Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

[222] change came more slowly, and reached its crisis at the outbreak of the Civil War; and it must have been at the time of his arrival in this country in 1861 that he met Phillips with the ardent exclamation, as the latter used to repeat it, ‘Phillips, you were right, and I was wrong!’This may, however, have been when he visited home in 1858, for his dissatisfaction with the pro-slavery tendency of public affairs was manifest as early as 1855.¹

I can remember well my first impression of Motley and his friend and afterward brotherin-law, Stackpole, as the acknowledged leaders of the Boston society of which I had an occasional boyish glimpse; and the glamour of youth still remains strong enough to make it impossible for me to believe that any drawing-room was ever ruled by more elegant and distinguished men. There was a younger brother—nearer my own Age—Preble Motley, who was an athlete as well as an Antinous, and hence doubly the idol of his compeers; and his early death was caused, in the traditions of that time, by a too daring excess in those gymnastic exercises which were