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and delivered a number of anti-Blaine speeches in the campaign. In 1886 he produced his imaginative story, The Monarch of Dreams, of which he wrote, "It is a great and almost unexpected delight to me to find that I can really write an imaginative story." Two years later he published Travellers and Outlaws and his first volume of verse, An Afternoon Landscape, though he had been writing fugitive poems for many years. Two of these poems stand out above all the rest, viz., "Decoration Day" and "The Things We Miss." Of the latter he once wrote to a friend, "I published the verses in 1870 without initials and nobody knew who wrote them . . . . but they have been twice as much praised by strangers as all I have written besides in verse." This poem made an especially wide appeal, and its author himself remarked concerning it that it was his "best bid for immortality." His poetic genius also found expression in his translation of Petrarch's sonnets, -a very meritorious effort.

Colonel Higginson made several trips to Europe and met a number of distinguished men. In his little book Carlyle's Laugh he describes a memorable walk in Hyde Park he took on one occasion in company with Froude and the rugged sage of Chelsea. As a notable incident of this walk we learn that all three came very near being run over while crossing Rotten Row, and "dear old Carlyle had to run for his life." In England Colonel Higginson was entertained by such eminent men in various avenues of life as Gladstone, Huxley, Tyndall, Rawlinson, Freeman, Anthony Trollope and others. At the Voltaire Centenary in Paris he heard Victor Hugo speak. His impression of all these distinguished Europeans he has preserved for us in his Cheerful Yesterdays. During his journeys abroad Colonel Higginson was generally taken for an Englishman, and one day an Englishman he had met said to him in the course of the conversation, "Then you have been in America?" to which Colonel Higginson replied, "Very much so." Among other observations he made abroad anent this point of mistaken identity his diary records the following: "We pick up lots of Americans we never heard of at home and learn a good deal that is new about our country. . . . An Englishman watched me

through a knot-hole for some Americanisms. Said he detected a good many in Holmes."

In the latter years of his life Colonel Higginson used to spend his summers at Dublin, New Hampshire, engaged in his literary work. One summer there he met Mark Twain, whom he had for a neighbor and of whom he wrote in his diary: "Called on Clemens. Found him in bed where he prefers to write, a strange picturesque object, in night-clothes, with curly white hair standing up over his head. The bed was covered with written sheets which his daughter carried off at intervals, to be copied by her on typewriter, his secretary only writing his correspondence. He often leaves off anything in the middle and begins on something else and goes back to it. He has always worked in this way and likes it."

One of Colonel Higginson's characteristic traits was his sympathy for struggling young authors whose work possessed merit and real promise. And many a one of this class did he help to get on his feet by writing him a word of encouragement. But many a man, not included in this class, learning of the Colonel's widespread reputation for sympathy and generosity, used to apply to him for aid of a more substantial character and none came who did not go away richer than he came.

In 1896 Colonel's Higginson's health broke down under the strain of overwork and he was compelled to spend a twelvemonth or more in bed. But his facile pen was never idle, and during this period of ill-health he records that he earned more by writing than in several previous years. "Some people," said he, "think I write better than formerly, in my horizontal attitude!" After recovering his health he produced Tales of the Enchanted Inlands of the Atlantic, Book and Heart, and Old Cambridge. In 1900, when almost an octogenarian, he undertook his Life of Longfellow, and two years later his Life of Whittier, the former for the American Men of Letters series and the latter for the English Men of Letters series, respectively. Many years before he had written a Life of Margaret Fuller Ossili. During his long literary career his prolific pen hardly had any vacation, but ever kept busy till the hand that guided it was stilled in death, May, 1911. Moreover, his tongue continued almost as active as

his pen, for he was in constant demand as a lecturer or public speaker, even down to the crowning year of his long life of service.

In view of his marvelous fertility as a writer it is interesting to observe in his journal a comment he once made on his own style:

"I have fineness and fire, but some want of copiousness and fertility which may give a tinge of thinness to what I write. . . . . What an abundance, freshness and go there is about the Beechers, for instance. They are egotistic, crotchety and personally disagreeable and they often 'make fritters of English,' but I wish I could, without sacrificing polish, write with that exuberance and hearty zeal. . . . . Shakespeare may have written as the birds sing, though I doubt it but minor writers at least have to labor for form as the painters labor-the mere inspiration of thought is not enough. . . . There must be a golden moment, but also much labor within that moment. At least it is so with me, and I cannot help suspecting that it is even so with the Shakespeares."

Colonel Higginson is portrayed in this biography as kindly and sympathetic and generous, a man of noble impulses whose achievement, at least in the realm of letters, was far greater than the promise of his early years. But the biography does not represent the interest of its subject as being by any means confined to the world of letters. Like Chremes in the play of Terence, Colonel Higginson is portrayed as being interested in all humane endeavors that have for their object the uplift and betterment of mankind; and the Terentian motto is peculiarly applicable to the subject of this biography, since nothing pertaining to humanity did Colonel Higginson deem foreign to himself. Of course, it is not to be expected that one's wife should write other than a sympathetic biography. But the present biography shows more than a mere sympathetic insight into the life of its subject. It shows evident literary skill and judgment in the selection of the salient facts to be presented and no inconsiderable grace in the simple and straightforward narration of those facts. The result is that the present story of Colonel Higginson's life is one that is admirable in wellnigh every respect and leaves but little to be desired.

Randolph-Macon College.

EDWIN W. BOWEN.

SHAPELESS IDLENESS

"I rather would entreat thy company

To see the wonders of the world abroad
Than, living dully sluggardized at home,

Wear out thy youth with shapeless idleness."

When Shakespeare used the expression "shapeless idleness," he undoubtedly had in mind the distinction between well-employed leisure and unoccupied time spent dully and without worthy interests: the words hold an implied belief in a kind of idleness that has a shaping power. 'Twas this sort of idleness that Thoreau indulged in. During his first summer at Walden Pond he did not read books, he tells us; he hoed corn. "Nay," he affirms, "I often did better than this." There were times when he "could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of head or hands." He would sometimes, on a summer morning, sit in his sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, in undisturbed solitude and stillness. And he grew in those seasons, he tells us, "like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been."

If few of us have enjoyed such complete silence and solitude, we have all known days when "idleness was the most attractive and productive industry." Those cherished memories of faraway summer afternoons spent afloat on a salt-water pond, hid away behind the dunes, with the sound of the sea faint in our ears and before us the glory of meadow and wood; the homeward drift toward the setting sun, and the silent walk across the darkening fields-such memories, in their tranquillizing power, are worth the price of a kingdom. It is sometimes a blessed thing to spend our days—

"Outstretched in very idleness,

Naught doing, saying little, thinking less; "

counting it one of our amusements

"To see the sun to bed, and see him rise; "

content, like Charles Lamb's forest-liver,

"To view the leaves, thin dancers upon air,

Go eddying round; and small birds how they fare."

A certain poet known to fame was wont to sit for hours in a dream, as moveless as the stone upon which he sat. Was it time ill spent? Nay, has he not left us his doctrine of a wise passiveness? Dante Gabriel Rossetti, we are told, was physically indolent. No doubt, his biographer adds, his mind was employed. This stillness of body and mind, seemingly in men of creative genius a condition essential to effective thought, is well described by Francis Thompson in his Contemplation:

He scarcely frets the atmosphere

With breathing, and his body shares
The immobility of rocks;

His heart's a drop-well of tranquillity ;

His mind more still is than the limbs of fear,

And yet its unperturbed velocity

The spirit of the simoon mocks.

This

The accusation of indolence-sometimes scarcely worth minding-easily attaches itself to one who is thus seemingly inactive. I recall with amusement the philosophic unconcern of a young lawyer whom I used to meet at a summer resort. young man was clever and dexterous in more ways than one, and intellectually brilliant besides, but he had somehow gained a reputation for laziness. "I might as well be lazy," he used to say, "since I have the reputation." It is observable that the most aggressively and self-admiringly energetic persons are often quite inclined to skirk the obvious duties. It's a great nuisance, this having to think to provide a fresh egg for that little daughter whose delicate appetite refuses anything so hearty as fried bacon. These fastidious creatures who require special catering are a bother, of course. But did anyone ever expect to keep house. without taking thought? Though there is little to gratify one's vanity in this kind of service, it is very sweet to take thought for others in these homely, practical ways; and this matter of nourishment is really important. To preside at a business meeting in the morning, stand in the receiving line all the afternoon, and sit through a tiresome banquet in the evening, may be no less exhausting than a day of house-cleaning. But to the self-complacent the pleasure of seeing and being seen, and the puffs of flattery snatched, make the expenditure of energy quite worth while. There is glory in these social and philanthropic

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