Lowell mumbled something inaudible but no doubt self-effacing.

“Now, now, Lowell,” Jennison said. “Were you not the one to convince the Saturday Club that a mere merchant was good enough to dine with such immortals as your friends?”

“Could they have refused you after you offered to buy the Parker House?” Lowell laughed.

“They could have refused me if I had given up my fight to belong among great men. May I quote from my favorite poet: ‘And what they dare to dream of, dare to do.’ Oh, how good that is!”

Lowell fell into more laughter at the idea of being inspired by his own poetry, but in truth, he was. Why shouldn’t he be? The proof of poetry was, in Lowell’s mind, that it reduced to the essence of a single line the vague philosophy that floated in all men’s minds, so as to render it portable and useful, ready to the hand.

Now, on his way to another lecture, the very thought of entering a room full of students, who still thought it was possible to learn all about something, made him yawn.

Lowell hitched his horse to the old water pump outside Hollis Hall. “Kick them like hell if they come, old boy,” he said, lighting a cigar. Horses and cigars were among the catalog of prohibited items on Harvard Yard.

A man was leaning idly against an elm. He wore a bright yellow-checkered waistcoat and had a gaunt, or rather wasted, set of features. The man, who towered over the poet even at his slanting angle, too old for a student and too worn for a faculty member, stared at him with the familiar, insatiable gleam of the literary admirer.

Fame did not mean much to Lowell, who liked only to think that his friends found some good in what he wrote and that Mabel Lowell would be proud of being his daughter after he was gone. Otherwise he thought himself teres atque rotundus: a microcosm in himself, his own author, public, critic, and posterity. Still, the praise of men and women on the streets could not fail to warm him. Sometimes he would go for a stroll in Cambridge with his heart so full of yearning that an indifferent look, even from an entire stranger, would bring tears into his eyes. But there was something equally painful in encountering the opaque, dazed glare of recognition. That made him feel wholly transparent and separate: Poet Lowell, apparition.

This yellow-vested watcher leaning on the tree touched the brim of his black bowler as Lowell passed. The poet bowed his head confusedly, his cheeks tingling. As he rushed through the College campus to vanquish his day’s obligations, Lowell did not notice how strangely intent the observer remained.

Dr. Holmes bounded into the steep amphitheater. A round of boot stomping, employed by those whose pencils and notebooks made the use of hands inconvenient, rumbled forth upon his entrance. This was followed by rapid hurrahs from the rowdies (Holmes called them his young barbarians) collected in that upper region of the classroom known as the Mountain (as though this were the assembly of the French Revolution). Here Holmes constructed the human body inside out each term. Here, four times a week, were fifty adoring sons waiting on his every word. Standing before his class in the belly of the amphitheater, he felt twelve feet tall rather than his actual five-five (and that in particularly substantial boots, made by the best shoemaker in Boston).

Oliver Wendell Holmes was the only member of the faculty ever able to manage the one o’clock assignment, when hunger and exhaustion combined with the narcotized air of the two-story brick box on North Grove. Some envious colleagues said his literary fame won over the students. In fact, most of the boys who chose medicine over law and theology were rustics, and if they had encountered any real literature before arriving in Boston, it would have been some poem of Longfellow’s. Still, word of Holmes’s literary reputation would spread like sensational gossip, someone securing a copy of The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table and circulating it, remarking with an incredulous stare to a fellow, “You haven’t yet read the Autocrat?” But his literary reputation among the students was more a reputation of a reputation.

“Today,” said Holmes, “we shall begin with a topic with which I trust you boys are not at all familiar.” He yanked at a clean white sheet that covered a female cadaver, then held up his palms at the foot stomping and hollering that followed.

“Respect, gentlemen! Respect for humanity and God’s divinest work!”

Dr. Holmes was too lost in the ocean of attention to notice the intruder among his students.

“Yes, the female body shall begin today’s subject,” Holmes continued.

A timid young man, Alvah Smith, one of the half-dozen bright faces in any class to which the professor naturally directs his lecture to intermediate for the rest, blushed vibrantly in the front row, where his neighbors were happy to taunt his embarrassment.

Holmes saw this. “And here, on Smith, we find exhibited the inhibitory action of the vasomotor nerves on the arterioles suddenly relaxing and filling the surface capillaries with blood—that same pleasing phenomenon which some of you may witness on the cheek of that young person whom you expect to visit this evening.”

Smith laughed along with the rest. But Holmes also heard an involuntary guffaw that cracked with the slowness of age. He squinted up the aisle at the Reverend Dr. Putnam, one of the lesser powers of the Harvard Corporation. The fellows of the Corporation, though they comprised the highest level of supervision, never actually attended classes in their university; tramping from Cambridge to the medical building, which was located across the river in Boston for proximity to the hospitals, would have been an unacceptable notion to most administrators.

“Now,” Holmes said to his class distractedly, setting his tools to the cadavers, where his two demonstrators gathered. “Let us plunge into the depths of our subject.”

After class ended and the barbarians elbowed their way through the aisles, Holmes led the Reverend Dr. Putnam to his office.

“You, my dearest Dr. Holmes, represent the gold standard for men of American letters. None have worked so hard to rise in so many fields. Your name has become a symbol of scholarship and authorship. Why, just yesterday I was speaking with a gentleman from England who was saying how you are revered in the mother country.”

Holmes smiled, oblivious. “What did he say? What did he say, Reverend Putnam? You know I like to have it laid on thick.”

Putnam frowned at the interruption. “Despite this, Augustus Manning has developed concern about certain of your literary activities, Dr. Holmes.”

Holmes was surprised. “You mean about Mr. Longfellow’s Dante work? Longfellow is the translator. I am but one of his aides-de-camp, so to speak. I suggest you wait and read the work; surely you will enjoy it.”

“James Russell Lowell. J. T. Fields. George Greene. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. Quite a selection of ‘aides,’ now, isn’t it?”

Holmes was annoyed. He had not thought their club a matter of general interest and did not like speaking of it with an outsider. The Dante Club was one of his few activities not belonging to the public world. “Oh, throw a stone in Cambridge and you’re bound to hit a two-volumer, my dear Putnam.”

Putnam folded his arms and waited.

Holmes waved a hand in an arbitrary direction. “Mr. Fields deals with such matters.”

“Pray remove yourself from this precarious association,” Putnam said with dead seriousness. “Talk some sense into your friends. Professor Lowell, for instance, has only compounded—”

“If you’re in search of someone to whom Lowell listens, my dear reverend,” Holmes interrupted with a laugh, “you’ve made a wrong turn into the Medical College.”

“Holmes,” Putnam said kindly. “I’ve come chiefly to warn you, because I count you a friend. If Dr. Manning knew I was speaking with you like this, he would…” Putnam paused and lowered his tone eulogistically, “Dear Holmes, your future will be hitched to Dante. I fear what shall happen to your poetry, your name, by the time Manning is through, in your current situation.”