Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays

[111] on that very evening that he read aloud to me from Krummacher's “Parables,” a book then much liked among us,--selecting that fine tale describing the gradual downfall of a youth of unbounded aspirations, which the author sums up with the terse conclusion, “But the name of that youth is not mentioned among the poets of Greece.” It was thus with Hurlbert when he died, although his few poems in “Putnam's magazine” --“Borodino,” “Sorrento,” and the like — seemed to us the dawn of a wholly new genius; and I remember that when the cool and keen-sighted Whittier read his “Gan Eden,” he said to me that one who had written that could write anything he pleased. Yet the name of the youth was not mentioned among the poets; and the utter indifference with which the announcement of his death was received was a tragic epitaph upon a wasted life.

Thanks to a fortunate home training and the subsequent influence of Emerson and Parker, I held through all my theological studies a sunny view of the universe, which has lasted me as well, amid the storms of life, so far as I can see, as the more prescribed and conventional forms of faith might have done. We all, no doubt, had our inner conflicts, yet mine never related to opinions, but to those problems of heart and emotion which come to every young