Dr. Holmes was one of the most versatile of men.  We saw him here at home with the oar in the open.  He was an excellent professor of anatomy, renowned for his insight and readiness in adapting means to ends in the difficult science where his main work lay.  Literature was merely his hobby, and he was wit, critic, philosopher, historian, poet, good in all.  Many a brilliant man has come to wreck through being too versatile. “Ne sutor ultra crepidam” is undoubtedly a good motto for the ordinary man, but sticking to his last was something to which Dr. Holmes could never bring himself, and in a marvellous way his abounding genius proved masterful in a score of varying fields.  But I have no purpose here to discuss or account for Dr. Holmes.  He was a delightful phenomenon in the life of the nineteenth century, with whom I chanced to be somewhat in touch, and it is for me only to note a bit of the scintillation which I saw brilliantly diffused.  He was frequently under my gaze, a low-statured, nimble figure, a vivacious, always cheerful face with a pronounced chin, seemingly ever on the brink of some outburst of merriment.  I have heard him described as an “incarnate pun,” but that hardly did him justice; punster he was, but he had a wit of a far higher kind and moods of grave dignity.  His literary fame in those years was only incipient, his better work was just then beginning.  The world appreciated him as a humourist of the lighter kind and capable, too, of spirited verse like Old Ironsides; it was not understood that he possessed profounder powers and could stir men to the depths.  I have a vivid image of him at a banquet of the Harvard Alumni Association of which he was Second Vice-President, clothed in white summer garb, standing in a chair that his little figure might be in evidence in the crowd, merrily rattling off a string of amusing verses.

  “I thank you, Mr. President,
  You kindly broke the ice,
  Virtue should always go before,
  I’m only second vice.”

These were the opening lines and the audience responded with roars to the inimitable fun-maker.  In later years we learned to accord him a higher appreciation.  The Autocrat and the Professor at the Breakfast Table have deep and acute thought as well as wit, and what one of our poets has produced a grander or more solemn lyric than the Chambered Nautilus?  I dwell with emotion upon the funeral of Lowell, in itself a touching occasion, because it so happened that I saw on that day three great men for the last time, Justin Winsor, Phillips Brooks, and Dr. Holmes.  I stood on the stairs at the rear of Appleton Chapel as the audience came down the aisle at the close.  The coffin of Lowell rested for a moment on the grass under its wreaths, President Eliot and Holmes walked side by side; I have a distinct image of the countenance of Holmes as they came slowly out.  It was no longer a young face but it had all the old vivacity and even at the moment was cheerful rather than serious; it had not, however, the cheerfulness of a man who looks lightly on life, but that of one whose philosophy enables him to conquer sorrow and look beyond, the face of a man who might write a triumphant hymn even in an atmosphere of death.  These lines ran in my thought: