868 THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON. 



the older medical men, and it was a privilege to be counted among 



his friends. 



He was elected a Fellow of the Academy March 13, 1889. He 



died February 20, 1909. 



Francis H. Williams. 



THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON. 



Thomas "Wentworth Higginson, preacher, soldier, author, was 

 born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, December 22, 1823. His pre- 

 liminary education was obtained in a private school at Cambridge, and 

 he was graduated from Harvard College in 1841. After graduation 

 he taught for six months in a boarding-school at Jamaica Plain, and 

 then became private tutor to the sons of a cousin, who at that time 

 resided in Brookline. Here, domesticated in an affectionate and 

 interesting family, and having access to a library the shelves of which 

 were loaded with the works of French and German writers with which 

 for the first time he then came in contact, he led a happy life. The 

 beautiful country about Brookline fascinated him, and he spent hours 

 in rambling over the hills, watching the birds and animals and gath- 

 ering wild flowers. " We often had school," he says, " in the woods 

 adjoining the house, perhaps sitting in large trees, and interrupting 

 work occasionally to watch a weasel gliding over a rock or a squirrel 

 in the boughs." 



The Brook Farm experiment was then in full career and Higginson 

 came in contact, while living in Brookline, with several of the young 

 men who were at that time giving practical proof of their faith in 

 communistic theories. Obviously these theories did not reach him, 

 although, so far as money matters were concerned, he at this time 

 deliberately renounced all thoughts of the accumulations that might 

 be had from the law as a profession, and under the influence of the 

 books that he was then reading, concluded that a life of extreme 

 economy was without terror for him. So minded, he became engaged 

 to be married, and returned to Cambridge in September, 1843, where 

 he entered college as a "resident graduate," having no clearly defined 

 purpose or intention as to the future, but attracted by the thought of 

 a purely literary life carried on in an unworldly spirit with the pos- 

 sible chance of an appointment as professor as a reward. The in- 

 fluences that surrounded him while in Cambridge are best told by 

 himself: "There were always public meetings in Boston to be at- 

 tended, there were social reform gatherings where I heard the robust 

 Orestes Brownson and my eloquent cousin, William Henry Channing ; 



