ABSTRACT
Holmes was graceful and epigrammatic to the end. On his resignation from the Court, his more than ninety years did not prevent him, in his letters to his colleagues who had sat with him and the members of the Bar who had argued cases before him, from turning a phrase and placing a punchline as effectively as ever. Some months before he resigned he agreed to take part in a celebration of his ninetieth birthday and spoke from his home over the radio. “To live is to function” he said. “… ‘Death plucks my ears and says, Live — I am coming.’” I have thought it best for these words to close this volume. It is worth noting that in his three last utterances the figures Holmes uses for life are the sun's course, a Japanese picture, the arrow in the chase, the horse race, fire. “We live by symbols,” Holmes once said, and the symbols he used were not without meaning. The race, the chase, the sun, the flame, the picture that does not end with the margin — these come closer than any words of our own could to delineating Holmes from the inside of his mind and faith.
