Syracuse, New York, January, 1855
I was a good deal at the Porters where W. H. C.1
boarded and really a charming place; they, of course, idolized him and I was so
like him. . . . The two sights in Rochester are Neander's Library and the
falls; I spent a good while in the former, which really transports you into the
life of a German professor. But the falls were yet better; half as high as Niagara,
they fall into a curving basin formed by the high banks, regular as the walks
of some castle. Looking across from the summit of the bank the white foamy
water waves away on its fall, while behind it the whole surface of the rock is
one great organ of fluted icicles. . . . I have seen Miss Griffiths . . . a
nervous little energetic Englishwoman, who manages all the antislavery in
Rochester, Frederick Douglass included, whose paper she partly edits.
There [Rochester] elderly ladies would peer up from their
knitting and gaze absorbed upon me “seeing the bobbing of his heavenly wig,” I
suppose.
It is very pleasant to go round so to new places and find a
circle of friends ready to receive you in each: as I do, especially since my
arrest.
All my A. S. [anti-slavery] lectures were successful
(extempore, of course). . . . A man came up and said, “Well, I should think
they would have indicted you!” — which I thought a great compliment.
_______________
1 William Henry Channing
SOURCE: Mary Potter Thacher Higginson, Editor, Letters
and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906, p. 66-7
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