"They all are gone, and, standing like a tower,
Our children shall behold his fame,
The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man,
Sagacious, patient, dreading, praise, not blame,
Now birth of our new soil, the first American."

With Oliver Wendell Holmes comes the last of this brief American list of
honor. No other American has so combined delicacy with the New England
humor. We should be poorer by many a smile without "My Aunt" and "The
Deacon's Masterpiece." But this is not his entire gift. "The Chambered
Nautilus" strikes the chord of noble sentiment sounded in the last stanza
of "Thanatopsis" and it will continue to sing in our hearts "As the swift
seasons roll." There is in his poems the smile and the sigh of the well-
loved stanza,

"And if I should live to be
The last leaf upon the tree
In the Spring.
Let them smile; as I do now;
As the old forsaken bough
Where I cling."

And is this all? Around these few names does all the fragrance of
American poetry hover? In the hurry, prosperity, and luxury of modern
life is the care if the flower of poetry lost? Surely not. The last
half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth have
brought many beautiful flowers of poetry and hints of more perfect
blossoms. Lanier has sung of the life of the south he loved; Whitman and
Miller have stirred us with enthusiasm for the progress of the nation;
Field and Riley have made us laugh and cry in sympathy; Aldrich, Sill,