Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays

[108] great delight, at Centre Harbor, I being on my way to the White Mountains and he returning thence. We had several hours together, and went out on the lake for a long chat. He told me that he had decided to go to New York and enter the office of A. Oakey Hall, a lawyer against whom there was then, justly or unjustly, some prejudice. I expressed surprise and perhaps regret; and he said frankly, “It is the parting of the ways with me, and I feel it to be necessary. I have made up my mind that I cannot live the simple and moderate life you and my other friends live in New England; I must have a larger field, and more of the appliances and even luxuries of existence.” This recalls what the latest biographer of Bayard Taylor has said of him: “The men of New England were satisfied with plain homes and simple living, and were content with the small incomes of professional life. Taylor had other aims. . . . Involved in the expense of Cedarcroft, he never knew the enormous value of freedom.”

There was nothing intrinsically wrong in the impulse of either, but the ambition brought failure to both, though Taylor, with the tradition of a Quaker ancestry, and with less of perilous personal fascination, escaped the moral deterioration and the social scandals which beset