From first to last he was a censor, but a most winning
and delightful censor, who could make us feel that our faults were other
people's, and who was not wont
"To bait his homilies with his brother worms."
At one period he sat in the seat of the scorner, as far as Reform was
concerned, or perhaps reformers, who are so often tedious and ridiculous;
but he seemed to get a new heart with the new mind which came to him when
he began to write the Autocrat papers, and the light mocker of former
days became the serious and compassionate thinker, to whom most truly
nothing that was human was alien. His readers trusted and loved him; few
men have ever written so intimately with so much dignity, and perhaps
none has so endeared himself by saying just the thing for his reader that
his reader could not say for himself. He sought the universal through
himself in others, and he found to his delight and theirs that the most
universal thing was often, if not always, the most personal thing.
In my later meetings with him I was struck more and more by his
gentleness. I believe that men are apt to grow gentler as they grow
older, unless they are of the curmudgeon type, which rusts and crusts
with age, but with Doctor Holmes the gentleness was peculiarly marked. He
seemed to shrink from all things that could provoke controversy, or even
difference; he waived what might be a matter of dispute, and rather
sought the things that he could agree with you upon.
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