Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Carlyle's laugh and other surprises

[128] made forty years ago by a man of forty or thereabouts, who occupied twenty pages in saying it, and rested in closing upon the calm basis, “The true worship of God consists in the service of his children and devotion to the common interests of men.” It may be that he who wrote these words never held a regular pew in any church or identified himself, on the other hand, with any public heretical organization, even one so moderate as the Free Religious Association. Yet the fact that he devoted his Sunday afternoons for many years to talking and Scripture reading in a Hospital for Incurables conducted by Roman Catholics perhaps showed that it was safer to leave such a man to go on his own course and reach the kingdom of heaven in his own way,

Norton never wrote about himself, if it could be avoided, unless his recollections of early years, as read before the Cambridge Historical Society, and reported in the second number of its proceedings, may be regarded as an exception. Something nearest to this in literary self-revelation is to be found, perhaps, in his work entitled “Letters of John Ruskin,” published in 1904, and going back to his first invitation from the elder Ruskin in 1855. This was on Norton's first direct trip to Europe, followed by a correspondence in which Ruskin writes to