"No wonder the tutor can't sleep in his bed
With two twenty-niners over his head."

He was said to have composed twenty-nine poems for his class, and then
declared that he had reached the proper limit,--that it would not be
prudent to go beyond the magical number. It was not a dissipated class,
but one with a good deal of life in it, much given to late hours and
jokes, practical and unpractical. The Doctor himself is mysteriously
silent concerning his college course, and so are his biographers; but we
may surmise that it was not very different in general tenor from
Lowell's; although his Yankee shrewdness would seem to have preserved him
from serious catastrophes.

In the "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table" Doctor Holmes mentions an early
acquaintance with Margaret Fuller, which is not referred to by Mr. Morse,
but must have arisen either at Mrs. Prentiss's Boston school or at the
Cambridgeport school which young Oliver afterwards attended. Even at that
age he recognized Margaret's intellectual gifts, and he was not a little
emulous of her; for he fancied that he "had also drawn a small prize in
the great literary lottery." He looked into one of her compositions,
which was lying on the teacher's desk, and felt quite crest-fallen by
discovering a word in it which he did not know the meaning of. This word
was _trite_; and it may he suspected that a good many use it without
being aware of its proper significance.

Margaret Fuller rose to celebrity with the spontaneity of true genius,
and left her name high upon the natural bridge of American literature.
Holmes did not come before the public until years after her death; and
then perhaps it might not have happened but for James Russell Lowell and
the _Atlantic_. He was a bright man, and possessed a peculiar mental