civic feasts, or post-prandial rhymes for the _petit comité_--the snug
little dinners of the chosen few; his

"The quaint trick to cram the pithy line
That cracks so crisply over bubbling wine."

And although he could write on occasion a _Song for a Temperance
Dinner_, he has preferred to chant the praise of the punch bowl and to

"feel the old convivial glow (unaided) o'er me stealing,
The warm, champagny, old-particular-brandy-punchy feeling."

It would be impossible to enumerate the many good things of this sort
which Holmes has written, full of wit and wisdom, and of humor lightly
dashed with sentiment and sparkling with droll analogies, sudden puns,
and unexpected turns of rhyme and phrase. Among the best of them are
_Nux Postcoenatica_, _A Modest Request_, _Ode for a Social Meeting_,
_The Boys_, and _Rip Van Winkle, M.D_. Holmes's favorite measure, in
his longer poems, is the heroic couplet which Pope's example seems to
have consecrated forever to satiric and didactic verse. He writes as
easily in this meter as if it were prose, and with much of Pope's
epigrammatic neatness. He also manages with facility the anapaestics
of Moore and the ballad stanza which Hood had made the vehicle for his
drolleries. It cannot be expected that verses manufactured to pop with
the corks and fizz with the champagne at academic banquets should much
outlive the occasion; or that the habit of producing such verses on
demand should foster in the producer that "high seriousness" which
Matthew Arnold asserts to be one mark of all great poetry. Holmes's
poetry is mostly on the colloquial level, excellent society-verse, but
even in its serious moments too smart and too pretty to be taken very