OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, “At the Saturday Club,” in Before the Curfew, and Other Poems, Chiefly Occasional, Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1888. [First published in the Atlantic Monthly, January 1884]

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, “At the Saturday Club,” in Before the Curfew, and Other Poems, Chiefly Occasional, Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1888. [First published in the Atlantic Monthly, January 1884]

In this nostalgic celebration of the Saturday Club—a group of leading Bostonian intellectuals that included writers, historians, and scientists—Holmes focused on his literary friends. Two years after the death of Longfellow, Holmes insists that he still wears the “POET Laureate” wreath and that his reputation endures. “How could I think him dead?” Holmes asks rhetorically. “He lives! He lives!”

Boston Public Library, Rare Books & Manuscripts