A few days before Whittier's death, he wrote an affectionate poem in celebration of the eighty-third birthday of his old friend of the Saturday Club, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. This was in 1892. The little Doctor, rather lonely in his latest years, composed some tender obituary verses at Whittier's passing. He had already performed the same office for Lowell. He lingered himself until the autumn of 1894, in his eighty-sixth year--The Last Leaf, in truth, of New England's richest springtime. "No, my friends," he had said in The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, "I go (always, other things being equal) for the man who inherits family traditions and the cumulative humanities of at least four or five generations." The Doctor came naturally by his preference for a "man of family," being one himself. He was a descendant of Anne Bradstreet, the poetess. "Dorothy Q.," whom he had made the most picturesque of the Quincys, was his great-grandmother. Wendell Phillips was his cousin. His father, the Rev. Abiel Holmes, a Yale graduate, was the minister of the First Church in Cambridge, and it was in its "gambrel-roofed" parsonage that Oliver Wendell was born in 1809. Know old Cambridge? Hope you do.-- Born there? Don't say so! I was, too. • • • • • • • • Nicest place that was ever seen-- Colleges red and Common green. So he wrote, in scores of passages of filial devotion, concerning the village of his boyhood and the city of Boston. His best-known prose sentence is: "Boston State House is the hub of the Solar System." It is easy to smile, as indeed he did himself, at such fond provinciality, but the fact remains that our literature as a whole sadly needs this richness of local atmosphere. A nation of restless immigrants, here today and "moved on" tomorrow, has the fibres of its imagination uprooted, and its artists in their eager quest of "local color" purchase brilliancy at the cost of thinness of tone, poverty of association. Philadelphia and Boston, almost alone among the larger American cities, yield the sense of intimacy, or what the Autocrat would call "the cumulative humanities."