Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/137

 Thomas Wentworth Higginson "9 has to offer, theirs is a consistent and hopeful interpretation of American ideals. Consider, for instance, Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911). At the age of twenty-seven he gave up his pastorate at Newburyport because he ran counter to the sentiments of his congregation, believing that his foremost duty was to preach a word for mankind in attacking the institution of slavery. With Theodore Parker and Wendell Phillips he became one of the leaders of the Abolition move- ment, daring, in aiding the fugitive slaves, to obey a law higher for him than that of Congress. In the dangers of the battle- field he shared, when, as colonel of the first regiment of free coloured soldiers, he served in the inevitable conflict. His writings, beginning in 1853 and continuing almost incessantly for well over threescore years, carried him into fields of history, literature, education, and politics, and reveal him as sym- pathetically familiar with the culture of the ancients as with the creative thought of modem democracy. In his translation of Epictetus, in his delightful essay on Sappho, he was the scholar of catholic tastes, whose shelves in his simple Cambridge home gave equally gracious welcome to the message of the Stoics and the appealing human lyricism of Heine; yet who wrote in the fiy-leaf of a copy of his own volume of essays entitled Old Cambridge, wherein he discusses the literary epochs of his native town and writes at length on Holmes, Longfellow, and Lowell : "This book is one of my favourites among my too numerous productions because it reproduces so fully the men and traditions which surrounded my early youth." These traditions, whose finest essence his own life emphasizes, con- noted for him those duties of citizenship that made him a mili- tant intellectual leader to the end of his long life; perhaps not the least of his services being his espousal of the cause of woman suffrage, whereto his admiration for Margaret Fuller, whose life he wrote, contributed a quota of immediately personal enthusiasm. Yet so varied was Higginson's culture, so easy flowing his style, so wide the fund of quotations on which he loved to draw, and so pleasant his wit, that his essays, even when propagandist, are literature. And through them all runs a stream of optimism which, let it be admitted, is to a great degree a matter of temperament yet no less constructive an element on that account. But for this optimism, this