenge his admiration. The vivacious doctor always seemed to write with his eye upon his reader, and to calculate in advance upon his reader’s surprise and pleasure. If the world finally neglects his work, it will probably be because it lacks the deep seriousness of the enduring productions. Yet this test of re-reading is, of course, only an approximate one. So great an authority as Hume said it was sufficient to read Cowley once, but that Parnell after the fiftieth reading was as fresh as at the first. Now, for my part, I have to go to the encyclopædia to find out who Parnell was, but of Cowley even desultory readers like myself know something. His essays one can not only read, but re-read. They make one of the unpretentious minor books that one can put in his pocket and take with him on a walk to the woods, and nibble at under a tree or by a waterfall. Solitude seems to bring out its quality, as it does that of some people.