SOURCE: "This is the ship of pearl …" in Books at Iowa, No. 45, November, 1986, pp. 17-25.

In the following essay, Martin compares Holmes's life and writing with that of his contemporaries and fellow New Englanders, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The nineteenth century saw a starveling infant nation grow into a muscular, prosperous giant whose strong arms spanned the land from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Aggressive, assertive, brawling; ridden by political scandal and social strife; hungering for land and getting it by purchase, treaty, war (Mexico), or disenfranchisement of the aboriginals (that is, decimation of the American Indians), the United States seemed more concerned with power and material gain than with "human rights" and spiritual development. Yet there was a brighter side to this country in that noisy century. Movements for social reform were many (the abolitionists, the attempts at communism at New England's Brook Farm...