In an early review of what he rightly sensed would be Holmes' major literary work, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, James Russell Lowell celebrated the dizzying effects of the many turns, shifts, and clashes basic to the Doctor's strange new verbal form as a “universal Catherine-wheeling of fun and fancy.” And indeed initially Holmes' table-talk does often seem to spin wildly out of control, sending out sparks and speeches in all directions, spiralling far from any central point or voice with an irrepressible centrifugal force, dispersing any attempt at sober signification into a carnival of jabberwocky mush, so that even more private moments of calm internal discussion develop along the lines of a three-ring circus – or of the unending, disorderly proceedings of a multivoiced committee in debate. It may be, Lowell continues, that with his conversational free-play Holmes has invented a “new kind of rocket” that can “stay up against all laws of gravity.”