Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Harvard Memorial Biographies

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[112] easy prey before the plague had approached any other. He was ill for about ten days, and died on the 22d of May, 1864. His disease was then thought jaundice; ‘complicated with typhoid fever,’ wrote his friend Colonel Thomas J. C. Amory, “so soon to follow him in death.” He breathed his last, not on the battle-field nor from the scathe of shell or bullet, but through the hostile malaria of that unwonted climate, more deadly to him than any lead or steel. It is not difficult to imagine that, with his almost romantic attachment to the heroes of the past, and his love of the ballads of old times, full of deeds of bravery and deaths of knights on the battle-plain, he might well have desired that another kind of death might have been his. Yet, however this may be, his friends will remember that his life was as much a sacrifice, his death as noble and as honorable, as that of those who fell when the artillery was roaring and the bullets singing their requiem.

In Lieutenant Barstow's character was to be found an agreeable and rather peculiar intermixture of the boy and the man. In many things his mind exhibited great maturity, while in others it had all the characteristics of early youth. He was especially fond of historical and philosophical reading. His knowledge of history, particularly of English history, was extensive and accurate. His powers of reasoning were excellent. His memory was extraordinary; he was not only able to repeat long ballads, of which he was very fond, but could even recite pages of prose which he had not seen for years. Macaulay was his favorite author; and it was his delight to deliver from memory his long and finished periods, with an emphasis which no one who has heard him can forget. His comrades of the mess-room will long remember how he enlivened the dulness of many a winter evening by reciting Thackeray's ‘Ballad of the Drum,’ or some stirring lay of Aytoun. Napoleon was his favorite hero. When a boy of ten, he would carry about a life of the Emperor under his arm, and read and reread it, and refuse to part from it. Among the volumes of a deserted library at Newbern he came upon Napier's ‘Peninsular War,’ and he was wont to descant, to his friends on the