Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays

[79] cousin, Stephen Higginson Perkins, a Boston merchant, residing in a pretty cottage which he had designed for himself in Brookline. In him I encountered the most attractive man I had yet met and the one who was most to influence me. He was indeed a person of unique qualities and great gifts; he was in the prime of life, handsome and refined, a widower, whose modest household was superintended by a maiden sister; his training had been utterly unlike my regular academical career; he had been sent to Germany to school, under the guidance of Edward Everett, then to the East and West Indies as supercargo, then into business, but not very successfully as yet. This pursuit he hated and disapproved; all his tastes were for art, in which he was at that time perhaps the best connoisseur in Boston, and he had contrived by strict economy to own several good paintings which he bequeathed later to the Boston Art Museum,--a Reynolds, a Van der Velde, and a remarkable oil copy of the Sistine Madonna by Moritz Retzsch. These were the first fine paintings I had ever seen, except the Copleys then in the Harvard College Library, and his society, with that he assembled round him, was to me a wholly new experience. He disapproved and distrusted all classical training, and was indifferent to mathematics; but he