_I._ What I shall try to do in my address is to show that Emerson would not have touched all sorts of people as he did, but for this matter-of-fact interest in his daily surroundings--if he had not gone to town-meetings, for instance. Was it you or Lowell who called him the Yankee Plato? _Holmes._ Not I. It was probably Lowell, in the "Fable for Critics." I called him "a winged Franklin," and I stand by that. Matthew Arnold quoted that afterwards, and I was glad I had said it. _I._ I do not remember where you said it. How was it? Doctor Holmes at once rose, went to the turning book-stand, and took down volume three of his own poems, and read me with great spirit the passage. I do not know how I had forgotten it. "Where in the realm of thought, whose air is song, Does he, the Buddha of the West, belong? He seems a winged Franklin, sweetly wise, Born to unlock the secrets of the skies; And which the nobler calling,--if 'tis fair Terrestrial with celestial to compare,-- To guide the storm-cloud's elemental flame, Or walk the chambers whence the lightning came, Amidst the sources of its subtile fire, And steal their effluence for his lips and lyre?" Here he said, with great fun, "One great good of writing poetry is to furnish you with your own quotations." And afterwards, when I had made him read to me some other verses from his own poems, he said, "Oh, yes, as a reservoir of the best quotations in the language, there is nothing like a book of your own poems." [Illustration: O. W. HOLMES'S RESIDENCE IN BEACON STREET, BOSTON.] I said that there was no greater nonsense than the talk of Emerson's time, that he introduced German philosophy here, and I asked Holmes if he thought that Emerson had borrowed anything in the philosophical line from the German. He agreed with me that his philosophy was thoroughly home-bred, and wrought out in the experience of his own home-life. He said that he was disposed to believe that that would be true of Emerson which he knew was true of himself. He knew Emerson went over a great many books, but he did not really believe that he often really read a book through. I remember one of his phrases was, that he thought that Emerson "tasted books;" and he cited a bright lady from Philadelphia, whom he had met the day before, who had said that she thought men of genius did not rely much upon their reading, and had complimented him by asking if he did so. Holmes said: "I told her--I had to tell her--that in reading my mind is always active. I do not follow the author steadily or implicitly, but my thought runs off to right and left. It runs off in every direction, and I find I am not so much taking his book as I am thinking my own thoughts upon his subject."