During his last visit to England Doctor Holmes was the guest of F. Max Muller at Oxford, and years afterwards Professor Muller wrote to an American correspondent concerning him and others:
"Froude was a dear friend of mine, related to my wife; so was Kingsley-- dear soul. Renan used to fetch books for me when we first met at the Bibliothique Royale. Emerson stayed at my house on his last visit here. But the best of all my American friends was Wendell Holmes. When he left us he said, 'I have talked to thousands of people--you are the only one with whom I have had a conversation.' We had talked about [Greek: ta megisthta]--the world as the logos, as the thought of God. What a pure soul his was--a real Serene Highness."
This is trancendentalism from the fountainhead; and here Doctor Holmes may fairly be said to have avenged himself on the _Nation's_ excoriating critic.
It is less than four miles from Harvard Square to Boston City Hall, a building rather exceptional for its fine architecture among public edifices, but the change in 1865 was like the change from one sphere of human thought and activity to another. In Boston politics was everything, and literature, art, philosophy nothing, or next to nothing. There was mercantile life, of course, and careworn merchants anxiously waiting about the gold-board; but there were no tally-ho coaches; there was no golf or polo, and very little yachting. Fashionable society was also at a low ebb, and as Wendell Phillips remarked in 1866, the only parties were boys' and girls' dancing-parties. A large proportion of the finest young men in the city had, like the Lowells, shed their blood for the Republic. The young people danced, but their elders looked grave.
At this time the political centre of Massachusetts and, to a certain extent of New England, was the Bird Club, which met every Saturday afternoon at Young's Hotel to dine and discuss the affairs of the nation. Its membership counted both Senators, the Governor, a number of ex- Governors and four or five members of Congress. They were a strong team when they were all harnessed together.
Francis William Bird, the original organizer of the club, was born in Dedham, October 22, 1809, and the only remarkable fact concerning his ancestry would seem to be that his great-grandmother was a Hawthorne, of the same family as Nathaniel Hawthorne; but there was no trace of that strongly-marked lineage in his composition. As a boy he was quick at mathematics, but not much of a student, so that he was full eighteen years of age before he entered Brown University. His college course also left him in a depleted physical condition, and it was several years later when he commenced the actual labor of life. His father had intended him for the law; but this did not agree with his health, and his physician advised a more active employment. Accordingly we find him in 1835 engaged in the manufacture of paper at East Walpole, an occupation in which he continued until 1892,--always suffering from dyspepsia, but always equal to whatever occasion demanded of him. He was a tall, thin, wiry-looking man, with a determined expression, but of kind and friendly manners.