Ralph Waldo Emerson. American Men of Letters. Edited by Charles Dudley Warner

Professionally a doctor and professor of anatomy at Harvard, Holmes also published numerous poems and essays. Best known among these are The Chambered Nautilus, a poem about natural growth and the human spirit, and The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, a collection of poetry and prose, both fiction and non-fiction. Holmes was a distinguished orator, poet, and essayist, typifying in the range of his intellectual accomplishments the refined intellect of his self-professed 'Brahmin' status.