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

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[158] a similar venture long before. Two articles under the same title had appeared twenty-five years earlier in the New England magazine. They had not attracted much attention, and were, as a whole, rather crude, but the general method employed, with its pleasant conversational flavor, and easy discursive style, was the method which best expressed the nature of the author in his maturity. When in 1857 the Atlantic monthly was founded, and Lowell became its editor, he stipulated that Dr. Holmes should be the first contributor engaged; and the first instalment of the Autocrat appeared in the opening number. Upon this series of papers Holmes's fame may stand; they represent the fine flowering of his genius for intimate discourse, and include, besides, much of the best of his verse. His later work in the same vein, however, is less delightful only because it is, in a sense, the “second growth” of an extraordinarily fertile mind.

In poetry his taste was conservative. He disliked modern experiments in irregular versification, and held to the somewhat rigid “correctness” of the school of Pope. His own verses were consequently of uniform