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Ernest Crosby, Garrison the non-resistant, Chapter 1: the Liberator (search)
Chapter 1: the Liberator In a small chamber, friendless and unseen, Toiled o'er the types one poor, unlearned young man; The place was dark, unfurnitured and mean; Yet there the freedom of a race began. Lowell, To Garrison. Oliver Johnson gives a graphic description of the room under the eaves of Merchants' Hall, Boston, in which Garrison printed the early numbers of his Liberator in January, 1831. The dingy walls, the small windows bespattered with printer's ink, the press standing in one corner, the composing stands opposite, the long editorial and mailing table covered with newspapers, the bed of the editor and publisher on the floor-all these, he tells us, make a picture never to be forgotten. It was a pretty large room, says a later visitor, but there was nothing to relieve its dreariness but two or three very common chairs and a pine desk in the far corner at which a pale, delicate and apparently overtasked gentleman was sitting. . ... He was a quiet, gentle and I mi
George H. Gordon, From Brook Farm to Cedar Mountain, Chapter 1: from Massachusetts to Virginia. (search)
ist of all the proposed officers of the regiment, from the colonel to the last second lieutenant, and on the other side a statement of the condition of the companies, as follows: Abbott, full; Quincy, probably full; Savage, 80; Curtis, 80; Cary (Lowell men), 80; Underwood, 82; Tucker, 33; Goodwin, not noted; Whitney, full; Cogswell, full. The date of this paper (unfortunately it is a matter of surmise) must have been later than the fourteenth of May, for then, by the history of the Second, Cgly did the saluting gun baptize the new encampment. On the eleventh of May, 1861, the day celebrated as an anniversary, when the first company of the regiment, detailed to take possession, came in sight under command of its captain,--Abbott of Lowell,--a single piece of artillery, borrowed from the City of Roxbury, manned by volunteer gunners, awoke the slumbering scene with a national salute. Then the Stars and Stripes were given to the breeze, and Brook Farm was baptized Camp Andrew. On
George H. Gordon, From Brook Farm to Cedar Mountain, Chapter 2: Harper's Ferry and Maryland Heights—Darnstown, Maryland.--Muddy Branch and Seneca Creek on the Potomac—Winter quarters at Frederick, Md. (search)
me too sick, who were transferred to an adjoining store, where at night one man died; how, when these poor men reached Washington, they lay two days in the boat before being removed to the hospital, and during this time had only water-crackers to eat; and how the whole story was told in the Boston post, to persuade others to enlist,--is a part of our history I do not like to recall. And as well for this, among many other reasons, because it brings before me again that poor boy Kittredge, of Lowell,--a recruit, and therefore a fit subject for that scourge among new soldiers, typhoid fever, with which I found him greatly emaciated in our canvas hospital Too sick to move with the others, I ordered our surgeon to transfer him to Darnstown and place him in the church, used as a hospital. After we left, this poor boy was removed five or six miles to the canal, thence by boat to Point of Rocks, thence by rail to Frederick, where he died soon after his arrival. It is said that his feet were
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 1: discontinuance of the guide-board (search)
r those who really cared enough for the books to read them; they needed no guide-boards; the guide-board was for the earlier efforts at realism, before it had proved its strength. Realism has since achieved its maturity, and undoubtedly has won — if it has not already lost again-possession of the field. Whether its sway be, as many think, a permanent change, or only, as I myself believe, a swing of the pendulum, the fact is the same. It is as useless to resist such changes as it was for Lowell to go on lighting his pipe for years with flint and steel, which I well remember his doing, rather than accept the innovation of a friction-match. Realism must hold the field so long as it has a right to do it, and it can only be asked to fulfil the conditions of its being. If we excuse it, as we plainly must, from the perpetuation of the guide-board, we can only ask that it shall go on and do its work so well that no such aid shall be needed; that its moral, where there is one, shall be
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 6: Lowell's closing years in Cambridge (search)
reminiscence by the same author-volumes which Lowell was always ready to praise, and his presentatier he had a more strenuous quality; but the Rev. Dr. Lowell was a man of sufficiently mild clericalear madam, what do you expect to do about it? Lowell did not, therefore, inherit recluse qualities.s and death of his wife; then the sinking of Dr. Lowell into that sorrowful condition described in omistaken generalizations. Instead of painting Lowell as a life-long recluse who was at last broughtit of monologue. No one needed this more than Lowell, except perhaps Holmes; the two had sat at opps Mr. Smalley presses too far the novelty that Lowell found in a circle where there were others besice was not in quality so much as in quantity. Lowell could not perhaps say, like Stuart Newton the ates afforded him a microcosm of the world. Lowell, fortunately, lived to refute very promptly thwas lodged in the East Cambridge jail. Now, Mr. Lowell, I know you wouldn't want that boy, that Cam[8 more...]
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 13: the dream of the republic (search)
more accessible to England than any other of its offshoots; and yet all the resources of assisted emigration and subsidized railroads, though they can tempt natives of the United Kingdom there, cannot keep them there. If, now, those born in Great Britain itself prefer the life of the self-governing republic, why should not those also prefer it who had the misfortune to be born somewhere else-as, for instance, in Venezuela or in Mexico? There remains only that general proposition, which Lowell satirized without mercy in his Biglow Papers fifty years ago, that all who do not speak English must needs be an inferior race, and that Anglosaxondom's idea must break them all to pieces. Yet there was a time when Bolivar was a recognized hero throughout this continent for rescuing first Venezuela and then Peru from the Spanish dominion; and when he died, in 1830, his name was associated in the public voice with that of Washington. We are now told that the South American states are unstab
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 15: the cant of cosmopolitanism (search)
a little wicked only by the lingering of a very few scruples and the presence of but a very few dollars. After his return to his family his cosmopolitanism is appalling. Perhaps there is a maiden who might compare with him, the damsel who has been taken abroad with the expectation of becoming the proud bride of a ducal coronet, and has come home with only a complete wardrobe and an exceedingly incomplete French accent. The more experienced often go abroad, as Emerson said-and Motley and Lowell illustrated-to be Americanized. That is, they learn that the nation of which they are a portion has its own career to work out; that nothing that can be learned or won in Europe is too good for us, but that you can no more transplant the social atmosphere of Europe than you can change the climate or the sky. They learn also the folly of supposing that cosmopolitanism means good manners, or has, indeed, very much to do with them. Perhaps, if we hear a man mentioned as a cosmopolite, we a
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 17: English and American gentlemen (search)
hole class will be clowns, and they are more likely to be so; assume that they are to be gentlemen, you remove half the obstacle to their success. Hence much of the flexibility of American character, its ready adaptation. Since it made no difference to anybody else that Whittier had been in youth a farmer's boy in summer and a shoemaker in winter, it made no difference to him; and nobody stopped to ask whether he had sustained, in childhood, the same refining influences with Longfellow and Lowell. In New York, in Washington, one often encounters eminent men who have worked with their hands. In England these men would have carried for life the stamp of that experience — some misplaced h, some Yorkshire burr would have stamped them forever. In America the corresponding drawbacks have been easily effaced and swept away. No doubt climate and temperament have something to do with this difference, but the recognized social theory has more. It grows largely out of the changed definitio
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 23: the alphabet as a barrier (search)
women among the blacks, who were wholly illiterate, had more vigor and trustworthiness than their better-educated children. The same discrimination is often made at the North, justly or unjustly, in favor of the first Irish immigrants as compared with their more enlightened descendants. Who that recalls the war for the Union does not remember how we all, from President Lincoln downward, played upon the string of the open doors of this nation, its being a home for all oppressed mankind ? Lowell again referred to this in that magnificent Commemoration Ode, which is the high-water mark of American poetry, and which no Englishman, except perhaps Hughes and Bryce, was ever yet able to appreciate or even understand. How fearlessly we then appealed to the Germans, the Irish, the Swedes, the Scotch, within our borders, and how well they responded? Even the green flag of Ireland, now forbidden to be displayed from our City Halls-and perhaps wisely — was then welcomed with cheers on batt
John Harrison Wilson, The life of Charles Henry Dana, Chapter 3: community life (search)
id. The life of actual labor combined with his intellectual pursuits had strengthened his body, improved his eyesight, and increased his confidence in himself, and this was of the first importance to him at least. The Harbinger was published for about two years, beginning in June, 1845. It was edited mainly by Dr. Ripley; but in this as in everything else Dana seems to have been his principal assistant and understudy. It was issued both in Boston and New York, and while Curtis, Cranch, Lowell, Dwight, Osborne Macdaniel, and many others, were regular or occasional writers, Dana was evidently the principal one. In the first three volumes his activity is particularly noticeable. He wrote editorials, essays, book reviews, poems, and bright, clever notes on many subjects. To the fourth volume, published mostly after Dana had married and removed to New York, he also appears as a contributor, but his articles were necessarily less numerous. In his earlier contributions he frequently
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