This
does not lessen the value of particular stories, of course. It merely
injures Hale's fame as a whole. Perhaps some will chiefly feel not so
much that his stories are different among themselves, but that they
are not strongly anything--anybody's--in particular, that they lack
strong personality. The pathway to fame is strewn with stray
exhibitions of talent. Apart from his purely literary productions,
Hale was one of the large moral forces of his time, through "uplift"
both in speech and the written word.
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894), one of the leading wits of American
literature, is not at all well known as a short story writer, nor did
he write many brief pieces of fiction. His fame rests chiefly on his
poems and on the _Breakfast-Table_ books (1858-1860-1872-1890). _Old
Ironsides_, _The Last Leaf_, _The Chambered Nautilus_ and _Homesick in
Heaven_ are secure of places in the anthologies of the future, while
his lighter verse has made him one of the leading American writers of
"familiar verse." Frederick Locker-Lampson in the preface to the first
edition of his _Lyra Elegantiarum_ (1867) declared that Holmes was
"perhaps the best living writer of this species of verse.
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