The Chambered Nautilus

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The Chambered Nautilus
Oliver Wendell Holmes
1858

Introduction
Author Biography
Poem Text
Poem Summary
Themes
Style
Historical Context
Critical Overview
Criticism
Sources
Further Reading

Introduction

With its rich imagery and ringing verse, "The Chambered Nautilus," by Oliver Wendell Holmes, is one of the most enduring nature poems of the mid-nineteenth century. Its subject is the nautilus, a sea creature that lives inside a spiral shell. As it grows, the nautilus makes new, larger chambers of its shell in which to live, closing off the old chambers and gradually forming a spiral. Holmes compares the nautilus to a "ship of pearl" sailing through enchanted but dangerous waters until it is wrecked. The speaker or narrator of the poem uses the nautilus as a metaphor for the human soul, stressing that its example provides a "heavenly message" of how people should grow and develop through their lives. At the end of the poem, Holmes emphasizes the idea that humans expand their horizons until they achieve the spiritual freedom of heaven or the afterlife.

Although it may appear abstract or timeless, "The Chambered Nautilus" is grounded in the world of mid-nineteenth-century Boston, sometimes called the American Renaissance because of its flowering in literature, philosophy, and culture. Holmes—a medical doctor, poet, novelist, travel writer, scientist, essayist, philosopher, lecturer, and conversationalist—was a prominent figure in the literary and philosophical circles of his era. "The Chambered Nautilus" was originally published in the new magazine Atlantic Monthly as part of a series combining poetry and prose that derived from Holmes's many stimulating conversational groups in Boston's intellectual society. In 1858, this series, called The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, was published in book form, and it was widely received as a witty and insightful work. "The Chambered Nautilus" is available in collections such as The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1975, as well as in reprint editions of The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, such as that published by J. M. Dent & Sons in 1960.

Author Biography

Oliver Wendell Holmes was born on August 29, 1809, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father was a Congregationalist minister, and his mother was a member of what would become the Unitarian Church. After years of private schooling, Holmes attended Harvard College, where he began to translate and write poetry. He started to have his poetry published after college, while he was studying law. One of his most famous poems, "Old Ironsides," was published in 1830. A response to the news that the famous Revolutionary War ship USS Constitution was to be taken apart and used as scrap, the poem gained Holmes a wide audience and garnered the necessary public support to have the ship preserved.

Holmes quit studying law in 1831 in favor of a degree in medicine, and, in 1833, he traveled to France to continue his medical education. During his studies and upon his return to the United States, Holmes refused requests that he have more poetry published and dedicated himself to practicing medicine. In the late 1830s, however, Holmes became involved in a variety of pursuits that included lecturing and gathering in prominent conversation circles. In 1840, Holmes married Amelia Jackson. In 1841, their first child, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., a future U.S. Supreme Court justice, was born. A variety of Holmes's important articles about medicine were published, and he continued lecturing until his position on issues such as the abolition of slavery, which he opposed, drew too much criticism. In 1857, installments of Holmes's Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table were published in the first edition of the magazine Atlantic Monthly. Posing as the record of a lively discussion group, Autocrat mixed prose with poetry; it contained some of Holmes's best poems, including "The Chambered Nautilus,"; and was very well received. Holmes wrote further installments of the series under the title The Professor at the Breakfast-Table, which was published in book form in 1860.

A collection of Holmes's medical essays and his novel Elsie Venner were published in 1861, and both received mixed reviews. During the Civil War, Holmes wrote patriotic poetry and twice traveled to Philadelphia, because his son had been wounded in combat. Holmes's novel The Guardian Angel was published in 1867, and Holmes afterward focused on his medical research. His works on determinism and the brain were published in 1871 and 1875. After he retired from Harvard Medical School in 1882, Holmes concentrated on his literary work, editing his collected writings and writing a biography of the American essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, a novel dealing with women's rights, a travel narrative titled Our Hundred Days in Europe, and a prose work titled Over the Teacups. Holmes died of respiratory failure on October 7, 1894, in Boston.

Poem Text

  This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign,
     Sails the unshadowed main,—
     The venturous bark that flings
  On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings
  In gulfs enchanted, where the siren sings,          5

     And coral reefs lie bare,
  Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair.
  Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl;
     Wrecked is the ship of pearl!
  And every chambered cell,                         10
  Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
  As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
     Before thee lies revealed,—
  Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt un-sealed!
 
  Year after year beheld the silent toil                 15
     That spread his lustrous coil;
     Still, as the spiral grew,
  He left the past year's dwelling for the new,
  Stole with soft step its shining archway through,
     Built up its idle door,                           20
  Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.
 
  Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee,
     Child of the wandering sea,
     Cast from her lap forlorn!
  From thy dead lips a clearer note is born            25
  Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn!
     While on mine ear it rings,
  Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:—
 
  Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul
     As the swift seasons roll!                         30
     Leave thy low-vaulted past!
  Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
  Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
     Till thou at length art free,
  Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's un-resting sea     35

Poem Summary

Stanza 1

The title "The Chambered Nautilus" refers to a sea creature that lives in the western Pacific and the Indian oceans and has a hard external shell, or exoskeleton. The creature lives in and is able to withdraw into the outermost compartment of its shell, which consists of sealed sections and is one of nature's best examples of a logarithmic spiral, one that grows at an exponential rate and appears to expand while it grows. Line 1 calls the nautilus a "ship of pearl," which combines a comparison to a human-made sailing vessel with a description of the pearly finish of the nautilus shell. The speaker then notes that "poets feign," or pretend, that the nautilus "Sails the unshadowed main," or the wide-open waters.

Lines 3, 4, and 5 continue the conceit, or extended comparison, of the nautilus to a ship, creating an image of a "venturous," or adventurous, wooden ship whose "purpled wings," or sails, fly on the "sweet summer wind." This description sounds like some kind of magical fairyland, and the speaker notes that the ship, or nautilus, sails to enchanted "gulfs." A gulf is a large, partially enclosed body of water, and the word gulf has a secondary meaning of "chasm" or "abyss." The speaker notes that "the siren sings" in these gulfs. This image refers to the beautiful and seductive water nymphs of ancient Greek mythology that sang so beautifully as to lure sailors to be destroyed on the rocks surrounding their island. Lines 6 and 7 continue this imagery, describing coral reefs that "lie bare." This image refers to the beautiful yet dangerous reefs that can destroy a ship but is also vaguely suggestive of the nude "cold sea-maids" who lie in the sun and dry their "streaming hair."

Stanza 2

Stanza 2 discusses the nautilus's wreckage and death in the past tense. In line 8, the speaker's conceit continues and expands as the nautilus is said to have "webs of living gauze," or sails. It is important to consider which part of the nautilus refers to the sails and which indicates the "ship of pearl." Logic would suggest that the sails, or "purpled wings" and "webs of living gauze," are the tentacles and head of the creature and that the pearly ship is the shell. In this stanza, however, the sails do not "unfurl," because the ship is "Wrecked" and the nautilus is presumably dead.

In lines 10 through 14, the speaker describes the nautilus's empty shell, continuing to use the comparison of a ship. The speaker discusses "every chambered cell," referring to the compartments and rooms of a ship as well as the sections of the nautilus's exoskeleton, which it makes as it grows larger, closing off old compartments and moving into new ones. The speaker describes these abandoned cells as expired locations where the nautilus's "dim dreaming life" used to dwell. Line 12 refers to the nautilus as a "frail tenant" constructing "his growing shell." Line 13 refers to the reader as "thee," suggesting that the empty shell lies directly in front of the reader. Line 14 describes the inside of the empty shell as having an "irised," or rainbow-colored, ceiling that has broken open and let the elements into what used to be a "sunless crypt," or coffin.

Stanza 3

Stanza 3 backtracks from the preceding description of the nautilus's death to describe in the past tense its lifelong "silent toil" to create protective compartments in its spiral shell. In this description, the speaker seems to abandon the comparison of the nautilus to a ship, although Holmes's choice of words is characterized by terms of human construction, such as "coil," "archway," "door," and "home."

Lines 15 and 16 emphasize the laborious repetition of creating the "lustrous" shell, and the following two lines state that each year the nautilus abandons its previous chamber in favor of a new one that it has created to accommodate its larger size. Line 19 describes this process as stealing, or moving sneakily, "with soft step" through the "shining archway" that divides the chambers, as though the nautilus were human. This process of personification, or assigning human qualities to an animal or object, continues in lines 20 and 21. The speaker describes the seal that the nautilus forms to block off its old chamber as an "idle door" ("idle" probably means "unused" in this context, as opposed to "useless" or "unproductive"). In line 21, the speaker explicitly compares the nautilus to a person, describing it as "Stretched in his last-found home" and noting that it "knew the old no more," or has shut out its past.

Stanza 4

In stanza 4, which changes to the present tense, the speaker addresses the nautilus directly and describes its effect on him. Line 22 thanks the nautilus for the "heavenly message" it has brought, and line 23 describes the creature as a "Child of the wandering sea," which is a mysterious image because it is difficult to envision the sea itself as wandering. Line 24 suggests that the nautilus is wandering or "forlorn" and has been cast from the lap of the sea as though the sea were its mother.

In line 25, the speaker reminds the reader that the nautilus is dead, but at the same time, he produces an image of a "note" coming from its "dead lips." The next line continues this thought by stating that the note born from the lips of the nautilus is clearer than that which "Triton" has blown from his "wreathèd horn." Triton is an ancient Greek demigod—or a being more powerful than a human but less powerful than a god—whose father is the sea god, Poseidon. Triton is usually portrayed as a merman, or a creature with the upper body of a man and the tail of a fish, although the name "Triton" came to be used for a host of other mythological mermen and mermaids. The "wreathèd horn" refers to Triton's great conch shell, which he blows like a trumpet to command the waves. In line 27, the speaker says that he listens to the clear note of the nautilus ring in his ear. In line 28, the speaker states that he hears the sound of the nautilus as a "voice that sings" in "deep caves of thought," which is an interesting image that ties to the description of the nautilus's many chambers.

Stanza 5

In the fifth stanza, the speaker addresses himself instead of addressing or describing the nautilus. In line 29, the speaker urges his "soul" to "Build thee more stately mansions," implicitly comparing the nautilus's chamber-building to the process of building expensive houses. Line 30 exclaims that the speaker should build the mansions amid the swiftly changing seasons, or because time rolls along rapidly. In line 31, the speaker tells himself to leave the "low-vaulted," or low-ceilinged, "past," and in the next line he wishes that "each new temple," a new and important metaphor suggesting the religious holiness of the chamber or house, be "nobler than the last."

Line 33 uses the phrase "Shut thee from heaven," which emphasizes the separation of the house or temple from the elements and from God, but the speaker paradoxically goes on to describe the ceiling as "a dome more vast" that increases until the speaker is "free." Line 34 suggests that the speaker achieves this ultimate freedom by releasing himself into heaven, or dying. The final line reinforces this interpretation, noting that the speaker, like the nautilus, will leave his "outgrown shell," which refers to the speaker's body as well as a house, "by life's unresting sea," as though the speaker's spirit will rise out of the shell of his body and into heaven.

Themes

Development and Mobility

The discussion in The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table that precedes "The Chambered Nautilus" focuses on the various stages of life and the importance of making progress by moving on from what one previously knew. In a sense, the poem is an elaboration on this idea, because it focuses on the concept of sealing off one's previous boundaries to create new and larger spaces in which to live and develop. In the paragraphs before the poem, the autocrat of the breakfast table says that "grow we must, if we outgrow all that we love," stressing the need to keep moving and developing as one ages, even if it means that one leaves one's old relationships behind. Holmes envisions a process of spiritual and personal progress in which one constantly challenges oneself to become a better person.

"The Chambered Nautilus" expresses this idea of progress, particularly in stanza 3, which describes the nautilus's practice of living only in the outermost and largest chamber of its shell, completely dividing itself off from the chambers that it outgrows. The poet depicts the nautilus's chambers as sealed, enclosed spaces, stating that they are like a dim "cell" or a "sunless crypt," although they have rainbow ceilings and are "lustrous," or glowing. Stanza 5 compares the chambers (or what they will become) to noble, "stately mansions" while noting that the previous chambers are "low-vaulted." This contradiction emphasizes that life is in a constant state of flux and that it is necessary to seal off the past in order to better oneself.

Holmes seems to imply that completely sealing off one's old relationships has its problems in the sense that this action can be considered turning one's back on one's friends. This may be why the speaker notes that the nautilus must sneak away "with soft step" to its new dwelling, soon taking the attitude that it "knew the old no more." If people go through such a process, they may find that they are "forlorn" like the nautilus and are children "of the wandering sea." Because life itself is an "unresting sea," however, Holmes also suggests that the process of spiritual and personal growth facilitated by leaving one's previous situation is a necessary act and an altruistic method of self-improvement.

Topics for Further Study

Research the characteristics of the chambered nautilus and give a class presentation about its biological and environmental significance. How does the species survive? What is its place in evolution? How and why does it build its shell in a logarithmic spiral? What was its status and contact with humans in the mid-nineteenth century, and what is its status today? Does Holmes's poem accurately portray the biological characteristics of the nautilus? Why or why not?
Holmes was renowned for his conversational skills. Read The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table and use it as an inspiration for leading a class discussion about philosophical, scientific, artistic, and other issues. You do not need to focus on the themes of the book, and you can include issues that are pertinent and topical to you and your classmates, but make sure that you address the universal and philosophical significance of these issues. Make an effort, like the autocrat, to discomfort and even shock your classmates in order to stir debate and conversation.
Write a poem that uses an animal or sea creature as a metaphor for a person or some kind of human endeavor. Try to tailor your description of the animal to emphasize the particular qualities of the person or endeavor that are the object of the metaphor, and try to use the technique of personification. For example, if you were using a particular dog to represent a vicious person or quality, you could dwell on the color and the points of its teeth that are in perfect order because it had braces when it was young.
Research the cultural climate of mid-nineteenth-century Boston and write an essay discussing its intellectual atmosphere. What were the major factions or groups of thinkers, and how were they important and influential? Describe the key philosophical debates of the period. What was the significance of the Boston renaissance to the rest of the country? Describe some of the factors that sparked this movement and how it came to an end. What writings of the period have endured, and why have they endured?

Death and the Afterlife

Because the nautilus's building of its shell is an extended metaphor for the speaker's spiritual life, "The Chambered Nautilus" can be interpreted as an allegory about death and the journey toward the afterlife. The idea that the human body is a ship or shell containing its spirit is not a new one, and Holmes clearly suggests that the nautilus's shell represents the physical covering of the human body and that the living creature itself represents the human soul or spirit. As early as stanza 1, Holmes hints that he is discussing dualism, the idea that the immortal soul is a separate entity from the mortal body, when he characterizes the ship with "purpled wings" like those of an angel. Holmes also suggests in stanza 4 that the nautilus provides a "heavenly message" as though it were an immortal spirit providing advice to the living.

The most explicit discussion of the idea that the nautilus is a metaphor for the human spirit comes in stanza 5. The speaker instructs his "soul" to build increasingly "nobler" temples until he becomes free like the dead nautilus, whose shell has been pierced. Although the domes of the chambers of the speaker's soul "shut [him] from heaven," the last dome appears to break away when he leaves the "outgrown shell" and ascends into the afterlife. The nautilus's journey toward immortality is somewhat perilous, given the deadly sirens, and it is a "forlorn" and "frail" creature resigned to "silent toil." This journey seems justified, however, because it creates the "heavenly message" of the shell. Similarly, the soul's hard work on earth is seemingly rewarded with the "free[dom]" of heaven.

Style

Personification

"Personification," or the attribution of human qualities to nonhuman objects or creatures, is an important literary technique in "The Chambered Nautilus." One of the poem's main extended metaphors compares a nautilus to the human soul, and the success of this metaphor depends on imagery that associates the nautilus with a human. Examples of this personification include the idea that the nautilus has a "dreaming life," its description as a "tenant," its stealing with "soft step," its ability to stretch out in a home, and the notion that it is a "child" with "lips." All of these characteristics are not literally possible in a shelled aquatic creature, and they implore the reader to imagine that the nautilus is human. Holmes uses this technique to develop the idea that the nautilus is a metaphor for the human condition, because personification makes it easier for readers to imagine themselves as a nautilus.

Symmetrical Rhyme Scheme

"The Chambered Nautilus" contains five stanzas, all of which follow the same rhyme scheme consisting of a rhymed couplet (group of two lines), followed by a rhymed tercet (group of three lines), followed by another couplet. Also written aabbbcc, this rhyme structure makes the verse flow musically by adding rhythm and musicality to the poem. Rhyme can also serve other functions, including linking words and associating them thematically, although Holmes does not seem to use it for these purposes.

Alliteration and Diction

Holmes carefully uses language to develop the meaning, rhythm, and structure of his poem. He uses alliteration, or the repetition of consonant sounds such as the use of d in "dim dreaming life was wont to dwell," to draw attention to the words that are alliterated and provide a pleasing or musical sound. Holmes's diction, or choice of vocabulary, is also carefully selected for various purposes; for example, it sounds somewhat antiquated (even for 1858) in order to make the poem seem more eloquent or authoritative. Finally, the poet uses diction to develop his thematic agenda, using spiritual terminology when he wishes to discuss the human soul and mythological references when he wishes to strike a fanciful or "enchanted" note.

Historical Context

The 1850s were a period of dangerous and rising tensions in the United States, but it was also a time of great intellectual progress and a flourishing of intellectual development in cities such as Boston. In a sense, therefore, it was a decade of contradictions and debate, and the great divide in values and patriotic sentiment would cause the country to erupt in civil war in 1861. This divide was between southeastern states, which were based on a cotton- and tobacco-producing plantation system, and northeastern states, whose economy was largely industrial. Although slavery had been outlawed in the North, it was legal in the South, and slave labor remained the basis of the southern economy. Much of the debate in the 1850s was about the destiny of the large middle and western sections of the country, to which settlers were moving in great numbers. Congress decided whether new states would be slaveholding, and this designation largely determined whether they would assume Southern or Northern values.

The question of slavery, therefore, was an extremely important and divisive issue of the day, hotly debated by politicians, writers, intellectuals, and ordinary people. Holmes and other figures lectured and wrote about the possible abolition of slavery in the territories, which Holmes opposed because he feared the consequences of the building conflict between the South and the North. American intellectuals also spoke and wrote about other major issues of the day, such as women's rights (women were barred from voting and experienced severe discrimination) and new, large-scale immigration. Massive numbers of immigrants, particularly from Ireland because of the Great Famine there, settled in the United States in the 1850s.

Holmes's hometown of Boston was famous in the 1850s for its vibrant intellectual culture full of social reformers and literary figures, and historians often characterize this period as a renaissance of literature and philosophy with Boston at its hub. Influential figures, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and James Russell Lowell, lived and wrote in Boston, which was a commercially successful and rapidly expanding city at this time. Emerson was the chief proponent of transcendentalism, a post-Romantic literary and philosophical movement that stressed the unity of all things and the revelation of deep truths to be found in personal experience as well as in reason. Thoreau (an influential early environmentalist) and Fuller (who helped found the American feminist movement) also were transcendentalists, and they met in conversation circles to develop their theories and inspire each other.

Compare & Contrast

1850s: The United States is an increasingly divided country. Tensions flare between Southerners and Northerners, and two presidents fail to ease the conflict over slavery and ideology that is building steadily toward civil war.

Today: The United States appears to be a divided country once again. Republicans and Democrats have deep ideological differences, and the administration of President George W. Bush is known for rewarding its ultraconservative base and refusing to take a moderate stance.
1850s: Boston is the literary and intellectual hub of the United States, boasting the greatest thinkers and scholars of the American Renaissance.

Today: Although Boston remains a center of American intellectual life, home to many of the best universities in the country, New York is a larger hub of literary and philosophical thought.
1850s: In the United States, slavery is legal in Southern states, African Americans throughout the country are impoverished and segregated from white society, women cannot vote, and discrimination against immigrants is widespread.

Today: The United States guarantees equal rights for all adult citizens under the law, but discrimination against minorities continues to exist.

Also of great importance in Boston in the 1850s were the elite members of the white male Protestant ruling class, who gathered in places like Harvard College. As a prominent member of the faculty at Harvard Medical School (although he upset the Harvard elite by speaking against its Calvinist doctrine in various public addresses), Holmes was a member of this class. He was also one of Boston's leading intellectual figures, famous for his conversational skills, and he met in conversation circles that debated issues ranging from art to science. A practicing physician and medical researcher, Holmes was interested throughout his life in advancing medical science and promoting awareness in the public. He was instrumental in encouraging the widespread use of microscopes by physicians and in alerting the public to a contagious condition found in women during childbirth. Although he was not a transcendentalist and even spoke out against its doctrines, Holmes later came to appreciate Emerson's ideas and wrote an influential biography of the philosopher.

Critical Overview

"The Chambered Nautilus" has been popular and critically acclaimed since its publication in Holmes's prose work The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. It is one of Holmes's most famous poems and one of the most popular poems about a sea creature in American literature. The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, in general, was an immediate success. Rowland E. Prothero writes in the Quarterly Review (1895) that it is by this work that "the name of Holmes will live." Prothero goes on to state that "The Chambered Nautilus" is one "of the best representatives of [Holmes's] poetic gifts." John Macy notes in The Spirit of American Literature that it is "Holmes's most ambitious poem, the one which he was most eager to have remembered as poetry." Macy, however, finds the poem "an elaborate conceit, pretty but not moving," and favors other examples of Holmes's verse.

Holmes has lost much of his prestige and readership in the twentieth century, in great part because of his old-fashioned views on issues such as slavery and women's rights. Many readers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have found the topical points in his prose and philosophical works, such as The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, quite dated. In her article "Sex, Sentiment, and Oliver Wendell Holmes," Gail Thain Parker argues that Holmes is a more complex thinker about gender than he may appear but nevertheless is "[eager] to believe in fundamental differences between the sexes." In the early twenty-first century, Holmes's poems, including "The Chambered Nautilus," are the most popular of his writings, although critics such as Peter Gibian continue to analyze all of Holmes's works and his place in the nineteenth-century intellectual scene.

Criticism

Scott Trudell

Scott Trudell is a doctoral student of English literature at Rutgers University. In the following essay, he discusses the didactic, or moral, emphasis on productivity in "The Chambered Nautilus," arguing that Holmes is ambivalent about his own moral message.

Immediately before "The Chambered Nautilus" is recited in The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, the autocrat asks, "Can you find no lesson in this?" In this way, he emphasizes that the poem will have a didactic, or a moral or instructional, quality. It is clear from the surrounding context that the poem's "lesson" will relate the ideas Holmes has been developing throughout the fourth chapter of his breakfast-table conversation series, which focuses on age, memory, productivity, personal development, and the spiritual journey through life's various stages. The autocrat's comments toward the end of the chapter about the "direction we are moving," the importance that "we outgrow all that we love," and the "race of life" in which a person must make his or her imprint on the world are intended to relate to Holmes's didactic message in "The Chambered Nautilus."

As the autocrat promises, the chambered nautilus serves as a didactic metaphor for the journey of the soul through life. The poem's speaker compares the nautilus to a ship in much the same way that the autocrat compares life's developmental progress to a sailing voyage: "To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it,—but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor." The poem reinforces this idea of personal agency when it dwells on the idea of leaving "the past year's dwelling for the new." For the speaker, the chambered nautilus is an ideal metaphor for the progress of the human soul through life. The nautilus achieves a kind of perpetual progress by leaving the old behind it and speeding through the race of life that the autocrat describes earlier.

The allegory in the poem is clearly Christian, guaranteeing an escape from the "silent toil" of "low-vaulted" and "dim dreaming" life, with its dangerous sirens besetting the "frail tenant" of mortality's shell. Although the nautilus, or the metaphor for the human soul, brings a "heavenly message," it is a "Child of the wandering sea, / Cast from her lap, forlorn!" It must endure life's trials with humble Christian patience, creating the perfect shell of a life's work in the process. When he reaches the end of life's voyage, the subject departs from life and into spiritual freedom, leaving this "outgrown" but beautiful shell behind as a mark of his achievement.

The poem reinforces the center of the autocrat's conversational argument and develops Holmes's idea of the noble process of development. It is not, like "Contentment" in chapter 11 of The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, an ironic poem that playfully and purposefully undercuts the auto-crat's moral message. This is not to say that the poem is an entirely straightforward or simple allegory, however. Holmes's "lesson" dwells on a variety of preconceptions about productivity, personal development, and social mobility, and it subtly suggests potential pitfalls, dangers, and inadequacies in this worldview.

The primary preoccupation of "The Chambered Nautilus" is an obsession with productivity and industriousness. Here and throughout The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, Holmes suggests that it is necessary to work constantly, steadfastly, and earnestly throughout one's life. The nautilus, compared to a "venturous" ship that "Sails the unshadowed main," is characterized by its "silent toil" as "year after year" it builds its shell. The main lesson the speaker extracts from the sea creature is not to float aimlessly in a protective shell, enjoying life's "gulfs enchanted," but to build continuously and productively "As the swift seasons roll!"

The demanding work ethic suggested in the poem relates to the drive to increase the world's scientific, artistic, literary, and philosophical knowledge. Holmes was a prolific scientist, physician, writer, and scholar, and he was dedicated to the wide advancement of human intellectual achievement as he saw it. Well respected as an intellectual authority by his critics and friends alike, Holmes was consulted on a wide variety of matters, acquainted with nearly all of the major writers and intellectuals of his time, and continually urged to publish and speak in Boston and throughout the country. The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, like much of Holmes's work, stresses that truth is an "eternal flow" (as it is called in the poem "What We All Think"), and it is the obligation of humankind to pursue it vigorously.

The demand for industriousness extends to Christian virtue, which is framed as a sort of natural extension of a productive and laborious life. As Holmes states in "What We All Think," the "one unquestioned text" around which all human study and achievement revolves is "God is Love!" This statement emphasizes that the pursuit of heavenly virtue is also the pursuit of scientific and philosophical truth. Holmes stresses that the pursuit of religious truth results in "All doubt beyond, all fear above" because, to him, it is another of the noble or necessary aims of human toil. "The Chambered Nautilus" reflects this idea in the sense that the nautilus's, or soul's, everyday toil to make its beautiful iridescent shell on earth is also its toil to build new temples, and with each larger chamber it comes closer to the "free[dom]" of heaven.

Holmes's moral of industriousness also extends to social mobility, a version of the American dream in which work results in monetary rewards. The line "Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul" in "The Chambered Nautilus" suggests that productivity applies not only to the pursuit of knowledge and Christian virtue but also to the accumulation of wealth. This suggestion is somewhat curious, because "stately mansions" are not a typical image of the humble Christian home, but the poem seems to include this kind of upward social mobility in its moral as the speaker leaves his "low-vaulted," presumably impoverished, past in exchange for the most stately of mansions, heaven. This idea is reinforced by the fact that the nautilus continually abandons its previous associations, which are no longer worthy of it. The autocrat develops this idea more explicitly in the paragraphs that precede the poem when he says, somewhat ironically, "So you will not think I mean to speak lightly of old friendships." Whether he speaks of them "lightly" or not, the autocrat values old acquaintances not for their virtues or by any sense of loyalty but only because they allow him to measure his progress in life. The nautilus is an appropriate metaphor for this kind of thinking because, as the speaker emphasizes, the shelled sea creature shuts its doors on its past and locks it away in compartments.

The poem's moral of constant, relentless productivity in the pursuit of knowledge, spirituality, and wealth reflects a typical outlook in its historical period. In the United States, as in Britain, the middle to late nineteenth century was a period in which many extremely prolific writers were obsessed with adding to the world's catalogue of truth and knowledge. Because of transcendentalist or post-Romantic thinking, however, the Boston renaissance did not always emphasize a logical scientific process as the ideal means by which to uncover truth. Knowledge, according to Emerson, was to be found within the human mind, and personal insight was the chief tool for uncovering what he and other transcendentalists considered the innate and universal truth of the world. It would be a mistake to imagine that Holmes entirely subscribed to logic and science over personal insight, although Holmes was often known to criticize the central tenets of transcendentalism.

Whether or not it can be said to include transcendentalist ideas, "The Chambered Nautilus" reveals significant ambivalence about its moral that a person is obligated to work industriously, ceaselessly, and rigorously year after year. The best example of Holmes's mixed feelings about a straightforward, logical, and productive work ethic is the fact that the nautilus is so dour as it labors endlessly in its chambers. A "frail" and "forlorn" creature confined to a "cell" or "crypt," the nautilus is continually displaced from its origins in a kind of tragic, circular toil. It is not allowed to dwell in the "gulfs enchanted" because of the alluring but deadly sirens, but it ends up wrecked on the rocks anyway. The nautilus must steal away with "soft step" as though to avoid the old friends and acquaintances it has left behind in its vigorous drive to produce. Because its final product is a beautiful but cracked-open shell, the "note" from its "dead lips" is not necessarily as clear a "heavenly message" as the speaker claims.

What do I Read Next?

Holmes's "Old Ironsides" (1830), available in books of his collected poetry, such as The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes (1975), is a famous poem about the USS Constitution, a Revolutionary War ship that was scheduled to be dismantled. Because of the emotion that Holmes's poem stirred in the general public, the ship was preserved.
Woman in the Nineteenth Century (published in 1845 and reprinted in 1999), by Margaret Fuller, is a striking, impassioned, and important prose work of feminism that criticizes male hypocrisy and discrimination against women and proposes a variety of solutions to improving women's rights.
Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter (1850) is about a child born outside wedlock in mid-seventeenth-century Boston and the cruel response to the mother by the rigidly Puritan community.
Phillis Wheatley's poem "On Being Brought from Africa to America" (ca. 1767) uses Christianity to compel whites to have compassion for the former and current black slaves in the United States.
"The City in the Sea," by Edgar Allan Poe (1831), is a mysterious poem about a doomed underwater city. It is based on a Bible story from the book of Genesis.

The speaker is certainly not aware of grim ambivalence in the portrayal of industriousness, but Holmes seems to be considering it sincerely. Ceaseless and unhappy toil may be a kind of necessary result of productivity, as it is portrayed in the poem, and the beauty of the nautilus's broken shell is, in part, a kind of signal that the labor was worthwhile. Holmes implies at the same time, however, that this tragically broken shell is a warning that the nautilus has pushed itself too hard and for rewards that it never enjoys. Although it develops a moral that urges the reader to engage in the laborious process of intellectual, religious, and financial productivity, "The Chambered Nautilus" leaves a strong hint of tragedy and resignation in the creature or person that follows this advice.

Source: Scott Trudell, Critical Essay on "The Chambered Nautilus," in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

Eleanor M. Tilton

In the following essay, Tilton examines the influence of Holmes's friend, the historian John Lothrop Motley, on Holmes's writing, asserting that Motley's influence affected the quality of Holmes's work negatively.

In the spring of 1857, Oliver Wendell Holmes sent to the historian John Lothrop Motley a private printing of a long poem written two years earlier for the opening of the 1855 lecture season of the Boston Mercantile Library Association. In 1857 Holmes seems to have had no plans for publication of the poem, but evidently felt the need of more discriminating criticism than the newspaper reporters had been in the habit of giving him. By then his friendship with Motley had reached that degree of intimacy that made him willing to ask for criticism that Motley felt willing and free to give.

Motley went through the private printing carefully, annotating his marks of praise and blame, and in his covering letter of May 3, he adumbrated his critical principles. His marginal notes and his letter provide a revealing illustration of mid-nineteenth-century sensibility. What would have been regarded in 1857 as the finest taste is recognizably moribund, an amalgam of elements drawn from the eighteenth century through Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and of ingredients diluted from German sources. Blair was known to every American college student, and Motley had not escaped him at Harvard; with some of the principal German sources he had been familiar from his school days at Joseph Green Cogswell's Round Hill School.

Deferring to his friend's taste, Holmes revised the poem carefully before its first publication in 1862 in Songs in Many Keys. Except for the deletion of matter appropriate only to the original occasion, nearly all the changes were directed by Motley's marginal notes and his letter. For this criticism Holmes remained loyally grateful all his life. In 1889 he wrote to Morley's daughter Lily: "I believe your father is the only friend to whom I ever submitted a manuscript for criticism, though Edward Everett sent and borrowed one and made some more or less wise suggestions. But everything your father said, had meaning for me."

Introduced by the portion later entitled "The Old Player" and closing with the section later entitled "The Secret of the Stars," this discursive sentimental poem belongs essentially to the same genre as Crabbe's "The Borough," although in those places where he allows his wit to rule, Holmes's manner is more nearly that of Pope. The poem deals with five figures—a recluse, a banker, a lover, a statesman, and a mother—each of whom cherishes a secret he fears to reveal. What Holmes called his "simple thread" was not so simple as he supposed, for the several "secrets" have no very close relation to one another. Motley, however, appeared to have no difficulty finding his way about the untitled private printing and was not disturbed by the juxtaposition of Daniel Webster and the Virgin Mary.

Of the seven parts of the poem, Motley without hesitation selected as the best the portion now entitled "The Mother's Secret." In his letter he said of this part: "The pictures are finished with an artistic delicacy of touch & a piety of feeling, which remind me of the Florentine painters of the 14th & 15th centuries." In the text against the lines describing the Nativity he wrote: "This is a picture worthy of Fra Angelico." In his letter, Motley went on to speak of sections he did not like: the recognizable portrait of Daniel Webster ("The Statesman's Secret"), the embezzling banker's farewell dinner-party ("The Banker's Secret"), and the mystery of the recluse of Apple Island ("The Exile's Secret"), although for the last of the three he was willing to make concessions. Motley's letter provides the grounds for his preferences:

The Webster photograph is bold, shadowy and imposing—but would probably elicit more hearty applause from a public audience, than from some of us who have perhaps pondered too much the unheroic & the unpoetical elements which constituted so much of that golden headed & clay footed image—
The same remark I shd be inclined to make upon the fraudulent banker. You have painted a very vigorous picture, but there is something in the details which are too inharmonious with the ideal—I suppose that you will not agree with me, and very likely it is some narrowness on my part or over squeamishness—but the particulars of a modern dinner party, refuse to make poetry to my imagination—The more life like they are (and nothing can be more vivid than your sketch) the more does my mind rebel at them—At the same time, I beg you to believe that I feel as warmly as anyone can do the genial flow of the atmosphere & the genuine ring of the verse, even in the passages which I put below the other parts of the poem in comparison—
Indeed the description of the ruined home on Apple Island, is almost the best thing in the poem….

Underlying the preferences here—aside from political disapproval of Webster—is the familiar opposition of the Ideal and the Actual. Having as its subject the mother of Jesus, "The Mother's Secret" could not escape being satisfactorily Ideal; an American politician, with or without feet of clay, and a banker, even an honest one, were bound to be grossly Actual. Motley was less sure of himself when he came to "The Exile's Secret." For reasons shortly to be noted, he was pleased with a passage clearly "beautiful" but put off by the fact that he could call the rumored exile by his actual name, William Marsh, and could identify the island, although Holmes had refrained from naming either and had idealized the location by referring to Boston as St. Botolph's town. So fixed in Motley's mind was the opposition of the Ideal and the Actual that he found "inharmonious with the ideal" any detail that seemed to speak or even to hint of actuality. With few exceptions, Motley's marginal protests and injunctions to "omit" or "change" are directed against such details as "refuse to make poetry" to an imagination instructed by Blair and a sensibility nurtured on the assumed opposition of Ideality and Actuality. The kind of picture Motley wanted was a Claude Lorrain. From Eckermann's Gespräche mit Goethe he could have taken a text for his criticism:

These paintings have the highest Truth, but no trace of Actuality. Claude Lorrain knew the real world by heart down to the smallest detail, and he used it as the means to express the world of his beautiful soul. And this is the true Ideality: in knowing how to use realistic means to reveal the True and make it create the illusion of the Actual.

For his criticism Motley did not need a text; the paired opposites, disassociated from their philosophical and literary sources, had become cant by 1857; as catchwords, they had been frequently evoked to praise Schiller as the poet of the Ideal and to disparage Goethe as the poet of the Actual. Longfellow exclaimed:

But who has told them [Goethe's admirers] that books are to be nothing more than an exact reflexion of what passes in real life? There is enough misery in this world to make our hearts heavy;—in books let us have something more than this—something to strengthen and elevate and purify us. Schiller—the beautiful Schiller does this. He is the prophet of the ideal—Goethe the prophet of the real.

Emerson made the same judgment: "Goethe, then, must be set down as the poet of the Actual, not of the Ideal; the poet of limitation, not of possibility; of this world, and not of religion and hope; in short, if I may say so, the poet of prose, and not of poetry."

The adored Schiller had offered the paired opposites as to indicate a standard for the artist's aspiration: "But how does the artist protect himself from the corruptions of his time, which beset him from all sides? By disdaining its judgments. He should look upward to his dignity and divine law, not downward to Fortune and material need…. He should relinquish to the Understanding, which is here at home, the sphere of the Actual; he should strive instead to effect the birth of the Ideal from the union of the possible and the necessary."

In Carlyle's prefatory comments on the writers he translated for his German Romance, the opposition is implied in his final judgment of the humoristic Musäus: "His imagination is not powerless: it is like a bird of feeble wing, which can fly from tree to tree; but never soars for a moment into the æther of Poetry, to bathe in its serene splendour, with the region of the Actual lying far below, and brightened into beauty by radiance not its own. He is a man of fine and varied talent, but scarcely of any genius."

Motley could not have expected Holmes always to reach the heavenly "æther of Poetry," but his criticism shows that he wished his friend to make the attempt. Wherever he found Holmes "spiritualizing the grossness of this actual life," Motley was content. We borrow the phrase from Hawthorne, for in Hawthorne's vein is a passage in "The Exile's Secret" that Motley marked with parallel lines of approval "as Channing used to do our themes":

   Who sees unmoved,—a ruin at his feet,—
   The lowliest home where human hearts have beat?
   Its hearth-stone, shaded with the bistre stain
   A century's showerly torrents wash in vain;
   Its starving orchard, where the thistle blows
   And elbowed spectres stand in broken rows;
   Its chimney-loving poplar, never seen

   Save next a roof, or where a roof has been;
   Its knot-grass, plantain,—all the social weeds,
   Man's mute companions, following where he leads;
   Its dwarfed, pale flowers, that show their straggling heads,
   Sown by the wind from grass-choked garden-beds;
   Its woodbine, creeping where it used to climb;
   Its roses, breathing of the olden time;
   All the poor shows the curious idler sees,
   As life's thin shadows fade by slow degrees,
   Till nought remains, the saddening tale to tell,
   Save home's last wrecks,—the cellar and the well!

Motley questioned the phrase "elbowed spectres" and asked "can a shadow fade?", but approved of the whole,… Not strictly speaking "Ideal," the picture is "beautiful" according to standards supplied by Blair:

There is, however, another sense … in which Beauty of writing characterizes a particular manner; when it is used to signify a certain grace and amenity in the turn either of style or sentiment…. In this sense, it denotes a manner neither remarkably sublime, nor vehemently passionate, nor uncommonly sparkling, but such as raises in the reader an emotion of the gentle placid kind, familiar to what is raised by the contemplation of beautiful objects in nature; which neither lifts the mind very high, nor agitates it very much, but diffuses over the imagination an agreeable and pleasing serenity.

Blair had earlier used as an example of the "beautiful" the movement of a bird in flight, contrasting that with flashes of lightning, which he clearly took for "sublime." The passage quoted is followed by a grudging admission of the pleasure afforded by novelty, an admission made in such a way as to discourage the student from trying to achieve it and the reader from admiring it. The faithful pupil of Blair was encouraged to provide the mixture as before. It is noticeable that Motley nowhere criticized his friend for being trite; the acceptable ideality of picturesque ruins made him content with stereotypes.

Pleasing to Motley and also "beautiful" according to the standards of Blair are lines from the introductory section, "The Old Player."

   From groves of glossy beech the wood thrush fills
   In the dim twilight with his rapturous trills;
   From sweet still pastures, cropped by nodding kine,
   Their noon-tide tent the century-counting pine;
   From the brown streams along whose winding shore
   Each sleepy inlet knows my resting oar;
   From the broad meadows, where the mowers pass
   Their scythes slow-breathing through the feathered grass;
   From tawny rye-fields, where the cradler strikes
   With whistling crash among the bearded spikes;
   Fresh from such glories, how shall I forget
   My summer's day-dream, now the sun is set?

The critic apparently found ll. 5-10 especially satisfying, for he gave them two sets of approving parallels. Again Motley was sufficiently taken with the ideality of the subject to be indifferent to the quality of the language, to the grotesque effects of the personifications, and to the haphazard arrangement of the details.

Employing the same standard of the "beautiful," Motley gave his accolade to the pseudo-Homeric catalogue of ships in "The Exile's Secret"; but when human beings appear on the scene he had complaints. He did not like an "old skipper" who "curses," an "excursion crew" of fishermen, a "slightly tipsy" sailor, and a group of "clamadventurers." Here Motley appears to be obeying the injunction of Blair against the use of "such allusions as raise in the mind disagreeable, mean, vulgar or dirty ideas."

Anxious to meet his friend's standards, Holmes frequently diluted his original matter. Lines of the Private Copy reading:

   We stand a moment on the outstreched pier;—
   Ho! lazy boatman, scull your dory here!
   The tide runs fast;

became in Songs in Many Keys:

   So fair when distant should be fairer near;
   A boat shall waft us from the outstretched pier.
   The breeze blows fresh;

The change was dictated by Motley's protest against the imperative: "Scull your dory here!" That in quest of the Ideal and in evasion of the Actual, one might come upon the insipid—this consequence the exponents of the favored opposition failed to perceive. Holding to the principle, Motley pushed Holmes toward an alien style. He bracketed and questioned these lines:

   Pilots, with varnished hats and shaggy coasts;
   Fishers, with scaly oars and slippery boats;
   Boys of rude speech, who spread a ragged sail
   On courtesying skiffs that want a crew to bale;
   Sires of the town who quit the cushioned chair
   On some bright morning when the breeze is fair,
   And tempt the dangers of the tossing brine
   To learn how paupers live,—and guardians dine;

The critic's marginal note is: "I would omit this—It is very good & Crabby, but I like your heroic style best particul[arl]y in this poem." Not Holmes at his best certainly, these lines are nevertheless in his best vein, and Motley did him no service by trying to shift his attention from a Crabbe to a Schiller. The whole of "The Exile's Secret," alternating between the "beautiful" and the "Crabby," did not give Motley the same satisfaction as "The Mother's Secret," with its clearly Ideal theme. The incongruity of the styles did not disturb Motley; what disturbed him was any intrusion of the Actual. "Artistic feeling" required the avoidance of Actuality; here Motley did not trust Holmes. In his letter he wrote: "To the morally pure & noble, there is no need of my exhorting you—To that you are always instinctively and unerringly true—To the intellectually beautiful & sublime you are equally loyal—It is only to the artistic feeling that you are sometimes false, and so far, false to your own nature…."

In the section now called "The Statesman's Secret," with its unheroic and unpoetical subject, Daniel Webster, Motley found two passages that he evidently regarded as notably "false" to "artistic feeling."

   The cheated turncoat shakes his broken chain,
   The baffled spoilsman howls, "In vain! In vain!"
   The whitening bones of trampled martyrs strew
   The slippery path his sliding feet pursue.
   Go, great Deluded! Go and take thy place
   With thy sad brethren of the bovine race, frenzied
   The herd of would-be quadriennial kings
   The white-house gad-fly crazes when he stings!

Motley wanted both deleted, explaining why in a marginal note to the first:

a presidential election is in its details so vulgar & unpoetical, that you must soar as high as possible into the general empyrean of poetical ambition—This you have done very skilfully, & if you will omit as above suggested, the picture is grand & solemn—it ought in no sense to be comic

Deleting the first passage, Holmes revised the second:

   Shake from thy sense the wild delusive dream!
   Without the purple, art thou not supreme?
   And soothed by love unbought, thy heart shall own
   A nation's homage nobler than its throne!

Avoiding the democratic Actual, Holmes could reach for the Ideal only by resorting to an inappropriately royal diction.

Bankers, like politicians, similarly tempted the poet toward the vulgar Actual, and the embezzler's dinner-party displeased Motley in proportion as it evoked Holmes's sense of the comic. The critic did what he could with the offending subject. The Hostess who thinks of her "vexed cuisine" is "too bourgeois"; there are "too many" extra dinner guests; the amount of drinking is "too strong for a ladies' dinner party." The "Blairish" objection to the "mean" shows in protests against such words as "sweating," "slink," "lugs out," "slow-coach," "slap on," and "jolly," offenses that Holmes amended or deleted.

A far safer subject was that of "The Lover's Secret." From Motley's standpoint a love-sick ancient Roman was Ideal in his condition, his time, and his place. Although Motley found a few inelegant words, he considered the "whole episode … classic, original, & brilliant," and marked the first eighteen lines with the parallels:

   What ailed young Lucius? Art had vainly tried
   To guess his ill, and found herself defied.
   The Augur plied his legendary skill,
   Useless; the fair young Roman languished still.
   His chariot took him every cloudless day
   Across the Pincian Hill or Appian Way;
   They rubbed his wasted limbs with sulphurous oil
   Oozed from the far-off Orient's heated soil;
   They led him tottering down the steamy path
   Where bubbling fountains filled the thermal bath;
   Borne in a litter to Egeria's cave,
   They washed him, shivering, in her icy wave.
   They sought all curious herbs and costly stones,
   They scraped the moss that grew on dead men's bones
   They tried all cures the votive tablets taught,
   Scoured every place whence healing drugs were bought,
   O'er Thracian hills his breathless couriers ran,
   His slaves waylaid the Syrian caravan.

Thirty-one additional lines received Motley's approving parallels. He asked for the omission of one couplet, pointed out the redundancy in "hired sicarius," and objected to "The maid of lion step," because "lion is too masculine," suggesting "panther" as a substitute. The maid is she who "bade black Crassus 'touch her if he dare!'" Motley protested in the margin: "I don't like 'touch her if he dare!'—too prosaic and the passage is very poetical & romantic." The whole, however, pleased Motley because he saw in it the ideal qualities of "classic elegance" and "tenderness & truth."

In "Ideality," however, it could not match "The Mother's Secret." In that section, Motley was able to mark nearly half the poem with the parallels; and here he saw little to complain of. Combining religion and domestic affection, "The Mother's Secret" nowhere tempted Holmes toward the gross actualities Motley wanted him to avoid. Motley saw not only Fra Angelico; he found in the description of the elders in the Temple "a vivid picture in 2 Rembrandt strokes":

   They found him seated with the ancient men,—
   The grim old swordsmen of the tongue and pen,—
   Their bald heads glistening as they clustered near,
   Their grey beards slanting as they turned to hear,
   Lost in half envious wonder and surprise
   That lips so fresh should utter words so wise.

Consistent in his major criticisms and in certain minor ones not here noted, Motley holds to the standard of the opposed Ideal and Actual as if by 1857 it were second nature to do so. As a directive for both the critic and writer, this standard carried weight well into the late nineteenth century. Extracted from their philosophical ground, the concepts of the Ideal and the Actual had degenerated into trite maxims for the selection of subject-matter and the choosing of words. The conspicuous insipidness of much American writing and painting of the period is traceable to this critical formula, not to the so-called "genteel tradition." Notions of gentility no doubt affected social behavior, but such notions cannot clearly be related to literary taste. Reference to the habit of condemning the Actual and demanding the Ideal will provide a better explanation of much nineteenth-century criticism—e.g., objections to the "realism" of William D. Howells—then loose of an assumed "tradition" of gentility. As for Victorian prudery too often charged to the Puritans, it operated to rule out entirely from the range of selection certain subject matter; but, as our illustration of taste shows, considerations of prudery need not be evoked at all. Here the magic formula provides the only standard except for those recollections of Blair not inconsistent with it.

A usable, or at least not damaging, directive for a writer of Hawthorne's interest and talents, the formula was scarcely the right one for Holmes. Using it, Motley was led to discount—perhaps was blinded to—his friend's gift for satire. For example, he enjoined Holmes to omit from "The Exile's Secret" the sharp couplet:

   I dress the phrases of our tarry friend,
   As lawyers trim the rascals they defend.

Apparently assuming that his friend's taste was superior to his own, Holmes accepted all Motley's criticism, except two trivial verbal ones. Had Holmes resisted this imposition of a standard alien to his temper and his talent, he would have been a wiser and possibly a better poet than he was. However successful a venture into the Ideal "The Chambered Nautilus" (1857) may be and may have seemed to its author (or to Motley), "The Last Leaf" (1831) is a better indication of where Holmes's real, if slight, talent lay. Finally, our illustration of taste suggests that a question possibly worth investigation is how far other writers (e.g., Henry James) were deflected from their courses by explicit or implicit exhortations to soar into the heavenly æther of the Ideal.

Source: Eleanor M. Tilton, "Holmes and His Critic Motley," in American Literature, Vol. 36, No. 4, January 1965, pp. 463-74.