Frank Preston Stearns, Cambridge Sketches

[157] was a pretty bold stroke, but Holmes evidently liked it. He said to the committee that waited upon him: “What is your rank and file? How deep do you go down into the class?” He also promised to lecture, and that he did not was more the fault of the students than his own. He was by no means a radical in religious matters, but he hated small sectarian differences-the substitution of dogma for true religious feeling. In his poem at the grand Harvard celebration in 1886 he made a special point of this principle:

For nothing burns with such amazing speed
As the dry sticks of a religious creed.

Creeds are necessary, however, and an enlightened education teaches us not to value them above their true worth.

In 1867 Doctor Holmes published a volume of poetry which was generally well received, but was criticised in the Nation with needless and unmerciful severity. Rev. Edward Everett Hale and other friends of his had already been attacked in the same periodical, and the Doctor thought he knew the man who did it; but whether he was right in his conjecture cannot be affirmed. There can be no doubt that these diatribes were written by a Harvard professor who owned a large interest in the Nation, and who was obliged to go to Europe the following year in order to escape the odium of an imprudent