I thought, when waiting for admission to President Quincy's
study, that there was really nobody living, except the veteran Humboldt, before
whom I should feel so much awe, as in the presence of this ancient Doge. But
when finally admitted, the impression of old college times was so strong that I
felt an immediate expectation of an English oration or a little good advice.
The latter came in the form of his views on Disunion, which he had evidently
thought over pretty thoroughly, and stated with the utmost heartiness and even
vehemence. He spoke just as he used to do, with occasional pauses for a word,
though not often; and with singular vigor and emphasis.
He expressed no sort of fear of Disunion; he was “perfectly
willing to look over into this dark chasm which yawns in the midst of the
Republic”; and as for fear of saying what he thought, “old age had made
him courageous” (an unusual effect of old age, I thought). . . . He thinks that
the Union may be dissolved; but that this is more likely to occur from the mere
size and weight of our future nation, than from the hostilities arising from
slavery, though, he says, this last “would no doubt be by far the most glorious
cause of a separation.” He said some very weighty things about the general
position and character of the nation, the necessity of discussing first
principles, and the wrong done by any distrust of agitation. “Our fathers built
our nest upon the waves, and we must not shudder at its rocking motion”; and
then he quoted Fisher Ames, that our nation was not a “ship of state,” but a raft;
safer, indeed, but one's feet were always in the water.
. . . He described his position very quietly, without
egotism; said he felt no sensation of old age, except sometimes in walking;
could work in his study from 9 A.M. to 9 P.M. without fatigue. “I am a miracle
to myself,” he said. Then he told me of the memoir of J. Q. Adams on which he
is now engaged and which will be out in a few weeks. “Then,” said he, with a
sort of roguish pause, “I am going
to school” I smiled
interrogatively, and his face lit up with a perfectly boyish smile of
triumph. “Yes,” said he, “to school — all existence is a school, and I hope to
keep on learning here, till I pass to a higher one.” I said, to draw him out,
that after this I supposed he had no new literary plans. “Ah, I won't say that!”
he quickly answered with the same gleeful smile, and afterwards quietly said
that he had “one or two “ projects of that kind, which would require a great
deal of preliminary preparation and on that he was about to enter! Thus
tranquilly does this man of eighty-six plan his life from month to month.
SOURCE: Mary Potter Thacher Higginson, Editor, Letters
and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906, p. 88-90
