In the year following, Whittier died; and of him the surviving poet sang:--
"Best loved and saintliest of our singing train,
Earth's noblest tributes to thy name belong;
A lifelong record closed without a stain,
A blameless memory shrined in deathless song."
Finally, two years later, October 7, 1894, Holmes, too, passed away -- last of the
"choir
That filled our groves with music,"
in that long golden age of our national literature.
Authorities.
It will not be necessary to specify regarding the selection of material for reading in either the verse or prose of Holmes. The Complete Works are published in fourteen volumes by Houghton Mifflin Company. The Cambridge Edition of the Poems is in one volume. The Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes (2 vols.) by John T. Morse, Jr., is the standard biography. Mrs. Annie Fields, in Authors and Friends, T.W. Higginson, in Old Cambridge, and J.T. Trowbridge, in My Own Story (1904), have written of the Autocrat. The usual authorities on American literature may be read in general criticism