Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays

[172] designating me as “a young friend” of his,a phrase which awakened, I regret to say, some scarcely veiled irreverence on the part of a young fellow at the Worcester Gymnastic Club, of which I was then president. Alas, I was already thirty-three years old, and youth is merciless. Nor can I wonder at the criticism when I recall that the daring boy who made it died a few years after in the Civil War, a brevet brigadier-general, at the age of twenty.

I had previously written an article for the “North American review,” another for the “Christian Examiner,” and three papers in prose for “Putnam's magazine,” one of these latter being a description of a trip to Mount Katahdin, written as a jeu d'esprit in the assumed character of a lady of the party. A few poems of mine had also been accepted by the last-named periodical; but these had attracted little notice, and the comparative éclat attendant on writing for the Atlantic monthly made it practically, in my case, the beginning of a literary life. I was at once admitted to the Atlantic Club, an informal dinner of contributors in those days, and at first found it enjoyable. Before this I had belonged to a larger club,rather short-lived, but including some of the same men,--the Town and Country Club, organized in 1849, at Boston. The earlier club