Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays

[26] human, and touch the imagination less. I could then fish all day by the seashore and could collect insects without hesitation,--always being self-limited in the latter case to two specimens of each species. Since the Civil War, however, I find that I can do neither of these things without compunction, and was pleased to hear from that eminent officer and thoroughly manly man, General Francis A. Walker, that the war had a similar effect on him. “Dulce bellum inexpertis.” It has been a source of happiness for life to have acquired such early personal acquaintance with the numberless little people of the woods and mountains. Every spring they come out to meet me, each a familiar friend, unchanged in a world where all else changes; and several times in a year I dream by night of some realm gorgeous with gayly tinted beetles and lustrous butterflies. Wild flowers, also, have been a lasting delight, though these are a little less fascinating than insects, as belonging to a duller life. Yet I associate with each ravaged tract in my native town the place where vanished flowers once grew,--the cardinal flowers and gentians in the meadows, the gay rhexia by the woodside, and the tall hibiscus by the river.

Being large and tolerably strong, I loved all kinds of athletic exercises, and learned to swim