In the case of Dr. Holmes’s books, I am very sensible of this disenchanting effect of time and experience.  “The Professor at the Breakfast Table” and the novels came into my hands when I was very young, in “green, unknowing youth.”  They seemed extraordinary, new, fantasies of wisdom and wit; the reflections were such as surprised me by their depth, the illustrations dazzled by their novelty and brilliance.  Probably they will still be as fortunate with young readers, and I am to be pitied, I hope, rather than blamed, if I cannot, like the wise thrush—­

      “Recapture
   The first fine careless rapture.”

By this time, of course, one understands many of the constituents of Dr. Holmes’s genius, the social, historical, ancestral, and professional elements thereof.  Now, it is the business of criticism to search out and illustrate these antecedents, and it seems a very odd and unlucky thing, that the results of this knowledge when acquired, should sometimes be a partial disenchantment.  But we are not disenchanted at all by this kind of science, when the author whom we are examining is a great natural genius, like Shakespeare or Shelley, Keats or Scott.  Such natures bring to the world far more than they receive, as far as our means of knowing what they receive are concerned.  The wind of the spirit that is not of this earth, nor limited by time and space, breathes through their words, and thoughts, and deeds.  They are not mere combinations, however deft and subtle, of known atoms.  They must continually delight, and continually surprise; custom cannot stale them; like the heaven-born Laws in Sophocles, age can never lull them to sleep.  Their works, when they are authors, never lose hold on our fancy and our interest.

As far as my own feelings and admiration can inform me, Dr. Holmes, though a most interesting and amiable and kindly man and writer, was not of this class.  As an essayist, a delineator of men and morals, an unassuming philosopher, with a light, friendly wit, he certainly does not hold one as, for example, Addison does.  The old Spectator makes me smile, pleases, tickles, diverts me now, even more than when I lay on the grass and read it by Tweedside, as a boy, when the trout were sluggish, in the early afternoon.  It is only a personal fact that Dr. Holmes, read in the same old seasons, with so much pleasure and admiration and surprise, no longer affects me in the old way.  Carlyle, on the other hand, in his “Frederick,” which used to seem rather long, now entertains me far more than ever.  But I am well aware that this is a mere subjective estimate; that Dr. Holmes may really be as great a genius as I was wont to think him, for criticism is only a part of our impressions.  The opinion of mature experience, as a rule, ought to be sounder than that of youth; in this case I cannot but think that it is sounder.