Page:Studies of a Biographer 2.djvu/204

 that any of his poems are more thoroughly himself than the early lines on a portrait:—

The inimitable One-Horse Shay was written when he was near fifty, and the Broomstick Train, almost equally full of fun, when he was over eighty, and had sorrows enough to quench most men's last sparkles of vivacity. No human being ever fought more gallantly with the old enemy who defeats us all in the end.

Holmes's boyishness appears in his quaint love of athletic sports, more eccentric in America when he wrote than it seems to be at present; his love of boxing and rowing and walking. We can almost believe the Autocrat when he says that he was tempted to put on the gloves with the 'Benicia Boy,' though that hero was of twice his weight and half his age. His exuberant feelings betray him into some bacchanalian lyrics, for which he half apologises. He goes back in spirit to the jovial old British squires who once possessed his punch-bowl—