Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Olde Cambridge

[94] taste for the society of literary men — and that he had to leave, after a single night's stay, because of a severe attack of his chronic complaint. It is a curious fact about the climate of Newport that some people come there expressly to be cured of asthma, while others have to leave the town in order to shake it off.

Holmes's relation to science now appears, when seen from the literary point of view, to have been more that of the poet than of the man of science. “None but Holmes,” says Professor Dwight, his associate, “could have compared the microscopical coiled tube of a sweat-gland to a fairy's intestine.” He was also one of the early microscopists, and these are themselves the poets of science. He suggested in 1872, before Percival Lowell did, the snows on Mars; and described a plant, considered as a companion for a sick room, in the true Darwinian spirit as “an innocent, delightfully idiotic being that is not troubled with any of our poor human weaknesses and irritabilities.” Dr. Cheever says of him that “he was too sympathetic to practise medicine, ”