truth, of New England's richest springtime.

"No, my friends," he had said in "The Autocrat of the Breakfast
Table," "I go (always, other things being equal) for the man who
inherits family traditions and the cumulative humanities of at
least four or five generations." The Doctor came naturally by his
preference for a "man of family," being one himself. He was a
descendant of Anne Bradstreet, the poetess. "Dorothy Q.," whom he
had made the most picturesque of the Quincys, was his
great-grandmother. Wendell Phillips was his cousin. His father,
the Rev. Abiel Holmes, a Yale graduate, was the minister of the
First Church in Cambridge, and it was in its "gambrel-roofed"
parsonage that Oliver Wendell was born in 1809.

"Know old Cambridge? Hope you do--
Born there? Don't say so! I was, too.
Nicest place that was ever seen--
Colleges red and Common green."

So he wrote, in scores of passages of filial devotion, concerning
the village of his boyhood and the city of Boston. His best-known
prose sentence is: "Boston State House is the hub of the Solar
System." It is easy to smile, as indeed he did himself, at such
fond provinciality, but the fact remains that our literature as a
whole sadly needs this richness of local atmosphere. A nation of
restless immigrants, here today and "moved on" tomorrow, has the
fibres of its imagination uprooted, and its artists in their
eager quest of "local color" purchase brilliancy at the cost of
thinness of tone, poverty of association. Philadelphia and
Boston, almost alone among the larger American cities, yield the