ABSTRACT
There are few who, reading Judge Holmes’s letter of resignation, will not feel that here they touch a life done in the great style. This, they will say, is how to live, and this is how to stop, with every power used to the full, like an army resting, its powder gone but with all its flags flying. Here is the heroic life complete, in which nothing has been shirked and nothing denied, not battle or death, or the unfathomable mystery of the universe, or the loneliness of thought, or the humors and the beauties of the human heritage. This is the whole of it. He has had what existence has to offer, all that is real, everything of experience, of friendship and of love, and the highest company of the mind, and honor, and the profoundest influence—everything is his that remains when illusion falls away and leaves neither fear nor disappointment in its wake.
