Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Carlyle's laugh and other surprises

[131] selections for childhood. There were comparatively few years of his maturer life during which he was not editor of something, and there was also needed much continuous labor in taking care of his personal library. When we consider that he had the further responsibility of being practically the literary executor or editor of several important men of letters, as of Carlyle, Ruskin, Lowell, Curtis, and Clough; and that in each case the work was done with absolute thoroughness; and that even in summer he became the leading citizen of a country home and personally engaged the public speakers who made his rural festals famous, it is impossible not to draw the conclusion that no public man in America surpassed the sequestered Norton in steadfastness of labor.

It being made my duty in June, 1904, to read a poem before the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa, I was tempted to include a few verses about individual graduates, each of which was left, according to its subject, for the audience to guess. The lines referring to Norton were as follows:--

There's one I've watched from childhood, free of guile,
His man's firm courage and his woman's smile.
His portals open to the needy still,
He spreads calm sunshine over Shady Hill.