We tried also to get Dr. Holmes to join us; but the Doctor was devoted to Boston, and could not have lived long out of its atmosphere, and with the woods and savagery he had no sympathy. He loved his Cambridge friends serenely, Lowell, Agassiz, and Wyman, I think, above others; but he enjoyed himself most of all, and Boston more than any other thing on earth. He was lifted above ennui and discontent by a most happy satisfaction with the rounded world of his own individuality and belongings. Of the three men whom I have personally known in the world who seemed most satisfied with what fate and fortune had made them,--viz., Gladstone, Professor Freeman, and Holmes,--I think Holmes enjoyed himself the most. There was a tinge of dandyism in the Doctor; not enough to be considered a weakness, but enough to show that he enjoyed his personal appearance and was content with what he had become, and this in so delightful a way that one accepted him at once at his own terms. The Doctor stood for Boston as Lowell for Cambridge, the archetype of the Hub. Nobody represented it as he did. Tom Appleton was nearest him, but Tom loved Paris better, and was a "globe-trotter," as often in Europe as in Massachusetts, while the Doctor hardly left the Hub even for a vacation; there was nothing beyond it that was of great import to him. He was the sublimation of Yankee wit as Lowell was of Yankee humor and human nature, and he made of witticism a study; polished, refined, and prepared his "_bons mots_", and, at the best moment, led the conversation round to the point at which it was opportune to fire them off. He had a large medical knowledge of human nature and intellectual pathology, but I could never realize that he was a physician; I should not have trusted myself to his doctoring. As with Longfellow, his family affections were absorbing, and his love for his son, the present Mr. Justice Holmes, and his pride in him, were very pleasant to see, and they ran on the surface of his nature like his love for Boston; but I could never feel that his feeling for his outside friends was more than a mild, sunny glow of kindliness and vivid intellectual sympathy. Of course I judge him from a difficult standard, that of the Cambridge circle, in which the personal relations were very warm, and especially comparing him with Lowell and the Nortons, with whom friendship was a religion.