Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes - The Original Classic Edition. E Brown

And this first glint of spring[86]--

       The spendthrift Crocus, bursting through the mould, Naked and shivering with his cup of gold.

       He is also known as the writer of many pieces which wear a serious look until they break out into a laugh at the end, perhaps in the last line, as with those on Lending a Punch Bowl, a cunning way of the writer's; just as the knot is tied in the whip cord at the end of the lash to enhance the smack.

       "But neither of these kinds of verse prepared us for anything so good, so sustained, so national, and yet so akin to our finest humorists, as The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table; a very delightful book--a handy book for the breakfast table. A book to conjure up a cosey winter picture of a ruddy fire and singing kettle, soft hearth-rug, warm slippers, and easy chair; a musical chime of cups and saucers, fragrance of tea and toast within, and those flowers of frost fading on the windows without as though old Winter

       just looked in, but his cold breath was melted, and so he passed by. A book to possess two copies of; one to be read and marked, thumbed and dog-eared; and one to stand up in its pride of place with the rest on the shelves, all ranged in shining rows,[87] as dear old friends, and not merely as nodding acquaintances.

       "Not at all like that ponderous and overbearing autocrat, Doctor Johnson, is our Yankee friend. He has more of Goldsmith's sweetness and lovability. He is as true a lover of elegance and high bred grace, dainty fancies, and all pleasurable things, as was Leigh Hunt; he has more wordly sense without the moral languor; but there is the same boy-heart beating in a manly breast, beneath the poet's singing robe. For he is a poet as well as a humorist. Indeed, although this book is written in prose, it is full of poetry, with the

       'beaded bubbles' of humor dancing up through the true hippocrene and 'winking at the brim' with a winning look of invitation shining in their merry eyes.

       "The humor and the poetry of the book do not lie in tangible nuggets for extraction, but they are there; they pervade it from beginning to end. We cannot spoon out the sparkles of sunshine as they shimmer on the wavelets of water; but they are there, moving in all their golden life and evanescent grace.

       "Holmes may not be so recognizably national[88] as Lowell; his prominent characteristics are not so exceptionally Yankee; the traits are not so peculiar as those delineated in the Biglow Papers. But he is national. One of the most hopeful literary signs of this book