We came away rejoicing, and the new series began with the new year following.  It was by no means the popular success that we had hoped; not because the author had not a thousand new things to say, or failed to say them with the gust and freshness of his immortal youth, but because it was not well to disturb a form associated in the public mind with an achievement which had become classic.  It is of the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table that people think, when they think of the peculiar species of dramatic essay which the author invented, and they think also of the Professor at the Breakfast Table, because he followed so soon; but the Poet at the Breakfast Table came so long after that his advent alienated rather than conciliated liking.  Very likely, if the Poet had come first he would have had no second place in the affections of his readers, for his talk was full of delightful matter; and at least one of the poems which graced each instalment was one of the finest and greatest that Doctor Holmes ever wrote.  I mean “Homesick in Heaven,” which seems to me not only what I have said, but one of the most important, the most profoundly pathetic in the language.  Indeed, I do not know any other that in the same direction goes so far with suggestion so penetrating.  The other poems were mainly of a cast which did not win; the metaphysics in them were too much for the human interest, and again there rose a foolish clamor of the creeds against him on account of them.  The great talent, the beautiful and graceful fancy, the eager imagination of the Autocrat could not avail in this third attempt, and I suppose the Poet at the Breakfast Table must be confessed as near a failure as Doctor Holmes could come.  It certainly was so in the magazine which the brilliant success of the first had availed to establish in the high place the periodical must always hold in the history of American literature.  Lowell was never tired of saying, when he recurred to the first days of his editorship, that the magazine could never have gone at all without the Autocrat papers.  He was proud of having insisted upon Holmes’s doing something for the new venture, and he was fond of recalling the author’s misgivings concerning his contributions, which later repeated themselves with too much reason, though not with the reason that was in his own mind.

V.

He lived twenty-five years after that self-question at sixty, and after eighty he continued to prove that threescore was not the limit of a man’s intellectual activity or literary charm.  During all that time the work he did in mere quantity was the work that a man in the prime of life might well have been vain of doing, and it was of a quality not less surprising.  If I asked him with any sort of fair notice I could rely upon him always for something for the January number, and throughout the year I could count upon him for those occasional pieces in which he so easily