874 THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON. 



and with much difficulty saved him from serious harm and succeeded in 

 getting him out of the city. Higginson rode with him in the vehicle 

 in which he was transported to safety, and, although his feelings of 

 hostility towards the man were not vile enough to permit his sacrifice 

 by the mob, he humorously tells us that while he thus had him at 

 his mercy he took an inhuman advantage of him and gave him a 

 discourse on the baseness of his career. 



After the Burns affair all attempts to enforce the fugitive-slave law 

 in Massachusetts ceased, but the abolitionists made preparation for 

 active interference in case opportunity offered, and kept in com- 

 mission a yacht which was nominally for hire, but which was ready at 

 all times for several years to receive a fugitive or, as the case might 

 be, his master, and take him on a cruise while the excitement should 

 last. Higginson was a stockholder in this yacht. 



As was the case when in Newburyport, he did not allow his crusade 

 against slavery to prevent his taking an active part in Worcester in 

 affairs of more immediate and local importance. He interested him- 

 self in the new question of a prohibitory law, was for a time secretary 

 of the state committee, and took a hand in the local enforcement of the 

 law. He, was deeply concerned with the problem of discharged convicts, 

 and at a later period he served as a delegate to a meeting of prison 

 reformers in Europe. He was firm in the conviction that the lives of 

 many of these convicts could be rescued. 



The peculiar nature of his religious society led to a certain amount 

 of ostracism. Edward Everett Hale was for a time, at any rate, the 

 only clergyman in Worcester who would exchange with him. Later 

 he was brought into amicable relations with others. As was to be ex- 

 pected, he was put on the school committee, from which, however, he 

 was subsequently dropped for defending the right of a Roman Catholic 

 father to decide which version of the Scriptures his child should read 

 in school. Later he was reinstated. He had a hand in organizing 

 the Worcester Public Library. He, with others, organized a local 

 Natural History Society. His fondness for out-of-door exercise took 

 shape in tramps over the hills about Worcester and in boating on Lake 

 Quinsigamond and in the organization of a gymnastic club, a skating 

 club, and a cricket club, of each of which he was president. 



He dates the beginning of his literary life from the publication of 

 " Saints and their Bodies " in the " Atlantic Monthly " in 1858. It is 

 true that the "North American Review," the "Christian Examiner," 

 and " Putnam's Magazine " had already published articles from his pen, 

 and that numerous communications and short poems had found a 

 ready welcome in the columns of certain newspapers, but for such recog- 



