Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

In this cheery announcement there is a curious foreshadowing of the “imaginings,” “enterprises,” and “designties” of his own life, and we can see whence he derived that gay and elastic spirit which made his later lectures delightful to his students at the University when he “opened a new world to them” in Professor Barrett Wendell's phrase; or, in the phrase of Mr. Henry James, made a “romance of the hour” for them. “It was,” the latter continues, “an unforgettable initiation. He was so steeped in history and literature that to some yearning young persons, he made the taste of knowledge sweeter, almost, than it was ever to be again.”

Like Irving and Longfellow and Holmes, he first turned to the law for support, and went so far as to be admitted to the bar; but he had less heart, even, for the actual practice of law than Holmes for the practice of medicine. He had also a firmer purpose of gaining success in literature, and sedulously trained himself to be a writer. In 1844 he married Maria White, a gifted and cultivated woman, whose criticism and sympathy were of great value to her husband's work, and whose reformatory feeling called