I asked him of his reminiscences of Emerson's famous Phi Beta Kappa oration at Cambridge, which he has described, as so many others have, as the era of independence in American literature. We both talked of the day, which we remembered, and of the Phi Beta dinner which followed it, when Mr. Everett presided, and bore touching tribute to Charles Emerson, who had just died. Holmes said: "You cannot make the people of this generation understand the effect of Everett's oratory. I have never felt the fascination of speech as I did in hearing him. Did it ever occur to you,--did I say to you the other day,--that when a man has such a voice as he had, our slight nasal resonance is an advantage and not a disadvantage?" I was fresher than he from his own book on Emerson, and remembered that he had said there somewhat the same thing. His words are: "It is with delight that one who remembers Everett in his robes of rhetorical splendor; who recalls his full-blown, high-colored, double-flowered periods; the rich, resonant, grave, far-reaching music of his speech, with just enough of nasal vibration to give the vocal sounding-board its proper value in the harmonies of utterance,--it is with delight that such a one recalls the glowing words of Emerson whenever he refers to Edward Everett. It is enough if he himself caught enthusiasm from those eloquent lips. But many a listener has had his youthful enthusiasm fired by that great master of academic oratory." I knew, when I read this, that Holmes referred to himself as the "youthful listener," and was glad that within twenty-four hours he should say so to me. [Illustration: DOROTHY Q'S HOUSE IN QUINCY, MASS.[1]] So we fell to talking of his own Phi Beta poem. A good Phi Beta poem is an impossibility; but it is the business of genius to work the miracles, and Holmes's is one of the few successful Phi Beta poems in the dreary catalogue of more than a century. The custom of having "_the_ poem," as people used to say, as if it were always the same, is now almost abandoned. [Illustration: DOCTOR O. W. HOLMES DELIVERING HIS FAREWELL ADDRESS AS PARKMAN PROFESSOR OF ANATOMY IN THE MEDICAL SCHOOL OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY, NOVEMBER 28, 1882. FROM A PROOF PRINT IN THE POSSESSION OF DOCTOR JAMES R. CHADWICK.]