Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

---

[159] smoothness and elegance; and as the best of them are marked by fineness rather than depth of feeling, it is not likely that a freer treatment would have increased their power.

Once or twice, in poems like The Chambered Nautilus and The last leaf, the poet seems to have risen above the grade of the kindly urbanity which made him one of the best of “occasional” verse-writers. Of his novels, it need only be said here that they are likely to hold their own for some time as interesting by-products of powers which found their main expression elsewhere.

Holmes is important to American literature not only as a singularly approachable and effective personality, but as in every way the product of his time and place. His favorite character, Little Boston, was a fanciful exaggeration of his own innocent cockneyism. In his day Beacon Street was still precisely what he called it, “The sunny street that holds the sifted few.” More than for America, perhaps, he stood for Boston, and for New England “Brahminism.” That was not the final type of Americanism, but it was one of the most important nineteenth-century types, and to represent it fitly in literature