NINETEEN
In the pinkish twilight of a September evening in 1904, after nearly twenty-one years abroad, Henry James was back in America, strolling along the brick streets of Cambridge. The university was no longer a small, leafy affair, he noticed. Knots of motley immigrants jostled long-skirted Radcliffe women on the crowded sidewalks, and further on, walking by Craigie House, he mused how the companionable Longfellow’s home was now a watering hole for sightseers. Democracy levels it all: distinction, nuance, individuality.
This was just the sort of hauteur that exasperated the local Cambridge belletrist, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who considered James a formidable talent deracinated by his refusals—chief among them, his repudiation of America. “American literature is not,” Higginson emphatically declared, “and never can be, merely an outlying portion of the literature of England.” Though he himself admired Jane Austen, whom he reread every year along with his beloved Thoreau, Higginson also believed American literature sprang—should spring—from that rich, self-renewing idiom in which “the mixture of nationalities is constantly coining and exchanging new felicities of dialect”: from the African spirituals he had so scrupulously copied; the twang of Western writers such as Bret Harte and Mark Twain, with whom he’d become friends; the argot of the Italian newcomer and of those who sailed in steerage from beyond the Pale. This was true cosmopolitanism, not the sinuous, self-regarding sentences of Henry James.
And unlike James, Higginson still hoped to heal the rift between art and public life, or what so long ago he had called, more generally, the dreamer and the worker. This had been the aim, as he saw it, of Thoreau, a writer snubbed by James, to whom Higginson constantly returned, again quoting Thoreau’s definition of style—“the art of composition is as simple as the discharge of a bullet from a rifle.” Thoreau, John Brown, Lincoln, Grant: these men—not James or Higginson himself, as he knew too well—closed the gap between private and public with the plain, clear speech of eloquent meaning.
Doubtless some of Higginson’s irritation with James, not unlike the grudge he bore Whitman, had its origins in the war, which James curiously had managed to avoid. Or had he? Higginson cannily wondered. “Mr. James has no doubt placed himself as far as possible beyond the reach of the Civil War by keeping the Atlantic Ocean between him and the scene where it occurred,” Higginson dryly commented. “But when I recall that I myself saw his youngest brother, still almost a boy, lying near to death, as it then seemed, in a hospital at Beaufort, S.C., after the charge on Fort Wagner, I can easily imagine that the Civil War may really have done something for Mr. James’s development, after all.”
Yet Higginson agreed with James that art was to be evaluated in aesthetic, not moral terms. “Let the picture only be well drawn; and the moral will take care of itself; never fear,” Higginson insisted. His preferred modern poets were Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Heinrich Heine, and he said that “in case I were going to prison and could have but one book, I should think it a calamity to have Tennyson offered me instead of Browning.” These days he gravitated toward Lanier and Poe and Swinburne, whom he praised for their metrical experimentation, as well as the young William Butler Yeats, whom he had met in England.
Not as square a critic as a subsequent generation of modernists would characterize him—neither as moralistic nor as mediocre—in 1890 Higginson co-edited a collection of American Sonnets, noting that “in attempting to enforce…[fixed] laws, it is easy to become as pedantic and wearisome as the later Greek grammarians.” Regardless, his taste was often inhibited by a finicky reticence, as it was in the case of Whitman, who still rankled him, although a mellower Higginson in old age acknowledged the poet’s gifts and said he’d like Whitman’s “Joy, Shipmate, Joy!” carved on his tombstone. But in 1870, just a few months before he went to Amherst for the first time, he declared that the “American poet of passion is yet to come.” Had he failed to see the genius under his nose? For a while, perhaps. But he eventually understood enough to let others—us—have her.
And though he initially hesitated about publishing Dickinson’s verse, once Poems appeared and he looked at it, as if for the first time, he never changed his mind about her brilliance. In 1895 he said she possessed an ability to touch depths other poets may only dream of. The next year, when Mabel Todd brought out the third and last volume of Dickinson poems, he recurred again to Thoreau’s aggressive metaphor: “She is to be tested,” Higginson declared, “not by her attitude, by her shot. Does she hit the mark? As a rule she does.” In 1903, when Higginson turned eighty and it seemed Dickinson’s star had set, he was unfazed. “We take for granted the somewhat exaggerated estimates of Margaret Fuller, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Emily Dickinson,” griped one critic riled by Higginson’s feminism. Higginson shrugged. Poems such as “Vanished” (his title) would never be forgotten, he claimed, and while this isn’t one of her best poems, it does reveal his awe in her presence—and his nagging sense of what he had lost and still missed:
She died,—this was the way she died;
And when her breath was done,
Took up her simple wardrobe
And started for the sun.
Her little figure at the gate
The angels must have spied,
Since I could never find her
Upon the mortal side.
Unable to find her on the mortal side, Higginson invented her: “a strange, solitary, morbidly sensitive, and pitifully childlike poetic genius who could afford, in all simplicity, to fall back upon her own companionship, and the companionship of animals, without caring to grow in wisdom,” he wrote with cloying sentimentality. A concoction of his and Mabel Todd’s, this image of Dickinson as reclusive-savant served both of them well: Mabel desperately wanted to enlarge her role in Dickinson affairs as the cicerone of a retiring genius, and Wentworth, who likely distrusted his own fondness toward Emily, wanted to keep her at bay. For though he may have been smitten with the crack’d and solitary singer who drained his nerve power, he would never have admitted to or acted on his feelings.
In the end, though, it was Emily who had closed the door, a door never opened to Mabel but unbolted, in part, for him. Their relationship was long-standing, deep, affectionate, real, and her poetry, whether he fully grasped all of it or not—he did grasp a great deal—said what he wished to say but more keenly, directly, daringly, and with more brio. He knew it. Eccentric and unmistakable and naming those uncharted places, her poetry “stands at the opposite remove from the verse of Longfellow,” Higginson noted in 1903—and Longfellow’s popularity, he hastened to add, was “the last fate” Dickinson would have “wished for.” There was nothing really strange about her vaunted seclusion; she merely shunned what she called “an admiring Bog.”
In fact, he envied the strength it took to withstand the world, since he, an obliging son of Puritans, could never brook isolation for long; his conscience hurled him, over and over, into the field of action. But the writers he most admired—Hawthorne, Thoreau, even the abolitionist Whittier—were recluses of a sort, as Higginson observed in an essay on the thorny subject of solitude. Even Shakespeare, a writer on the public stage, so skillfully concealed his private life that many doubted he wrote his own plays. “It would be easy to make up a long list of authors of eminence who have deprecated instead of encouraging all personal information,” Higginson declared, “and who would have been eminently unfitted to live in an age or land of interviewers.”
Desiring the solitude he could not sustain, Higginson thrived in that age of interviewers; Dickinson, not at all. They respected each other the more for it.
“Perhaps the more we are destined to have in common,” Higginson concluded, “the more we shall take refuge in what we can preserve of ‘retiracy.’” The modern age erased individuals: Higginson agreed with Henry James more than he let on.
“FEW OF US NOW REMAIN who were baptized into the light & hope of the ‘Transcendental’ movement,” Higginson had remarked just days after his seventieth birthday. “To that & to the Anti Slavery movement I always feel that I owe most of what makes life worth living.”
Bearing the scar on his chin that he had earned while storming the Boston courthouse, Higginson still framed the war as a contest between freedom and enslavement, with freedom victorious; the simplification, though considered radical in 1893, papered over the inequities and indignities that black Americans, legally free, now endured. In retrospect, then, Higginson sometimes seems a man of denial: the war was over, slavery abolished. Garrison had closed The Liberator in 1865, and all was presumably well.
Higginson himself is partly to blame for this perception. The ongoing series of reminiscences he published in his later years had a sedative effect on his readers, distancing them from the derring-do of his more militant and feminist past. In 1896, for instance, his gastric ailment bedeviling him, he sat up in bed, propped with pillows, to write a memoir called “The Recollections of a Radical”—that is, before he jettisoned the title as too combative and unliterary. Borrowing instead from Wordsworth’s Excursion (“A man he seems of cheerful yesterdays / And confident tomorrows”) he renamed his book Cheerful Yesterdays.
Though the title sounds a bit smug, Cheerful Yesterdays is nonetheless the recollection of a public-spirited, self-proclaimed reformer who refuses to recant the radicalism that, by 1898, seemed quaint—or, worse yet, was dismissed as the very fanaticism that caused the war and after it divided the nation. Higginson took umbrage. A commitment to basic human rights is not fanaticism, and as for Reconstruction, if it ended poorly, as he wrote in The Nation in 1899, it was because southerners kept blacks in a condition “just as near slavery as possible; to limit their right of contract, their right of locomotion, and their range of labor.” Former slaveholders had driven out northerners come to invest energy, time, and cash; “the typical carpet-bagger,” he said, “was simply the man who was left behind to do mischief.”
But overall Cheerful Yesterdays said little about racial inequality, Jim Crow, or the recent disenfranchisement of black voters in the South. Instead, Higginson devised a narrative of his life in terms of progressive reform conceived in the ravishing innocence of radicalism and matured into hope for the coming century: “To those who were living when the American nation lifted and threw off from its shoulders the vast incubus of human slavery,” he asked, “what other task can seem too great to be accomplished?”
YET THE SUBJECT OF PREJUDICE was on his mind. Higginson joined the Anti-Imperialist League, formed in 1898 to protest American foreign policy and especially the brutal effort to annex the Philippines. With William James, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Andrew Carnegie, and Samuel Gompers, Higginson thoroughly rejected the so-called White Man’s Burden (Kipling would coin the phrase in ’99) and condemned jingoistic American politicians, his disgust the inevitable result of a lifelong commitment to justice and liberty. “Freedom is freedom,” he cried, “and it is not for a nation born and reared on this theory to ignore it in judging the affairs of others.”
That meant he had to reconsider the present condition of American blacks. “These people have a right to the freedom of civilization, the freedom of political rights, the freedom not merely to escape being held as slaves, but to have a position as free men that is worth having,” he wrote in the Boston Evening Transcript, his oratorical style again strong. In the presidential election of 1900, Higginson threw his support to the anti-imperialist William Jennings Bryan and, aware the black voter would be leery of a Democratic candidate, joined with Garrison’s son and George Boutwell, head of the Anti-Imperialist League, to write the “Address to the Colored People of the United States.” The black population, Higginson said, “must cut adrift from every organization which wars on darker races, as such, and begins to talk again of ‘the natural supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon.’ We fought through a four years’ war to get rid of that doctrine, and enlisted nearly 200,000 black soldiers for the purpose.”
That the African American had no real advocate in government soon became abundantly clear to Higginson, who read with mounting fury Bryan’s newspaper, The Commoner, in which Bryan stated over and over that he believed black Americans inferior to Anglo-Saxons. Higginson angrily wrote Bryan; the letter is worth quoting at length:
I have yours of Nov. 23rd, and it perhaps justifies me in writing to you with a frankness which I might not otherwise have regarded as proper. You ask me to assist in finding efficient agents for “The Commoner.” Excuse me if I reply that, although I headed your electoral ticket in this state during the last presidential election, I never could have done it had you taken the position assumed in “The Commoner” of Nov. 1st, in regard to what you call the “social equality” question. In this number of the paper you take a position which appears to me utterly retrograde and mediaeval; & wholly inconsistent with your general attitude.
You also show in your way of arguing either ignorance or indifference in respect to American history when you say that no man or party has advocated social equality between the white man and the black man. The simple fact is that no man concerned in the great anti-slavery movement in its early days ever advocated anything else. In my own case from the first time I had a house of my own in 1847, a fugitive slave always had a refuge there, and was treated as a social equal; and when, in the year 1857, I raised emigrant parties and accompanied them into your state and Kansas, it was always under the same fiat. It is humiliating to me to think that a newspaper, calling itself Democratic in a region thus made free, should take such an attitude as you now assume.
It is in my opinion an essential part of Democracy that social distinctions should be merely individual, not racial. Character is character; and education is education. What social gradations exist should be based on these, and these alone; and even these should be effaced as rapidly as possible. What are you or what am I that we should undertake to advocate any social law that shall place us above men like Frederick Douglass or Booker Washington? No point which “The Commoner” advocates seems to me so important as this, and whatever its other merits, it here seems to me so utterly in the wrong, that I have no wish to subscribe for it myself or to have it sent me and can only wish, if it holds to this attitude, that it may be discontinued.
Similarly, in 1904 Higginson wanted to know what so-called freedoms African Americans actually enjoyed: “a freedom tempered by chain-gangs, lynching, and the lash” he angrily wondered. Loathing the deep vein of racism that underlay violence perpetrated on black Americans, he snapped with antebellum fury, “Was any white man ever lynched, either before or since for insulting the modesty of a colored girl?” As for the fear, northern and southern, of miscegenation, he would have none of it. “As the memories of the slave period fade way, the mere fetich [sic] of colorphobia will cease to control our society,” he imagined, “and marriage may come to be founded, not on the color of skin, but upon the common courtesies of life, and upon genuine sympathies of heart and mind.”
In 1905 he wrote an introduction to The Aftermath of Slavery by Dr. William Sinclair, an ex-slave, in which Sinclair cogently argued that southern whites, wishing to reenslave black Americans, murdered thousands of them while denying them the vote. Though Higginson took the long view—“I am a man old enough to recall a time when there existed all around us at the North instances of the same kinds of injustice of which we now properly complain when we see it in the South”—he rebuked individuals like the white supremacist Thomas Nelson Page, whose novels Higginson had already censured. The next year he reproached Brander Matthews for not paying much attention to “the fact of colorphobia, still so dangerous & inhuman a feature of our civilization.”
While he largely agreed with the Great Accommodator, Booker T. Washington, that education—for Washington, vocational education—was for African Americans the royal road to economic independence, he reminded his readers that “it is important for this race to produce its own physicians, lawyers, preachers, and above all, teachers.” And he chided Harvard graduates in a poem published the same year that Henry James rambled the streets of Cambridge:
They saved you; charged Fort Wagner; they held out,
Held the road wide that Sherman might pass through.
You built Shaw’s statue; can you calmly doubt
That those who marched with him should vote, like you?
IN 1908, AFTER TWO DAYS of gruesome race riots in Springfield, Illinois, not far from the place where Lincoln lay entombed, Higginson joined with John Dewey, William Dean Howells, and W. E. B. Du Bois to demand suffrage for black Americans, as Du Bois put it, on the same terms as whites. From this challenge came the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Higginson then retreated; revolutions do go backward, as he once said. He talked of conciliation between black and white instead of the demand for equal rights. It’s difficult to know exactly why except in the terms he himself offered: political expediency and prudence, the same combination that lay behind his telling Dickinson not to publish her poems right away; the public was not ready for her, nor she for it. A curious mix of caution and courage, Higginson yet showed himself to be, in the end, mordantly skeptical about the capacity for people to change. “No white community will ever consent to the political supremacy of either the black man or the colored man or the yellow man,” he wrote to the National Negro Conference. “I make this declaration philosophically and as a result of observation and reflection and absolutely without feeling of prejudice, for I have none.”
Thomas Wentworth Higginson at 80, in 1903.
“CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS IS INDEED, in spite of its cheer, a book of ghosts, a roll of names, some still vivid but many faded,” observed Henry James, “redolent of a New England in general and a Boston in particular that will always be interesting to the moralist.” To James, Higginson was a man of compunction and good deeds, not an artist. He was echoing the minority view of Higginson—today the majority view—first put forward in 1871 by Theodore Tilton, then editor of The Independent.
He is too much of a moralist to lose himself in literature, and so fails of realizing the highest success in that department; and too much of a litterateur to throw himself into reform to sink or swim with some great movement or cause; and so fails to awaken the enthusiasm or quite command the sympathies of the reforming class. In fact, he never quite loses himself in anything, and so never quite finds himself in anything, never touches the high mark of his power, never realizes the ideal set for him by warm-hearted friends.
Higginson pasted Tilton’s criticism into his scrapbook.
Yet no one would dispute his magnanimity or fair-mindedness. His seventieth and seventy-fifth and eightieth birthdays prompted testimonial dinners in Boston and Cambridge, with speeches and newspaper articles ritually praising his physique, his energy, and, more keenly, his kind but sad mouth. A portrait painted when he was eighty depicts him seated, his hair white as bone, whiskers white as sugar. He wears a double-breasted wool jacket and large necktie with stripes. He looks forward, almost defiantly, but at the same time seems uncomfortable sitting still. There is a hint of a watch fob and the glitter of a ring, but his hands are thin, and the outlines of his skinny knees poke through folds of cloth. His eye, though heavy lidded, is fixed on the future. “There are so many younger writers to be recognized & encouraged,” he said. He liked to summarize Goethe: “The old trees must fall in order to give the younger growth a chance…. It is not the 19th century but the twentieth, which now becomes interesting.”
More and more he meditated on the meaning of fame, that bugbear of a subject: spurred by ambition since youth, he frequently stood on the Boston Common in front of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s bronze memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth, thinking about what might have been, “but for some inches of space, one trivial turn of Fate’s arrow, I had been riding there, foredoomed to Shaw’s glory immortal.” Did he secretly covet that glory? Of course. But the price was martyrdom, and his paternalism, if that’s what it was, had inspired him to save, not sacrifice, the troops in his command.
If Dickinson had dreamed of posthumous fame, Higginson sensed that for him the pendulum would likely swing in the other direction. “All teaches us that fame is, in numberless cases, the most fleeting of all harvests; that it is, indeed, like parched corn, which must be eaten while it is smoking hot or not at all,” he wrote. The titles of his essays tell their own story: “Favorites of a Day,” “A Contemporaneous Posterity,” “Concerning High-Water Marks,” “The Literary Pendulum.” As for himself, he said he was like a horse that never won a race but “was prized as having gained a second place in more races than any other horse in America.”
LESS THAN FIVE MONTHS after Higginson’s death, in 1911, George Santayana, the Harvard professor of philosophy who had been a student of William James’s and, in his turn, was a teacher of T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Walter Lippmann, delivered a lecture in California that, when published, influenced an entire generation of moderns. “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” as it was called, described America as a country with two mentalities. Predictably excoriating the busy Americans “occupied intensely in practical affairs,” Santayana also criticized their obverse: those soggy writers who floated in the “backwater” of an abstract, fatuous transcendentalism. Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Whittier, Bryant, and Holmes (the so-called fireside poets) toppled from the canonical mantel on which they had been enshrined—and Higginson sank with them into the sea of obscurity.
Alice James had in fact thought the Dickinson poems were “sicklied o’er with T. W. Higginson,” and the poet Amy Lowell would dismiss Higginson as a bungler too dim for the dauntless poet. “There is not, to my mind, a sadder page in history than the picture of good, well-meaning Mr. Higginson trying to guide Emily’s marvelous genius,” Lowell wrote to Mrs. Todd. “You will find that all the modern poets and critics rate her as I do, and it is owing to you, who have collected her poems and letters with such care, that we know what she was, and a debt of gratitude do we all owe you.” Mabel Todd was content not to share the limelight with Higginson, now deceased, and willing to pass on to him the blame for editorial folderol.
But Dickinson survived her early editors as a modernist first class, her work transcendent yet concrete, knotty and well wrought. Her conscience agonized, her inward look was availing: she had a knack for seeing the unseen—and for the “uncertain certainty” (her phrase) of consciousness. In 1913, after Sue’s death, Mattie, now Martha Dickinson Bianchi and herself an aspiring poet, inherited the poems in her mother’s possession and, Lavinia having died in 1899, secured the rights to them. In 1914, she renewed the copyright on the collections edited by Higginson and Todd and published 147 poems in a volume called The Single Hound to commemorate—and rehabilitate—the relationship between Sue and Emily that Mabel had suppressed. The timing was perfect. Dickinson was hailed as an “unconscious and uncatalogued Imagiste,” a Puritan with a pagan imagination writing short, concentrated, subtle poems “dug out of her native granite.”
Dickinson, it was soon said, had discarded the Calvinism of her forebears while preserving their sense of tragedy and with a hard-won faith had resisted the incursions of religious evangelism and its secular counterpart, pie-eyed transcendentalism. This is the theme of Conrad Aiken’s 1924 influential reevaluation of Dickinson (Aiken was a student of Santayana’s). As epigrammatic symbolist, Puritan, and freethinker, she fended off the call of the genteel with its requirement that upper-class ladies sew for soldiers, join a Browning club, and recite Hiawatha. Instead, the vigorous and self-sufficient Emily Dickinson stood for the life of the impassioned mind, the embodied soul.
Yet for all her gifts, to the literary establishment Dickinson remained a wacky Old Maid. “Once adjust oneself to the spinsterly angularity of the mode,” Aiken concluded, sounding far more conservative than Higginson, “its lack of eloquence or rhetorical speed, its naive and often prosaic directness, one discovers felicities of thought and phrase on every page.”
And Higginson? Symbolizing prudery, he stayed the emblem of weak-kneed gentility, lacking substance, his mind an old music box (to borrow from Santayana) of worn-out tunes. Dickinson’s early biographer, the poet Genevieve Taggard, belittled him as a brave, humane meddler—the “hero of a hundred Atlantic paragraphs”—who went to war “in high feather” and by the early 1930s, was lumped with the dull “Cambridge” group of academics. Dickinson was avant-garde, Higginson an heirloom. And since the modernists of the first part of the twentieth century disdained the grubby world of politics and held themselves aloof not just from old-fashioned narrative but from public events and national crimes, they turned their aesthetic back on racism (to say nothing of women’s rights and suffrage). Higginson’s brave political iconoclasm—which had attracted Dickinson—thus fell by the literary wayside. Few litterateurs read or cared about his pungent writing on Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, or the slave called Gabriel. As a consequence, and out of context, he became easy to ridicule, as in Adrienne Rich’s fine poem “I Am in Danger—Sir—,” where Dickinson appears as “‘Half-cracked’ to Higginson.’”
Rarely was Higginson evaluated by literary people with the kind of evenhandedness of the Dickinson scholar who in 1968 observed that “one should not demand more acumen of an individual than of the whole tribe of critics of the 1890s.” Yet that’s not the whole story either. Returning to Cambridge after the war had not been good for Higginson’s future; in Newburyport and Worcester, he shone; in Beaufort, he shone; he rallied the troops through oratory and his moral courage. But after the war he slowly adopted the hypnotic equitability that helped brand him Dickinson’s half-baked editor. Too bad: he was the women’s rights activist who declared in 1852 that “we must choose between the past forms which once embodied the eternal spirit, and the other forms which are to renew and embody it now…. The old has the court, the senate, the market; the new has the poets, the people, and posterity.”
Yet this radical and, in later years, this apostle of moderation was the man Emily Dickinson trusted, for there was something of the radical and conservative, activist and recluse, in her nature, too. Innovator, maverick, and marvel, anatomist of the heart and mind, she scribbled poems on the backside of recipes for cocoanut cake, and when her father insisted that the neighborhood pastor question her for heresy, she submitted. “It is remarkable,” Hawthorne once noted, “that persons who speculate the most boldly often conform with the most perfect quietude to the external regulations of society.” Nor did she fuss over sanitary commissions or suffrage. “‘George Washington was the Father of his Country,’” she joked. “‘George Who?’ That sums all Politics to me.” The world that counted would catch up to her, not her to it.
LIKE DICKINSON, Higginson never stopped writing. Seated either in his cozy book-lined study, his desk near a window, or in the larger room on the second floor where he installed a typewriter, he flooded newspapers and magazines with essays and reviews. He opposed all proposals to restrict immigration, he advocated religious tolerance—including toleration for atheism—and woman suffrage. (He turned down membership in the National Institute of Arts, Science and Letters until it admitted women.) He produced new books on Whittier and on Longfellow as well as a short biography of his grandfather. And aware that the end was near, he assigned that portion of himself assignable, donating to the Boston Public Library his huge collection on literature by and about women, over one thousand volumes gathered over the years while he was hoping to write their history. He called the massive library his Galatea Collection and included in it his letters from the un-Galatea, Emily Dickinson.
He planned to translate Aristophanes’ The Birds from the Greek (“very good for elder years,” he chortled). And though he spoke at the funerals of almost all his friends, he did not visibly sadden or tire. Or withdraw from the present. He did not condemn technology or mass culture. “I wish we had automobiles when I was a boy,” he joked. “The old times were good, but the new times are better.”
And he offered what had become his credo: “Best of all, is to lead, even at the very last, a life so full and useful that the thought of death occurs but as a momentary interruption; an incident that may come to us as easily, perhaps, as when a steamer moves from the wharf—so noiselessly that we do not know ourselves to be riding on a new element until we look back on the receding and irrevocable shore.”
He had not forgotten his Whitman after all.
Joy! shipmate—joy!
(Pleas’d to my Soul at death I cry;)
Our life is closed—our life begins;
The long, long anchorage we leave,
The ship is clear at last—she leaps!
She swiftly courses from the shore;
Joy! shipmate—joy!
NOR DID HE EVER FORGET EMILY. Within a week of his eighty-fifth birthday, on December 22, 1908, Higginson, along with Henry James and William Dean Howells, was commissioned by Harper’s Bazaar to write a short piece on the afterlife. Consenting, Higginson said he had little to add to his essay on immortality, written nearly forty years earlier: “that I am glad we live in a universe large enough, and that humanity is vast enough, to give an hundred souls an hundred different methods of reaching truth.” And besides, for him, poetry supplied all the intimations of immortality he ever needed; dare you see a soul at the white heat.
And so when he sat down to write the piece, he bade farewell, albeit indirectly, to her one last time, again quoting from the Brontë poem “Last Lines” that she had asked him to read at her funeral.
Though earth and man were gone,
And suns and universe ceased to be,
And Thou were left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.
THE NIGHT WAS GENTLE. Purple crocuses had poked through the damp earth, the forsythia were in yellow bloom, the city smelled of honeysuckle and spring. A slight breeze rippled over gauzy curtains, lamps burned low, and at half past eleven, Thomas Wentworth Higginson died.
The funeral took place two days later, on May 13, 1911, and while unfussy in some respects, it was completely unlike Dickinson’s obsequies some twenty-five years earlier. For this was a public event, full of pomp and circumstance, although Higginson had specifically requested there be no eulogy. There was, as ever, a simplicity to his character.
Wrapped in the regimental flag of the First South Carolina, Higginson’s casket was borne from Buckingham Street to the First Parish Church, near the Cambridge Common, on the shoulders of African American men, members of Company L, Sixth Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteer Militia (Colored), and accompanied by its color guard, J. Homer Pryor, Captain. The delegation included Sergeant W. E. Carter and Privates Henry Falson, Edward R. Chelmsford, Thomas Brown, Edward A. Brewer, Charles Bassett, Isaac Lassiter, Toland J. Edwards, William H. Wilson Jr., Henry Grouse, and William F. Scott. They entered the vestibule of the old church to the low beating of a drum, and had they glanced around, they could have seen the place packed with luminaries, black and white, past and present, crowding the aisles as the light streamed through the tall windows: Higginsons, Channings, Cabots, Eliots, Putnams, and Storrows, the mayor of Cambridge, the presidents of Harvard, Emerson’s children, Charles Francis Adams, Colonel N. P. Hallowell of the Massachusetts Fifty-fifth, councilmen and aldermen, former governor John D. Long, George Mifflin of Houghton Mifflin, members of the Massachusetts Historical Society and representatives of the Cambridge and Boston public libraries, as well as the students, also black and white, he had helped through college, perhaps Virginia Alberta Scott, Radcliffe’s first black student, and of course the sons and daughters, all black, of Civil War veterans. From Higginson’s antislavery days, only Franklin Sanborn remained, and he was there too, sitting unstooped among the wreaths and banners.
There was a reading from Psalms; one of Higginson’s early hymns, “To Thine Eternal Arms, O God” then a poem, a song, a benediction. The Loyal Legion played taps as the casket was removed from the church.
The body had been cremated, the ashes buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery to the roll of more drums, and the flag of the First South Carolina Regiment was presented to the Loyal Legion post. His headstone did not bear a quotation, just a few lines commemorating Higginson’s military rank and his service to the country’s first soldiers of African descent.
On a busy roadway, Route 21, in Beaufort, South Carolina, stands a plaque similarly commemorating the regiment and its commander. But the pendulum has indeed swung far from him, and he is hardly remembered.
EXCEPT, OF COURSE, by Dickinson herself: “I will not let thee go,” she had told him, “except I bless thee.”
Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just Ourselves—
And Immortality
….….
Since then—’tis Centuries—and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward Eternity—