Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Harvard Memorial Biographies

At last came the reward of toil. One by one clients appeared and friends were made; and professional labor, carefully and successfully performed, gradually gave him a recognized position at the bar. He was not a fluent speaker, but his words were always well chosen and appropriate, and his reasoning compact and cogent. The hearers unconsciously accompanied the speaker's clear statement; and, disarmed by its apparent simplicity, adopted it as their own, mentally adding to it, and convinced by what they seemed to have suggested to themselves.

But he did not allow professional duties or studies, however attractive, to withdraw him from physical exercise. He never permitted any acquirement to gather rust from disuse, and steadily kept up his athletic skill. He had carefully constructed under his personal supervision, and according to a model of his own, a wherry, fitted perfectly for secure voyaging on the open sea as well as for speed on smoother water. In this he set out in August, 1860, to row from Boston to Mount Desert Island, there to meet a party of friends. It was the first ocean voyage in one of these slender skiffs which had then been attempted, and required no little hardihood to undertake. His own graphic account of it, written, by request, for the Atlantic Monthly Magazine, is the best evidence at once of his skill with the oar and with the pen. The voyage proceeded very successfully until the rocky headlands of Cape Ann were passed, when the steady easterly wind drove in the fog and storm shorewards, obscuring everything, and night fell upon the adventurous voyager, who was at sea in his frail boat, in a locality beyond exact conjecture. Carefully calculating the possibility of drifting on the treacherous shore before morning, and concluding against it, he very coolly drew about him his oil-skin outer shelter, and slept lulled by the impatient plash of the waves against his little craft. Morning broke and showed him close under the rocky islets of The Shoals, and but half-way to his intended goal; and as the easterly storm