and delivered, in various places, lectures on the English poets. He also wrote his delightful poems, all of them short, many very witty, others pathetic, still others stirring and patriotic.

He was deeply interested in the civil war, which called forth several of his best poems. His son, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was wounded in the

war.

Besides his medical works, lectures, and poems, Dr. Holmes has written three charming stories: "Elsie Venner," "The Guardian Angel," and "A Mortal Antipathy."

He contributed for many years to the Atlantic Monthly, first publishing in it his Breakfast Table Series, including the "Professor at the Breakfast Table," "The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table," and "The Poet at the Breakfast Table."

This magazine owed its brilliant success largely to him. In 1879, on his seventieth birthday, the managers of the Atlantic celebrated the occasion by a dinner given in his honor, at which distinguished writers from all parts of the land were present. He responded in a poem running over with fun, pretending, however, to be greatly embarrassed.

Since 1870 he has lived in a brown stone house on the north side of Beacon Street, in Boston. Charles River, widened almost into a bay, flows past the rear of the house.

His favorite room, the library, on the second

floor, looks out through a large bay window upon the river where ducks and gulls are always sporting.

The walls are lined with books, and through the heavy oak doors comes hardly a sound of the busy life in Beacon Street.

A picture of his great-grandmother, Dorothy Quincy, the "Dorothy Q." of his poem, hangs upon the wall. One of the beautiful framed embroideries for which Dr. Holmes's daughter-inlaw is so famous, also ornaments the room.

Below, the handsome dining-room is also on the river side of the house. He invites his chosen guests to his library, saying, "The reception-room is good enough for your things but you must come to the library."

His summers are spent on the seashore at the Beverly Farms with his daughter, Mrs. Sargent.

In 1882 Dr. Holmes resigned his professorship at Harvard, and since then has written, traveled, and enjoyed his Beacon Street home. His class at parting presented him a "loving cup" inscribed with the words: "Love bless thee; joy crown thee; God speed thy career."

Two years later, at the age of seventy-five, he was given a complimentary dinner in New York by the medical profession.

In 1886, almost eighty years old, he again sailed for Europe. He was greeted with the greatest en

thusiasm, and received every attention.

He says

of this trip, "I thought I had four friends in England; I found that I had four thousand." This visit he describes in his "One Hundred Days in Europe."

Dr. Holmes, besides being a learned scholar, is a hearty, whole-souled, generous man. He is running over with fun and jollity. He tells us in one of his poems that he never dares to write "as funny as he can."

His humor is like a bracing tonic, and Whittier declares that "he was born for the laughter cure.' Long live his genial smile and hearty laugh!

THE CHAMBERED NAUTILUS.

Dr. Holmes once wrote a letter to the Cincinnati school children on the occasion of their celebrating his birthday.

6

In it he confessed he had written some poems which he did not prize highly. "But," he added, "if you will remember me by The Chambered Nautilus,' 'The Living Temple,' and 'The Promise,' your memories will be a monument I shall think more of than of any bronze or marble."

The first of these three, "The Chambered Nautilus," was his favorite. He chose the last stanza of this when asked to write in the album of Princess Louise of England.

Let us study this poem, and discover why Dr. Holmes prefers to be remembered by it.

First, however, as the poet did, we must study the shell and learn something of the little creature that once lived in it.

The large, pearly nautilus, divided into its numerous chambers, began with a tiny, undivided shell. In it the nautilus lived at the bottom of the sea for one year. In the second year the shell grew larger and the nautilus left the portion it had occupied the previous year, closed up the entrance, and began life anew in its second year's home. Each year in turn added a new chamber and gave the nautilus a larger home. Only a slender ligament passing through each chamber joined it to its first home.

Then it began to rise to the surface, where, spreading its purple, gauze-like tissues for sails, it might often be seen in the warm waters of the South Pacific. At last a storm cast it upon the shore. The fragile life perished, and the shell, treated with acids, revealed to the shell polisher its pearly hues.

So it came into the poet's hands. Dr. Holmes calls it a "ship of pearl." Pearly it is, but why a ship? He recalls the sight of the living nautilus, sailing the ocean. He remembers that centuries ago the Greeks saw the little sailor and named it nautilus, from the Greek word for ship.

A ship all of pearl! Would you not like to sail in such a fairy vessel?

stays on the bot

This ship "poets feign," for really it does not so often appear on the surface as it tom, "sails the unshadowed main or sea. Did you ever think that though the sun shines on the sea, there are no shadows?

This ship of pearl he calls a "venturous bark," a daring little craft. It does not fear to sail on its purple wings, down into deep gulfs where sirens. were fancied to dwell-those ocean singers whose music lured to destruction.

Down into these enchanted gulfs it sails, risking the sharp coral reefs which human sailors shun, and meeting, perhaps, the mermaids as they rise to sun their hair upon the reefs.

But at last the too venturesome bark was wrecked, and now, as the poet holds it, feelings of compassion come to him.

Those "webs of living gauze" which formed the fragile body will never again unfurl like sails before the wind. It is a wrecked ship. Its owner has perished.

Every secret room once so carefully locked is open. We may look upon the "irised ceiling" of the outermost chamber. We may peep through the broken side into the partitioned rooms which the poet calls "sunless crypts." No sunlight ever before entered them.