topic but after a moment's thought was newly interested. "You have a larger duty to the world and to yourself than any mere spectator! I shan't hear a bit of your hesitancy! I wouldn't know what Dante is to save my soul. But a genius the likes of you, my dear friend, assumes a divine responsibility to fight for all those exiled from the world."
Lowell mumbled something inaudible but no doubt self-effacing.
"Now, now, Lowell," Jennison said. "Were you not the one to convince the Saturday Club that a mere merchant was good enough to dine with such immortals as your friends?"
"Could they have refused you after you offered to buy the Parker House?" Lowell laughed.
"They could have refused me if I had given up my fight to belong among great men. May I quote from my favorite poet: 'And what they dare to dream of, dare to do.' Oh, how good that is!"
Lowell fell into more laughter at the idea of being inspired by his own poetry, but in truth, he was. Why shouldn't he be? The proof of poetry was, in Lowell's mind, that it reduced to the essence of a single line the vague philosophy that floated in all men's minds, so as to render it portable and useful, ready to the hand.
Now, on his way to another lecture, the very thought of entering a room full of students, who still thought it was possible to learn all about something, made him yawn.
Lowell hitched his horse to the old water pump outside Hollis Hall. "Kick them like hell if they come, old boy," he said, lighting a cigar. Horses and cigars were among the catalog of prohibited items on Harvard Yard.
A man was leaning idly against an elm. He wore a bright yellow-checkered waistcoat and had a gaunt, or rather wasted, set of features. The man, who towered over the poet even at his slanting angle, too old for a student and too worn for a faculty member, stared at him with the familiar, insatiable gleam of the literary admirer.
Fame did not mean much to Lowell, who liked only to think that his friends found some good in what he wrote and that Mabel Lowell would be proud of being his daughter after he was gone. Otherwise he thought himself teres atque rotundus: a microcosm in himself, his own author, public, critic, and posterity. Still, the praise of men and women on the streets could not fail to warm him. Sometimes he would go for a stroll in Cambridge with his heart so full of yearning that an indifferent look, even from an entire stranger, would bring tears into his eyes. But there was something equally painful in encountering the opaque, dazed glare of recognition. That made him feel wholly transparent and separate: Poet Lowell, apparition.
This yellow-vested watcher leaning on the tree touched the brim of his black bowler as Lowell passed. The poet bowed his head confusedly, his cheeks tingling. As he rushed through the College campus to vanquish his day's obligations, Lowell did not notice how strangely intent the observer remained.
Dr. Holmes bounded into the steep amphitheater. A round of boot stomping, employed by those whose pencils and notebooks made the use of hands inconvenient, rumbled forth upon his entrance. This was followed by rapid hurrahs from the rowdies (Holmes called them his young barbarians) collected in that upper region of the classroom known as the Mountain (as though this were the assembly of the French Revolution). Here Holmes constructed the human body inside out each term. Here, four times a week, were fifty adoring sons waiting on his every word. Standing before his class in the belly of the amphitheater, he felt twelve feet tall rather than his actual five-five (and that in particularly substantial boots, made by the best shoemaker in Boston).
Oliver Wendell Holmes was the only member of the faculty ever able to manage the one o'clock assignment, when hunger and exhaustion combined with the narcotized air of the two-story brick box on North Grove. Some envious colleagues said his literary fame won over the students. In fact, most of the boys who chose medicine over law and theology were rustics, and if they had encountered any real literature before arriving in Boston, it would have been some poem of Longfellow's. Still, word of Holmes's literary reputation would spread like sensational gossip, someone securing a copy of The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table and circulating it, remarking with an incredulous stare to a fellow,