No wonder the tutor can't sleep in his bedHe 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
With two twenty-niners over his head.
This text is part of:
Table of Contents:
[143]
at the age of twenty.
His class has been a celebrated one in Boston, and there were certainly some good men in it,--especially Benjamin Pierce and James Freeman Clarke,--but I think it was Doctor Holmes's class-poems that gave it its chief celebrity, which, after all, means that it was a good deal talked about.
In one of these he said:
1905. E. P. DUtton and Co. Boston,.
Tufts University. provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.