Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays

[3] impassable. Even a so-called cosmopolitan man has never seemed to me a very happy being, and a cosmopolitan child is above all things to be pitied. To be identified in early memories with some limited and therefore characteristic region,--that is happiness. No child is old enough to be a citizen of the world. What denationalized Americans hasten to stamp as provincial is for children, at least, a saving grace. You do not call a nest provincial. All this is particularly true of those marked out by temperament for a literary career. The predestined painter or musician needs an early contact with the treasures and traditions of an older world, but literature needs for its material only men, nature, and books; and of these, the first two are everywhere, and the last are easily transportable, since you can pile the few supreme authors of the world in a little corner of the smallest log cabin. The Cambridge of my boyhood--two or three thousand peopleafforded me, it now seems, all that human heart could ask for its elementary training. Those who doubt it might, perchance, have been the gainers if they had shared it. “He despises me,” said Ben Jonson, “because I live in an alley. Tell him his soul lives in an alley.”

I was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on December 22,--1823, in a house built by my