Dr. Holmes's Boston / edited Caroline Ticknor.

  • Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 1809-1894.
Date:
1915
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Dr. Holmes's Boston / edited Caroline Ticknor. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    breakfast-table, the Autocrat looked out upon the broad expansive universe and in inimitable lan¬ guage discoursed upon its problems, pointed out, with a roguish finger, its eccentricities, touched gently upon its sorrows, and with his flow of wit and wisdom enlivened and instructed the minds and spirits of the ever-widening circle of his table com¬ panions. Dr. Holmes’s Boston is the Boston of the entire nineteenth century, barring its opening and clos¬ ing decades, and in his varied disquisitions he has reflected its characteristics, changes, and gradual expansion. His Boston was not merely a place, it was also a very individual “state-of-mind,” and the immortal Autocrat not only voiced that mental at¬ titude, but also did much to influence its trend and shape its course. Holmes was, no doubt, to some extent, what Boston made him, and Boston to-day bears the vivid imprint left by the personality of him who christened it the “Hub.” “Surely this is the ideal civic bard,” exclaimed Edmund Clarence Stedman, “who at the outset boasted of his town, — “ The threefold hill shall be The home of art, the nurse of liberty, —