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Today's Featured Biography
Oliver Wendell Holmes
 Abraham Lincoln, it is said, was one day talking with a friend about favorite poems, and repeated with deep feeling the well-known classic stanza:
"The mossy marbles rest
On the lips that he has prest
In their bloom;
And the names he loved to hear
Have been carved for many a year
On the tomb."
"That verse," he said, "was written by a man by the name of Holmes." If the manner of referring to the authorship was little flattering, the honest admiration of the great-hearted President might atone for it. An attorney in a country town in Illinois might well have been unacquainted with the reputation of a poet away in Massachusetts, whose lines, perhaps, he had seen only in the newspapers.
No reader of feeling ever passed that simple stanza unmoved. It is for all time not to be forgotten. Not a word could be changed any more than in "The Bugle Song." Its pathos is all the more surprising in connection with the quaint humor in the description of the old man who is the subject of the poem. There is a delicious Irish character in this, as in many other pieces of Holmes, reminding us of the familiar couplet of Moore--
"Erin, the smile and the tear in thine eyes
Blend like The rainbow that hangs in thy skies."
"The Last Leaf," from which the stanza is quoted, was written over fifty years ago, when the author was a little more than twenty-one. There are a few others of the same period which may ...
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