Thomas Wentworth Higginson to Louisa Storrow Higginson, June 26, 1856

Worcester, June 26,1856

I have a momentary lull, having yesterday sent off my second party to Kansas. . . . The first had forty-seven and our Committee will send no more, leaving it for the State Committee, which was appointed yesterday, chiefly on my urging. . . .

At Chicago they show an energy which disgraces us; have arrangements and men already and need only money. The night I came from Brattleboro', Friday, we had letters from Chicago, and our Finance Committee voted them fifteen hundred dollars and voted to add three thousand dollars more, unless I could raise this second party by Wednesday, which I did. Saturday, the day after, I was sent to Boston, with the same letters, to urge the Boston Committee to send money to Chicago. With great difficulty I got five minutes each from Pat Jackson and several other merchants, and at two they came together for ten minutes and voted to send two thousand dollars, Ingersoll Bowditch being happily absent, who had just told me he should come and oppose it entirely. I saw the telegraphic despatch written and came back.

That very night we got a telegraphic despatch from Chicago, imploring us to send that precise sum, for the relief of a large party of emigrants, detained at Iowa City for want of means. The two despatches crossed on the way.

This two thousand dollars, with our remittance, and our two parties of emigrants (which would not have gone till by this time if I had not gone to work on it the first night I came) are absolutely All that has yet been done by New England for Kansas, in this time of imminent need. This I say to show you how ill-prepared we are for such emergencies. The busy give no time and the leisurely no energy, and there is no organization. I should except the Committee here, which has done admirably, and that in Concord, Massachusetts, and Dr. Howe, Sam Cabot, Charles Higginson, and a few others in Boston.

There is talk now of sending Dr. Howe to Kansas with a large sum of money, and this will be the best thing possible, but it should have been done a fortnight ago.

SOURCE: Mary Potter Thacher Higginson, Editor, Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906, p. 137-9

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, October 1860

. . . It so happens that we have just had a visit from Edwin Morton, Gerrit Smith's private tutor, who went to Europe at the time of John Brown. “The wicked flea, whom no man pursueth,” Judge Russell satirically termed him: but he is a very cultivated and refined person and had that career among English literati which seems to be cheaply open to all young Yankees.

SOURCE: Mary Potter Thacher Higginson, Editor, Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906, p. 115

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, February 6, 1862

February 6, 1862

. . . Always after writing anything I immediately come upon something which ought to have gone into it. Last Sunday I came in with a bird's nest all full of ice and snow and showed it to Charlotte Hawes, who was here, saying something about its having the wrong thing in it. “Oh,” said she quickly, “snow is eggs, you know — in cookery.” . . . Then she also told me of a little girl who said snow was popped rain, which I think inimitable.

SOURCE: Mary Potter Thacher Higginson, Editor, Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906, p. 114

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, January29, 1862

January 29, 1862

. . . “Snow” [an essay of Higginson's in the “Atlantic”] seems quite popular and Thoreau likes it, the only critic whom I should regard as really formidable on such a subject. By the way, he is fatally ill with hereditary consumption and may not live to another summer. It is probably aggravated by neglect and exposure.

SOURCE: Mary Potter Thacher Higginson, Editor, Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906, p. 114

Thomas Wentworth Higginson to James T. Fields, January 1862

Dear Friend:

I send the “Letter to a Young Contributor,” which will cover nine or ten pages.

I am sorry to say that this household unites in the opinion that February is a decidedly poor number. Mrs. Howe is tedious. “To-day” grim and disagreeable, though not without power; “Love and Skates” [Theodore Winthrop] trashy and second-rate; and Bayard Taylor below plummet-sounding of decent criticism. His mediocre piece had a certain simplicity and earnestness, but this seems to me only fit for the “Ledger” in its decline. I could only raise one smile over the “Biglow” (“rod, perch, or pole”), but I suppose that will be liked. Whittier's poem is daring, but successful; Agassiz has covered the same ground often. Whipple uses “considerable” atrociously at beginning of last critical notice, and “Snow” has a direful misprint on page 195 (end of, paragraph) — South for Earth. I liked “Ease in Work,” “Fremont and Artists” in Italy.

The thing that troubled me most, though, was the absence of a strong article on the war, especially as January had none. I see men buying the “Continental” for its strong emancipatory pieces, and they are amazed that the “Atlantic” should not have got beyond Lowell's timid “Self-Possession.” For the “Atlantic” to speak only once in three months, and then against an emancipatory policy, is humiliating. Perhaps I ought to have written and offered one, but I could not write when busy about regiments and companies, and after that I supposed you had a press of war matter on hand, as no doubt you did some months ago; but public sentiment is moving fast if events are not, and it is a shame that life should come from the “Knickerbocker” and not from the “Atlantic.” You always get frank criticisms from me, at least, you know.

P.S. I see the papers treat the number well — but so they always do. At the lowest point ever reached by the magazine, just before your return from England, the newspaper praises kept regularly on.

SOURCE: Mary Potter Thacher Higginson, Editor, Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906, p. 112-4

Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Perhaps you expect a full account of last Saturday's “Atlantic” dinner; but really it was hardly worth it, except for Holmes, who was really very agreeable and even delightful, far more so than James Lowell, the other principal interlocutor, who was bright and witty as always, but dogmatic and impatient of contradiction more than he used to be, though he always had that tendency; whereas Holmes was very genial and sweet and allowed Lowell to be almost rude to him. The other guests were Edmund Quincy, Dr. J. W. Palmer (author of your favorite Miss Wimple), Charles W. Storey (a lazy, witty lawyer), Charles Norton, Underwood, John Wyman, formerly of Worcester, and myself. . . . Most of the serious talk turned on theology (which Underwood said they often fell upon), Holmes taking the radical side and Lowell rather the conservative. Holmes said some things that were as eloquent as anything in the “Autocrat” about the absurdity of studying doctrines in books and supposing that we got much from that source, when each person is the net result of a myriad influences from all nature and society which mould him from his birth and before it.

SOURCE: Mary Potter Thacher Higginson, Editor, Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906, p. 112

Thomas Wentworth Higginson to Louisa Storrow Higginson, July 1861

You ask about the “Atlantic” — Fields will edit it, which is a great thing for the magazine; he having the promptness and business qualities which Lowell signally wanted; for instance, my piece about Theodore Parker lay nearly two months under a pile of anonymous manuscripts in his study while he was wondering that it did not arrive. Fields's taste is very good and far less crotchety than Lowell's, who strained at gnats and swallowed camels, and Fields is always casting about for good things, while Lowell is rather disposed to sit still and let them come. It was a torment to deal with Lowell and it is a real pleasure with Fields. For instance, the other day Antoinette Brown Blackwell sent me a very pleasing paper on the proper treatment of old age — called “A Plea for the Afternoon.” I sent it to Fields by express and it reached him after twelve one noon (I don't know how many hours after). At seven that night I received it again by express, with Approval and excellent suggestions as to some modifications. . . . Such promptness never was known in a magazine; it would have been weeks or months before L. would have got to it.

SOURCE: Mary Potter Thacher Higginson, Editor, Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906, p. 111-2

Thomas Wentworth Higginson to Harriet Prescott

Dr. Holmes — whom you evidently did not fancy, though you describe his talk so well — is really superior, at every point I can think of, to Lowell, whom you liked so much; I should except personal appearances, for Lowell's brow and eyes are Apollo-like, while all Holmes's face is small in outline and expression, though mobile and vivacious. . . .

Maria Lowell was a living poem. She was his inspiration and his moral tonic beside, and he has been living on her memory ever since, in both respects. . . .

The chief editor [Lowell of the “Atlantic”] reads every article without knowing the author's name, so as to be perfectly impartial.

SOURCE: Mary Potter Thacher Higginson, Editor, Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906, p. 110-1

Thomas Wentworth Higginson to Louisa Storrow Higginson, July 10, 1859

July 10, 1859

Dearest Mother:

Emerson says, “To-day is a king in disguise”; and it is sometimes odd to think that these men and women of the "Atlantic Monthly," mere mortals to me, will one day be regarded as demi-gods, perhaps, and that it would seem as strange to another generation for me to have sat at the same table with Longfellow or Emerson, as it now seems that men should have sat at table with Wordsworth or with Milton. So I may as well tell you all about my inducting little Harriet Prescott into that high company.

She met me at twelve in Boston at Ticknor's and we spent a few hours seeing pictures and the aquarial gardens; the most prominent of the pictures being a sort of luncheon before our dinner; viz., Holmes and Longfellow in half length and very admirable, by Buchanan Read (I don't think any previous king in disguise ever had his portrait so well painted as this one, at any rate); also, by the same, a delicious painting of three Longfellow children — girls with their mother's eyes and Mary Greenleaf's coloring, at least three different modifications of it. . . .

In the course of these divertisements we stopped at Phillips's and Sampson's, where we encountered dear, dark, slender, simple, sensitive Whittier, trying to decide whether to "drink delight of battle with his peers" at the dinner-table, or slide shyly back to Amesbury in the next train. To introduce him to Harriet was like bringing a girl and a gazelle acquainted; each visibly wished to run away from the other; to Whittier a woman is a woman, and he was as bashful before the small authoress as if she were the greatest. Cheery John Wyman was persuading him to stay to dinner, and on my introducing him to my companion turned the battery of his good-nature upon her, pronouncing her story the most popular which had appeared in the magazine — “Oh, sir,” she whispered to me afterwards, “he spoke to me about my story — do you suppose anybody else will? I hope not.”

Duly at three we appeared at the Revere House. You are to understand that this was a special festival — prior to Mrs. Stowe's trip to Europe — and the admission of ladies was a new thing. Harriet was whirled away into some unknown dressing-room, and I found in another parlor Holmes, Lowell, Longfellow, Whipple, Edmund Quincy, Professor Stowe, Stillman the artist, Whittier (after all), Woodman, John Wyman, and Underwood. When dinner was confidentially announced, I saw a desire among the founders of the feast to do the thing handsomely toward the fair guests, and found, to my great amusement, that Mrs. Stowe and Harriet Prescott were the only ones! Nothing would have tempted my little damsel into such a position, I knew; but now she was in for it; to be handed in to dinner by the Autocrat himself, while Lowell took Mrs. Stowe I Miss Terry was at Saratoga and Mrs. Julia Howe suddenly detained; so these were alone. But how to get them downstairs — send up a servant or go ourselves? — that is, were they in a bedroom or a parlor; an obsequious attendant suddenly suggested the latter, so Lowell and I went up. In a small but superb room the authoress of “Uncle Tom” stood smoothing her ample plumage, while the junior lady hovered timidly behind. . . . Mrs. Stowe was quietly dressed in a Quakerish silk, but with a peculiar sort of artificial grape-leaf garland round her head which I could not examine more minutely; she looked very well, but I thought Harriet looked better; she had smoothed down her brown .curls, the only pretty thing about her, except a ladylike little figure, robed in the plainest imaginable black silk. . . .

Down we went: Dr. Holmes met us in the entry; each bowed lower than the other, and we all marched in together. Underwood had wished to place Edmund Quincy by Harriet, at his request, she being on Dr. Holmes's right — the Autocrat's right, think of the ordeal for a humble maiden at her first dinner party! but I told him the only chance for her to breathe was to place me there, which he did. On Dr. Holmes's left was Whittier, next, Professor Stowe, opposite me, while Mrs. S. was on Lowell's right at the other end.

By this lady's special stipulation the dinner was teetotal, which compulsory virtue caused some wry faces among the gentlemen, not used to such abstinence at “Atlantic” dinners; it was amusing to see how they nipped at the water and among the ban mots privately circulated thereupon, the best was Longfellow's proposition that Miss Prescott should send down into her Cellar for some wine, since Mrs. Stowe would not allow any abovestairs! This joke was broached early and carefully prevented from reaching the ears of either of its subjects, but I thought it capital, for you remember her racy description of wine, of which she knows about as much as she does of French novels, which I find most people suppose her to have lived upon — she having once perused “Consuelo”!

Little Dr. Holmes came down upon her instantly with her laurels. “I suppose you meet your story wherever you go,” said he, “like Madam d'Arblay" (and indeed the whole thing reminded me of her first introductions into literary society). . . . I seized the first opportunity to ask whether she and Mrs. Stowe had any conversation upstairs. “Yes,” said she meekly; “Mrs. Stowe asked me what time it was and I told her I didn't know.” There's intellectual intercourse for a young beginner! . . .

When the wife of Andrew Jackson Davis, the seer, was once asked if her husband, who was then staying at Fitzhenry Homer's, was not embarrassed by being in society superior to that in which he was trained, she replied indignantly that her husband, who was constantly in the society of the highest angels, was not likely to be overcome by Mrs. Fitzhenry Homer. And when I reflected on the entertainments which were described in “In a Cellar,” I felt no fear of Harriet's committing any solecism in manners at an “Atlantic” dinner, which she certainly did not, though a little frightened, occasionally, I could see, at the obsequiousness of the waiters and the absurd multiplicity of courses. . . .

I don't care so very much for " Atlantic " dinners — Professor Felton says they are more brilliant than London ones, but I think that Mary and I get up quite as good ones in Worcester — but Dr. Holmes is always effervescent and funny, and John Wyman is the best story-teller the world ever saw, and indeed everybody contributed something. The best thing Holmes said was in discoursing on his favorite theory of races and families. “Some families,” he said, “are constitutionally incapable of doing anything wrong; they try it as boys, but they relapse into virtue; as individuals, they attempt to do wrong, but the race is too strong for them and they end in pulpits. Look at the Wares, for instance; I don't believe that the Wares fell in Adam!”

SOURCE: Mary Potter Thacher Higginson, Editor, Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906, p. 106-10

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, November 1861

November, 1861

. . . Lecturing in Chelsea last night, I spent the night at their [the Fields] house in Boston for the first time. . . . Nothing could be pleasanter, more hospitable, and more entertaining than the bibliopole himself. Such treasures as that house is crammed with. Most of the books there described I saw and some not mentioned; as, for instance, a Greek book, marked in the title-page “Percy Shelley and Leigh Hunt,” in the latter's hand, but the blank leaves full of Shelley's notes in pencil-writing, delicate as himself. The Wordsworth volumes were captivating, with his own later alterations put in with ink in the neatest way, and showing the delicacy of his literary work. They have the original engravings from Sir George Beaumont, giving the actual scenes of “Lucy Gray,” “Peter Bell,” and other poems. Fields described Wordsworth's reading of his own poems in old age, quite grandly, and his reading Tennyson aloud also with equal impressiveness; and turning on a silly lady too profuse in her praise of passages, with “You admire it? But do you understand it?”

A long parlor, in a house on Charles Street like Louise's, looking on the beautiful river at full tide, and crowded from end to end with books and pictures. Beautiful engravings of great men, framed with an autograph below — Addison with a note to a friend to meet him at the Fountain Tavern; Pope, with a receipt for a subscription to the Iliad; Dickens, Tennyson, Scott, Washington, etc., each with an original note or manuscript below. An original drawing of Keats by Severn, his artist friend, in whose arms he died; given to Fields by Severn, as was also a lovely little oil painting of Ariel on the bat's back. Two superb photographs, of a wild, grand face, more like Professor Peirce than any one, with high, powerful brow, long face, masses of tangled hair, and full black beard; they might be a gipsy or a wandering painter or Paganini, or anything weird — and they are Tennyson.

SOURCE: Mary Potter Thacher Higginson, Editor, Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906, p. 102-3

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, March 22 1860

March 22, 1861

In Boston I was much interested in looking over Leigh Hunt's library which J. T. Fields bought and had for sale. It carried one nearer to a past era in English literature than anything else could do, to see his name and notes, all written in ink, in a delicate Italian hand and very abundant.

SOURCE: Mary Potter Thacher Higginson, Editor, Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906, p. 102

Thomas Wentworth Higginson to Louisa Storrow Higginson, January 1860

January, 1860

Dearest Mother:

I have not written very punctually, but it is from wandering up and down the world lecturing. . . .

I enjoyed Hartford. . . . There I saw Rose Terry. She lives in a sort of moated grange a mile out of town, an old house with an air of decay, once lovely among its fields and shrubbery, now more lonely with the city grown up to it. There she has lived for sixteen years with an old gray father and a sister more finely organized and invalid than herself, and the healthy tone of the majority of her stories seemed more surprising than the weirdness of the minority. She seems seven and twenty, tall and sallow, with fine eyes, the lower part of her face the smallest and narrowest I ever saw, with a slender, slight voice scarcely audible. She is full of talent, feeling, and delicate humor, very lovable, I should think, but impulsive and vehement, and with a satire as fine as the edge of a lancet. Her sister is married now, and she lives alone with her flowers and her father.

SOURCE: Mary Potter Thacher Higginson, Editor, Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906, p. 101

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Thursday Evening, January 25

Detroit, Thursday evening, January 25

At one this morning we were driven down to the [Hamilton] station. It was filled with large English or Irishmen reposing on benches. Presently a freight train came thundering in, and up jumped all the Irishmen. Going out I found that there was an emigrant car attached, and then out came bundling a multitude of women and children, and also numerous great neat corded boxes. Poor creatures, I supposed them newcomers, and wondered what would become of them. I saw that all seemed to get off very quickly, and the great boxes were wheeled away with miraculous activity, while the elders seemed quite at home. At last I discovered that these were the wives of the men on the benches, fresh from the old country, every soul of them, nine women and fifteen children, five children having died on the voyage, which explained the tears that streamed down the cheeks of one wild dark woman, as she convulsively grasped her husband's hand.

When this was once understood, it became a scene worth watching. All, without exception, were comfortably clothed and looked pictures of health — such round little rosy children, clustering round the fire, winking and blinking, the older ones asking, “Mother, is it morning?” and the smallest always decided on that point — “Oh, yes, iss morning!” Most were English; the few Irish were more talkative and demonstrative, telling all their experiences; the English were quicker, but all seemed really happy, and the men shouldered about the babies, and didn’t believe little Jimmy was the same boy, which all the Jimmies resented. The women looked handsome and respectable, but seemed coarse; they swore a little and the husbands a great deal; then one man treated all the others with hot wine and water and whiskey and water, and all the women drank in a circle, very quietly, and let the children taste, even an urchin two years old. It was like a scene out of Dickens. Of course I began distributing candy, and plump little girls dropped old-fashioned curtsies. Then our train came up and I whirled away, and left them still talking and laughing and crying behind; on this the first night of their New World.

(On the train.) . . . We had several Irish families; it was pleasant to see that nothing could disturb Irish good-nature or make Irish peasants — even the ruggedest men — any less devoted to their sturdy little children. Was wood wanting in the stove, the Irish laughed, the English grumbled briefly and sat still, the Yankees grumbled nervously and then set out, hunted up wood, and revived the fire. . . . I saw no Germans or Swedes, but to my surprise found the “notice to passengers” translated into both those languages — a thing which speaks volumes. . . .

I felt a childish pleasure in the thought that I was really getting into the West. Our track ran through scores of miles of woods, broken only by log huts, and one could see our straight path, looking back, far as eye could reach. Some log huts held Irish apparently, and some negroes; others of the latter were driving wood-sleds, or sawing at the stations. All looked hale and well dressed.

My heart bounded when we came out of the trees on a vast level plain, with the withered grass appearing through the snow, and a snow-storm driving across it — reminding me of Sarah Clarke's brown etchings. They tell me since that it was not a prairie, but it was as good as one to me.

At last we got to Windsor, where the ferry-boat was slowly toiling through the ice, and I preferred, with many others, to walk across, carpetbag in hand, and thus I reached Detroit at 3 P.M.

SOURCE: Mary Potter Thacher Higginson, Editor, Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906, p. 99-101

Thomas Wentworth Higginson

[Continued from HERE.]

Wednesday afternoon. Chess is perpetual in this “Institute.” A handsome youth, in beard and vizorless cap, plays every afternoon. All last evening there was a game with five lookers-on.

To-day is brighter, and brings more people into the street. I think I never saw so many black-haired, black-eyed, and black-clothed women, which surprises me. I have just met a beautiful child of eight, in deep mourning above her knees, and all below in full white pantalets and snowy long stockings drawn over her shoes. A girl a few years older had the same rig, but no mourning veil and a bright checked skirt. But the oddest little butterfly was a girl of six or seven coming home from school this morning: a scarlet cloak and hood, over a dark blue dress; then scarlet flannel drawers, loose and short; then black stockings surmounted by gray socks, covering the shoes. On the head, finally, a large round fur cap, with ears and no vizor. A sort of servant attended her. I saw some pretty fair-haired boys with large vizorless fur caps and loose gray wrappers, gathered by a belt of the same. The men are far handsomer than the women. All wear fur caps and gloves (which I did not see in Maine), and none the buffalo coats and red leggins which were common there.

This morning I went to the markets — wood, meat, and grass markets — all in open air. . . . I saw women sitting for hours in the freezing cold. There is a queer mixture in the currency. In the hotel placards they state $2 per day as their price, and “York shillings” seem as familiar as any other currency. In the same shop you see one thing labelled as 7/6 (English) and another as $6.00.

In fact, the American infusion is larger than I supposed. Mr. Smith, a Worcester man, . . . called on me. . . . He was eager for Worcester gossip. . . . He said there were many Yankees here and they prospered, as he had. . . .

I am amused to find that other American things creep in here also. My devoted little friend, Mr. Milne, is about to lose his place because of what the Directors called “an act of insubordination,” in inviting Lucy Stone here to lecture, on his own account, after they voted her “not a proper person for the Institute to countenance!” . . . But the spunky Secretary is resolved to have her here, in some other hall than the Institute's and I have promised (sub rosâ) to write the opinion of an American clergyman upon her, to be inserted in the paper, when she comes.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

I noticed English-looking hotels with pictures of the Crown and Anchor, the Fox and Hounds, etc. I saw but few colored people, but they looked, without exception, well clothed and comfortable.

SOURCE: Mary Potter Thacher Higginson, Editor, Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906, p. 97-8

Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Continued from: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, December 3, 1857

[From Hamilton, Canada, the record continues:]

What's the use of going to England and using up excitement, all at once, when one can come to Canada and get enough here? I am as distinctly a foreigner here as in Sebastopol, and circumstances have enabled me to enjoy the experience more fully than I expected. . . .

Behold me, then, domesticated at the City Hotel. Not a Yankee in it but myself — all straight, solid Englishmen, with deep, clear voices emerging from their fur-covered chests. Everybody's made handsome by a fur cap without a vizor, the most picturesque thing possible. The rooms of the hotel are dark, solidly furnished, and hung with colored prints of horses, races, and mail-coaches. The long dining-hall has a large painting of the Queen at one end, of the British arms at the side, with many others of various merit. At dinner each guest is offered a tall, narrow glass of foaming ale. No other gustatory novelty save macaroni pudding. I wish to chronicle, however, that I never saw guests eat faster in America — I mean the United States. Also I never had a scantier supply of water and towels — far inferior to Niagara, though, to be sure, water is what people come there for.

I am now writing in the Institute News Room and Library. Little bluff Canadian boys in fur caps are coming in for books to my kind and busy friend Mr. Milne (pronounced Mellen) . . . and a group of sturdy seniors are debating the £1000 which the city has just voted toward the fund for relieving the wives and children of those killed in the Russian War.

Hamilton is a city nearly as large as Worcester and growing rapidly, but with nothing in the least resembling its apparent life. A set of English and Scotch merchants, old and young, congregate in this Reading Room, which has a sort of provincial or Little Pedlington air. For instance there are six little tables, with chessboards on top; — conceive of persons with time to play chess in New England!

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

I had a fine afternoon walk up the mountain west of the city. . . . At the top I passed a tollgate and stopped to read the inscriptions; the tolls were very complicated — distinction made between private and hired teams, and between the width of tire of different wheels. Below, in large letters, “Clergymen and Funerals gratis” I preferred to pass, however, neither as a clergyman nor as a funeral, but as a foot-passenger.

[Continued HERE.]

SOURCE: Mary Potter Thacher Higginson, Editor, Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906, p. 95-7

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, December 3, 1857

Worcester, December 3,1857

[In] Montreal . . . I saw many delightfully wholesome-looking people, English and French. Among other excitements I went to a steeplechase, which is one of the most enlivening things I ever saw — riders galloping over a mile and half circle of farming country, , taking hedges, ditches, and walls at full speed, the horses leaping like kittens, of course always at some risk of failure or delay. This multiplies the points of interest, and made it infinitely more exciting than any mere trial of speed on a level track. Then the people, those staid John Bulls, were as wild with exuberant emotions as a Yankee caucus. Everything indicated an athletic race. One thing especially delighted me; when I went in to ask the price of snowshoes, they asked me if I wished gentlemen's or ladies' size; and I found that ladies there wear them a good deal.

_______________

He continued from Hamilton, Canada HERE.

SOURCE: Mary Potter Thacher Higginson, Editor, Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906, p. 95

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, November 1857

Montreal, November, 1857

. . . We crossed the long bridge to Rouse's Point in a wild wind, and the hotel, which is built far out into the lake, rocked all night with the wind and waves. I had a large room with two doors and no fastening, but the landlord said if I was “timid” I could put a table against the door. This morning I hurried breathless to the cars at seven; got there just in time, but was the first passenger. The ticket-seller said seven was the hour and they should leave “as soon as they could get ready” — which was not till a quarter to eight by his clock. Most of the passengers evidently understood and got there about seven-thirty. Three quarters of the talk in the cars was French, and all the peasants are French.

SOURCE: Mary Potter Thacher Higginson, Editor, Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906, p. 94

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, about 1858

Mr. Emerson is bounteous and gracious, but thin, dry, angular, in intercourse as in person. Garrison is the only solid moral reality I have ever seen incarnate, the only man who would do to tie to, as they say out West; and he is fresher and firmer every day, but wanting in intellectual culture and variety. Wendell Phillips is always graceful and gay, but inwardly sad, under that bright surface. Whittier is the simplest and truest of men, beautiful at home, but without fluency of expression, and with rather an excess of restraint. Thoreau is pure and wonderfully learned in nature's things and deeply wise, and yet tedious in his monologues and cross-questionings. Theodore Parker is as wonderfully learned in books, and as much given to monologue, though very agreeable and various it is, still egotistical, dogmatic, bitter often, and showing marked intellectual limitations. Mr. Alcott is an innocent charlatan, full of inspired absurdities and deep strokes, maunders about nature, and when outdoors has neither eyes, ears, nor limbs. Lowell is infinitely entertaining, but childishly egotistical and monopolizing.

SOURCE: Mary Potter Thacher Higginson, Editor, Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906, p. 93-4

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, about February 1857

I had a nice two days at Nantucket, which is a mere scion of Cape Cod and sister of Plum Island; sandhills and marshes and sea; but I enjoyed it. The people are all cousins. A few years ago the Coffin School went into operation and they looked round for the “Coffin family” to whom it was limited, and found them to include the whole island, so they made no distinction but of age. They are hospitable and sociable, as such isolated people always are; talk of “the main land” and "the continent” and “foreigners.” I stayed at the hotel, but had plenty of hospitality, and a drive with two horses seven miles out to Siasconset, their watering place, a shower of little cottages, covered with honeysuckle, on a high bluff. At Siasconset they have fish-carts made like wheelbarrows, only with a whole cask for a wheel; and in Nantucket you see ladies riding in two-wheeled carts, standing up, holding by a rope to steady themselves. My lectures were very well received, only the people who had been to the Azores were astonished that I could make so much out of them!

SOURCE: Mary Potter Thacher Higginson, Editor, Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906, p. 92-3

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, February 1857

Worcester, February, 1857

You will like to hear something of Dr. Hayes and his lecture. There was a large audience, who of course expected plenty of beard and bearskin, and applauded rather faintly when a spare young man in black stepped out on the platform. He is thin, nervous, spirited, with quite a lively manner. . . . Much of the lecture was familiar to us; but the descriptions were very simple and quite graphic. He always said we and referred but once to Dr. Kane, speaking of “the brave heart of our commander.”

The most novel and least pleasing part of it was his description of their separation from Dr. Kane. This he did not speak of as a thing requiring apology, but he did not give the explanation given by Dr. Kane, or rather added it, as part of their plan, to remain at the Esquimaux settlements and supply the rest of the party with food. But how were they to get the food? They were not hunters, and their few knives and treasures soon lost their power over the natives, so that they would not sell them even provisions enough for themselves, as might have been anticipated. Dr. K. softens down their sufferings, perhaps in charity for their blunder; he says they had lived on seal and walrus for two months, but Hayes says that they lived for the last three weeks on lichens from the rocks, and had only fuel enough to cook coffee twice a day.

Another thing Dr. H. told with great openness which Dr. K. omits entirely: that the party of the former had not only appropriated some . . . furs — but much worse. For they drugged with laudanum some natives who visited them, took their sledges and dogs, and made off. Being poor drivers, however, the owners soon overtook them, and were compelled by (empty) rifles to drive them to the brig; thus they escaped . . . and it seems rather hard, after such an example, to reproach the poor Esquimaux with theft. To be sure, the party were reduced to extremities, but the Esquimaux were in extremities all the time.

Otherwise, I liked the Doctor and walked along with him afterwards to his hotel. His great desire now is to go in a small screw steamer to explore that open sea; I begged him not to mention it, lest I should go too. . . . He wore finally a bearskin coat, one of the skins, and says his sensations of cold here are not the least affected by his Arctic experiences. (N. B. The mercury fell to zero as soon as he entered the city.)

SOURCE: Mary Potter Thacher Higginson, Editor, Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906, p. 91-2