Last week, Law School professor Paul Freund had occasion to recall his second meeting with Oliver Wendell Holmes. "We went up to the second floor study, where Holmes was seated, starched and stiffly erect in his ninety-third year, behind his desk. He wore a black cutaway and striped trousers, his skin was parchment, his hair luxuriant and silver, his cavalryman's moustachioes abundantly flowing." Freund remembered.

Freund's companion. Thomas g. Corcoran, told Holmes that he was "the primal flame to which we come to light our torches." The justice replied. "There may once have been a little spark, but now all is ashes." Freund remembered a "deathly silence" falling afterwards."

Freund's remarks came at the inauguration last Thursday of a special exhibition at the Law School marking the 40th anniversary of Holmes's death. A Harvard law professor and a distinguished Justice of the Massachusetts and United States Supreme Courts, Holmes stands as one of the intellectual titans of his age.

A brief ceremony was scheduled for the afternoon in the Law School Library, Shortly beforehand, several distinguished looking men, all well over 60, were leaning on glass cases and conversing in hushed tones. For these men, the articles in the cases evoked memories of the man they had all clerked for at one time or another.

"It seems like both yesterday and a lifetime ago," one of them remarked wistfully.

A small crowd of about 40 eventually gathered in the Treasury Room adjacent to the main library. With its heavy wooden paneling, subdued colors, and muted lighting, the room seemed like a perfect place in which to honor 'Justice Holmes. Dark grays and navy blues, those colors so basic to lawyers' wardrobes, predominated throughout the room. The low murmur lapsed into silence as Freund rose to deliver the main address.

"Within the chambers of the Court, he carried off his labors with a jauntiness of spirit that disguised the meticulous care of his note-taking off the bench and his analysis of the issues." Freund said of Holmes. He summed up his impression of the man by observing that "the joyous freedom of his mind, the greatness of his life, and the high way he took his mortality made him an exemplar for a time of searching."

After the ceremony broke up, the previously unidentified men came out from behind their cloak of gray flannel. Of the ten surviving Holmes clerks, seven had made it to the ceremony: Chauncey Belknap, Thomas G. Corcoran, Lawrence Curtis, H. Chapman Rose, Robert W. Wales, and Alger Hiss and his brother Donald.

"From the way Holmes plowed through Coleridge, you can imagine the type of mind he must have had," recalled "Tommy the Cork" Corcoran whom Holmes once described as "quite satisfactory, quite noisy, quite satisfactory."

Corcoran drafted much New Deal legislation as one of FDR's chief lieutenants, but in the past 20 years he has been criticized for defending the business world that he helped to regulate in the 1930s.

"Holmes gave us no advice," said Alger Hiss, probably the most famous of all the clerks present. "He always said form your battalions and fight."

Hiss attracted national attention in the early 1950s as a result of the "pumpkin Papers Case"--prosecuted by Congressman Richard M. Nixon--which ended in his conviction for perjury before the House Unamerican Activities Committee. Hiss would have been tried for espionage for the Soviet Union had the statute of limitations not run out. A wide body of public opinion still maintains his innocence.

When the group had dwindled to the Hiss brothers and a few lingering guests someone asked Alger Hiss if Holmes's reputation for profanity had any basis in truth.

"I only heard him say the word "shit' twice in the year I was with him," Hiss recalled. "He then turned around to correct himself, and declared 'I'm annoyed."

Erika S. Chadbourn, the curator of the Law School Library, has spent much time compiling the exhibit over the past year, drawing material from the library's collection of Holmes papers and memorabilia. The glass cases interspersed throughout the library each cover a different period in Holmes's life. "I try to tell a story that way," Chadbourn said of the exhibit, which will remain on display until June 15.