It would be impossible to enumerate the many good things of this sort which Holmes has written, full of wit and wisdom, and of humor lightly dashed with sentiment and sparkling with droll analogies, sudden puns, and unexpected turns of rhyme and phrase.  Among the best of them are Nux Postcoenatica, A Modest Request, Ode for a Social Meeting, The Boys, and Rip Van Winkle, M.D.  Holmes’s favorite measure, in his longer poems, is the heroic couplet which Pope’s example seems to have consecrated forever to satiric and didactic verse.  He writes as easily in this meter as if it were prose, and with much of Pope’s epigrammatic neatness.  He also manages with facility the anapaestics of Moore and the ballad stanza which Hood had made the vehicle for his drolleries.  It cannot be expected that verses manufactured to pop with the corks and fizz with the champagne at academic banquets should much outlive the occasion; or that the habit of producing such verses on demand should foster in the producer that “high seriousness” which Matthew Arnold asserts to be one mark of all great poetry.  Holmes’s poetry is mostly on the colloquial level, excellent society-verse, but even in its serious moments too smart and too pretty to be taken very gravely; with a certain glitter, knowingness, and flippancy about it, and an absence of that self-forgetfulness and intense absorption in its theme which characterize the work of the higher imagination.  This is rather the product of fancy and wit.  Wit, indeed, in the old sense of quickness in the perception of analogies, is the staple of his mind.  His resources in the way of figure, illustration, allusion, and anecdote are wonderful.  Age cannot wither him nor custom stale his infinite variety, and there is as much powder in his latest pyrotechnics as in the rockets which he sent up half a century ago.  Yet, though the humorist in him rather outweighs the poet, he has written a few things, like the Chambered Nautilus and Homesick in Heaven, which are as purely and deeply poetic as the One-Hoss Shay and the Prologue are funny.  Dr. Holmes is not of the stuff of which idealists and enthusiasts are made.  As a physician and a student of science, the facts of the material universe have counted for much with him.  His clear, positive, alert intellect was always impatient of mysticism.  He had the sharp eye of the satirist and the man of the world for oddities of dress, dialect, and manners.  Naturally the transcendental movement struck him on its ludicrous side, and in his After-Dinner Poem, read at the Phi Beta Kappa dinner at Cambridge in 1843, he had his laugh at the “Orphic odes” and “runes” of the bedlamite seer and bard of mystery

  “Who rides a beetle which he calls a ‘sphinx.’ 
  And O what questions asked in club-foot rhyme
  Of Earth the tongueless, and the deaf-mute Time! 
  Here babbling ‘Insight’ shouts in Nature’s ears
  His last conundrum on the orbs and spheres;
  There Self-inspection sucks its little thumb,
  With ‘Whence am I?’ and ‘Wherefore did I come?’”