Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Carlyle's laugh and other surprises

[199] he had grown up from youth, and a casual visitor might infer from his cheery manner that these comrades had just left the room. During his last illness, mind and memory seemed equally unclouded until the very end, and almost the last words he spoke were a caution to his faithful nurse not to forget to pay the small sum due to a man who had been at work on his driveway, he naming the precise sum due in dollars and cents.

He died at Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the morning of December 3, 1905, aged eightyfive. Was his career, after all, more to be pitied or envied? He lived a life of prolonged and happy labor among the very choicest gems of human thought, and died with patient fortitude after all visible human joys had long been laid aside.