Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Harvard Memorial Biographies

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[418] time) and enthusiastically wrote: ‘When you ride horseback or row, you are likely to be thinking about ordinary cares all the time, —post equitem sedet atra cura,—and perches on the oar-blade, too. But when a covey of partridges start,—whir, whir, whir—away fly all thoughts but those of the game.’ In one of his admirable Savannah letters to friends, we find a scholarly criticism on Dr. Eliot's rendering of the word δρπαγμόν as ‘to be robbed,’ in a sermon which he discusses. Controversial theology and metaphysics had always great charms for him; and, with congenial comrades, he would speculate earnestly on these topics for hours together on long walks or before the evening fire. He was much pleased, while at Savannah, with the writings of Mansel. His letters, also, are full of earnest and candid discussions of slavery. He tells with fidelity what he sees of it. His theory is that of ‘necessary evil for the present.’ He desires its speedy end, but finds ‘many excuses and palliating circumstances for slaveholders,’ and ‘insurmountable difficulties at present’ in its removal. Meanwhile he ‘can never forget the immense injustice on which the system rests.’ Politics he reviews quite as earnestly, it being the year of the Presidential election. His favorite candidates were Bell and Everett, but he would have voted for Mr. Seward, had he been the Republican nominee. In the spring of 1860, he attacked Blackstone again, though not very earnestly, and found ‘no book more interesting.’ But lighter reading, as of favorite novels, like ‘The Virginians,’ was better suited to the approaching summer; and out-door pleasures made him, he says, ‘dwindle in mind and grow fat in body.’ As his engagement approached an end, he sighed for ‘Northern air’ and a more ambitious career.

In the summer of 1860, accordingly, he returned North, and accepted, in September, an assistant professorship in the Academic Department of Washington University, St. Louis, offered to him by his friend Chancellor Hoyt of that University. Here our young pedagogue passed another successful year, and thence returning, he entered the Cambridge Law School in the summer of 1861, and at the same time received a proctorship