Perhaps you expect a full account of last Saturday's “Atlantic”
dinner; but really it was hardly worth it, except for Holmes, who was really
very agreeable and even delightful, far more so than James Lowell, the other
principal interlocutor, who was bright and witty as always, but dogmatic and
impatient of contradiction more than he used to be, though he always had that
tendency; whereas Holmes was very genial and sweet and allowed Lowell to be
almost rude to him. The other guests were Edmund Quincy, Dr. J. W. Palmer
(author of your favorite Miss Wimple), Charles W. Storey (a lazy, witty
lawyer), Charles Norton, Underwood, John Wyman, formerly of Worcester, and
myself. . . . Most of the serious talk turned on theology (which Underwood said
they often fell upon), Holmes taking the radical side and Lowell rather the
conservative. Holmes said some things that were as eloquent as anything in the “Autocrat”
about the absurdity of studying doctrines in books and supposing that we got
much from that source, when each person is the net result of a myriad
influences from all nature and society which mould him from his birth and
before it.
SOURCE: Mary Potter Thacher Higginson, Editor, Letters
and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906, p. 112
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