Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Harvard Memorial Biographies

The ensuing fall and winter were spent at home, in an uncertainty as to the calling he should adopt. There was no such decided bent of taste or conscious aptitude as to make the choice an easy one. He leaned at first to a business calling; partly in distrust of his abilities for any good success in a professional career, and yet more, as was undesignedly indicated rather than expressed, that he might more surely thus become a pillar of pecuniary dependence to those who, he foresaw, might have need of such aid. Meanwhile he made the best possible use of this intermediate season, by a diligent application to such general studies as would be available for any calling. He determined at length upon the law; a decision entirely his own, and yet coincident with that of those who knew him best; his mind, as all saw, being eminently judicial in its cast and tone,—clear, broad, discriminating, just,—while the accompanying moral qualities were of a high order. In the same exercise of independent judgment which determined him in the choice of a profession, he made choice of the West as the sphere for its exercise; influenced in part by the impressions he had gained at Antioch College in intercourse with some of its representative minds, and especially by the hope of finding there a certain largeness and liberality of thought and action. And so, with a single letter of introduction, stating simply his name and connections,—the writer knew no more,—to a lawyer in Chicago, Illinois, he left home, March, 1861. Obtaining at once a position as a student with the gentleman to whom he bore his letter, he gave himself without reserve to the work before him. ‘I have kept in the office all summer,’ he writes, ‘a thing the like of which I never had to do before, my summers hitherto having been largely spent in recreation. But I don't know that this has been less pleasant for it, though one gets a little tired sometimes, this hot weather, and longs for sea-shore or country.’ He did not add,—what was true,—that almost the only recreation he allowed himself, through those heated months, was