gravely; with a certain glitter, knowingness, and flippancy about it,
and an absence of that self-forgetfulness and intense absorption in its
theme which characterize the work of the higher imagination. This is
rather the product of fancy and wit. Wit, indeed, in the old sense of
quickness in the perception of analogies, is the staple of his mind.
His resources in the way of figure, illustration, allusion, and
anecdote are wonderful. Age cannot wither him nor custom stale his
infinite variety, and there is as much powder in his latest
pyrotechnics as in the rockets which he sent up half a century ago.
Yet, though the humorist in him rather outweighs the poet, he has
written a few things, like the _Chambered Nautilus_ and _Homesick in
Heaven_, which are as purely and deeply poetic as the _One-Hoss Shay_
and the _Prologue_ are funny. Dr. Holmes is not of the stuff of which
idealists and enthusiasts are made. As a physician and a student of
science, the facts of the material universe have counted for much with
him. His clear, positive, alert intellect was always impatient of
mysticism. He had the sharp eye of the satirist and the man of the
world for oddities of dress, dialect, and manners. Naturally the
transcendental movement struck him on its ludicrous side, and in his
_After-Dinner Poem_, read at the Phi Beta Kappa dinner at Cambridge in
1843, he had his laugh at the "Orphic odes" and "runes" of the
bedlamite seer and bard of mystery

"Who rides a beetle which he calls a 'sphinx.'
And O what questions asked in club-foot rhyme
Of Earth the tongueless, and the deaf-mute Time!
Here babbling 'Insight' shouts in Nature's ears
His last conundrum on the orbs and spheres;
There Self-inspection sucks its little thumb,
With 'Whence am I?' and 'Wherefore did I come?'"