Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Harvard Memorial Biographies

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[309] but he did not enter without ‘conditions,’ obliging him to make up during the first term for his seemingly defective preparation in certain studies. When he came up to be examined, his constitutional diffidence so possessed him that he was unable to give proof of attainment commensurate with his actual knowledge, or with the requirements of a free admission, and thus he started on his college career oppressed by the weight of these added tasks as well as dispirited by ill health. In the midst of these difficulties, he found his spirits cheered and his mind sustained by his piano, which at the same time drew many friends around him. The musically inclined in his Class soon found him out, but until his Senior year he did not become truly known to his classmates. Though much inclined to be alone at times, few men were more dependent on the love of friends and the pleasures of social intercourse.

During the three previous years he had lost his mother and two lovely sisters, whose deaths followed each other at short intervals, the passing bell of one prolonging its sad tone into that of the next. Yearning for sympathy, the quiet, unchanging love which his home afforded had sustained him; and when these blows fell upon him, he was bowed by a sadness which only such deep and tender natures feel. He loved his friends with great earnestness, and yet was so little demonstrative that some whom he loved the best were often unaware of the depth of his affection, until sorrow or danger threatened, when the warmth of his attachment showed itself in untiring devotion.

Although not a disciple of any special religious creed, he was in the truest sense a religious man, penetrated by a clear faith and loving trust in God, whose presence he seemed to feel ever around him. Long after, and almost at the end of his earthly career, he expressed to a friend his firm conviction that God was ever near to comfort and sustain his trusting creatures; adding, that he felt ‘as if God's hand was always under him.’ The friend asked him how he had attained this earnest faith? He replied, ‘By contemplation.’