Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Carlyle's laugh and other surprises

[130] being doomed to wear out his life in America, Norton with pleasure made his birthplace his permanent abode, and fully recognized the attractions of the spot where he was born. “What a fine microcosm,” he wrote to me (January 9, 1899), “Cambridge and Boston and Concord made in the 40's.” Norton affords in this respect a great contrast to his early comrade, William Story, who shows himself in his letters wholly detached from his native land, and finds nothing whatever in his boyhood abode to attract him, although it was always found attractive, not merely by Norton, but by Agassiz and Longfellow, neither of whom was a native of Cambridge.

The only safeguard for a solitary literary workman lies in the sequestered house without a telephone. This security belonged for many years to Norton, until the needs of a growing family made him a seller of land, a builder of a high-railed fence, and at last, but reluctantly, a subscriber to the telephone. It needs but little study of the cards bearing his name in the catalogue of the Harvard Library to see on how enormous a scale his work has been done in this seclusion. It is then only that one remembers his eight volumes of delicately arranged scrap-books extending from 1861 to 1866, and his six volumes of “Heart of Oak”