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The poet at the breakfast table, with illustr. by H.M. Brock
The poet at the breakfast table with illustr by HM Brock Author:Oliver Wendell Holmes Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: front and shaggy over-shadowing eyebrows; following in the train, mild-eyed John Foster of Brighton, with the lambent aurora of a smile about his pleasant m... more »outh, which not even the " Sabbath " could subdue to the true Levitical aspect; and bulky Charles Stearns of Lincoln, author of " The Ladies' Philosophy of Love. A Poem. 1797." (how I stared at him ! he was the first living person ever pointed out to me as a poet) ; and Thaddeus Mason Harris of Dorchester (the same who, a poor youth, trudging along, staff in hand, being then in a stress of sore need, found all at once that somewhat was adhering to the end of his stick, which somewhat proved to be a gold ring of price, bearing the words, " God speed thee, Friend ! "), already in decadence as I remember him, with head slanting forward and downward as if looking for a place to rest in after his learned labors ; and that otherThaddeus, the old man of West Cambridge, who out- watched the rest so long after they had gone to sleep in their own churchyards, that it almost seemed as if he meant to sit up until the morning of the resurrection ; and bringing up the rear, attenuated but vivacious little Jonathan Homer of Newton, who was, to look upon, a kind of expurgated, reduced and Americanized copy of Voltaire, but very unlike him in wickedness or wit. The good-humored junior member of our family always loved to make him happy by setting him chirruping about Miles Coverdale's Version, and the Bishop's Bible, and how he wrote to his friend Sir Isaac (Coffin) about something or other, and how Sir Isaac wrote back that he was very much pleased with the contents of his letter, and so on about Sir Isaac, ad libitum,—for the admiral was his old friend, and he was proud of him. The kindly little old gentleman was a collector of Bibles, a...« less