Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Harvard Memorial Biographies

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I have received three letters from our friend. . . . Is n't he a noble fellow! ‘The courage of a man with the gentleness of a woman.’ This is Mrs. Somebody's ideal of a man. Is it not literally true of him? If not, I never saw the person to whom it could be applied. He is certainly very brave, (you know courage was my ‘favorite virtue,’) and as certainly he is beautifully gentle.

It was Jack's great ambition as an undergraduate to excel in all athletic and manly sports. It almost broke his heart,—I write it seriously,—when he was judged not strong enough for a place in the picked crew of the “ Harvard.” He could have borne almost anything better than that.

As to his mental ability, it was naturally great. He took no pains to acquire scholarship, and probably hated the Tabular View as much as any man in the Class. The curriculum he cared most for was the Delta. But for all that he was not indifferent to the humanities, and was passionately fond of certain favorite books. “Shirley” he used to read through regularly once a term, and he would pore over a deep passage of Tennyson or Wordsworth with an avidity that would have won him signal Commencement honors had it been turned in another direction. But the trait that most distinguished Jack was unquestionably his quick sense of the ludicrous. By all odds he was the best humorist we had. I was next him alphabetically, and the tedium of the recitation-room was brightened for four years by his drollery. I remember he used always to write his name in his text-books with an interrogationmark thus, “How?” He despised cant and affectation. For false sentiment and all nonsense of that sort he had no pity. . . . . But his wit was of the evanescent sort that could not have been recorded and cannot be called back again. To appreciate it, one should hear it from his own lips, and they, alas! are stilled forever. Chivalrous, kind, unselfish, many of us loved him well. His gallant death was the very one he would have chosen for himself. By it the land has lost one of her noblemen.