Historic leaves, volume 5, April, 1906 - January, 1907

‘ [37] matter, and April 2, 1890, appointed Charles Elliot, George C. Mann, and Rosewell B. Lawrence to arrange for a meeting of all persons interested in the preservation of scenery and historical sites in Massachusetts.’ And this meeting, according to Mr. De las Casas, by a sequence of other efforts and events, resulted in the Metropolitan Park law of 1893. Mr. Wright was a member of the Appalachian Club, and somewhere between 1881 and 1885 he had the pleasure of escorting a very large portion of the membership through the Fells, and in 1884, the year he was trying to get organized help on his subscription, such as they as a club had the power to give, he lectured before one of the meetings on ‘The Functions of a Forest.’ Mr. Wright was not only open to conviction, as his record would show, but was as magnanimous as he was generous, and although the approval given his plan by many of the club had done much to encourage both his work for it and his hope for aid in that most important contribution, had the meeting in behalf of another been called while he was alive, he would have rejoiced. The magnificent and broadly beneficial Metropolitan idea, including as it did both his Fells and Blue Hills, would have made him supremely happy, and its carrying out, whatever the means, so long as they were honest, would have had his heartiest co-operation.

Rosewell B. Lawrence, secretary of the Appalachian Club, publishes the following from the pen of T. W. Higginson in his pamphlet, ‘The Middlesex Fells,’ of 1886, which was delivered before the club after Mr. Wright's death: ‘We miss from among us the face of that devoted friend of all outdoor exploration, Elizur Wright. I have known him almost all my life; first as the fearless ally, and at times the equally fearless critic of William Lloyd Garrison; then as the translator of La Fontaine's Fables,—a task for which he seemed fitted by something French in his temperament, a certain mixture of fire and bonhomie, which lasted to the end of his days; then as a zealous petitioner before the legislature to remove the lingering disabilities of atheists; and then as the eager, hopeful, patient, unconquerable advocate of the scheme for setting apart the Middlesex Fells as a forest park. I served with him for a time on a committee for ’