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YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

Bought with the Income
ofthe
SAMUEL LOCKWOOD FUND

A GREAT
PRIVATE CITIZEN
Henry Lee Higginson
BY
M. A. DeWOLFE HOWE

CW33,2.'^5'

"I give the/e Books
firr^.the fmndtag if a, CoUege in this Colony"

Bought with the income
ofthe
Samuel Lockwood Fund

A GREAT PRIVATE CITIZEN
HENRY LEE HIGGINSON

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HENRY
LEE HIGGINSON
A GREAT PRIVATE CITIZEN
HENRY LEE HIGGINSON
by
M. A. DeWOLFE HOWE

The ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS
BOSTON

Copyright ig20
ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS

I
Henry Lee Higginson, who died in
Boston on November 14, 19 19, personi
fied to an extraordinary degree a qual
ity in American citizenship for which
the need was never greater than at the
present moment. This was the quality
of a patriot's idealism evoked in time of
war and sustained to the very end of a
long life. He was the embodied refutation
of the doctrine, now proclaimed on many
sides, that the war-time spirit of idealism
is all very fine, but that it cannot be ex
pected to endure. In him it did endure —
in him and a few others, scattered through
out the country, who offered their lives in
the physical struggle of the Civil War, yet
found in it also a great spiritual adven
ture, from which they returned spiritually
quickened for the rest of their days. The
rigid realists can point to their tens of
thousands, not so quickened, but rather
hardened to make the most of every ma
terial opportunity that reared its head

A GREAT PRIVATE CITIZEN
once war was put aside; and none can
deny that such there were, in dishearten
ing numbers. Such no doubt there will be
again, in the new period on which we have
entered. But a life like that of Major Hig
ginson, ending on the threshold of this
period, has something to say both of the
past and of the future. What it meant to
the young men of successive generations
for whom he was an inspiring visible pres
ence, his memory may still mean to the
multitude of his countrymen who have
now laid down their arms after the great
est of wars, and are confronted with the
immediate danger of losing that generous
spirit of idealism which it nourished in
them. He did not lose this spirit — nor
need they.
If Major Higginson, in respect of his
sustained idealism, represented an excep
tion to the general rule, he embodied also
several obvious contradictions. His very
title of 'Major' was one of them; he was
in reality brevetted Lieutenant-Colonel,
U.S.V., before the end of the war ' for gal
lant and meritorious services,' and might
naturally have gone through life ' Colonel

HENRY LEE HIGGINSON
Higginson.' He was commonly desig
nated 'the first citizen of Boston' — and
so justly that no second citizen has stepped
at once into his vacant place; but, not
even a native of New England, he was
born in New York, November i8, 1834.
He was a preeminent son of Harvard, but
studied at the University for less than a
single year, the freshman year of the class
of 1855. He was best known throughout
the country as a patron of music and edu
cation, as the 'founder and sustainer' of
the Boston Symphony Orchestra and a
liberal benefactor of Harvard; he was a
Puritan at heart, and in his daily life a
hard-working, hard-headed man of affairs,
deeply immersed in intensely practical
matters, a member of an important finan
cial firm, a director of powerful corpora
tions. For approximately forty years he
held a conspicuous place in the public
eye; but he never held public office. It
was as a private citizen, a great private
citizen, that he did his far-reaching work
for his community and his country.
Major Higginson was forty-seven years
old when, in 1881, he established, out of
Q

A GREAT PRIVATE CITIZEN
resources acquired by his own industry
and intelligence, not through inheritance,
the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and
committed himself to maintaining it by
means of resources still to be acquired on
the same terms. .This work lasted for
thirty-seven years. It would have been
an impossible task but for certain per
sonal endowments, native and cultivated
— courage, unselfishness, a capacity for
public friendship, and a pervading sense
of whimsical humor, that surest compan
ion to a true sense of relative values.
These gifts were not suddenly bestowed at
the age of forty-seven. They grew out of
his inheritances, his boyhood, and the ma
turing experiences of his earlier manhood.
The essential Puritan in him, that part
of him which cried out against extrava
gance and waste, both public and private,
and gave to his personal habits an auster
ity quite foreign to the households of mod
ern American financiers, came to him di
rect from the earliest settlers of New Eng
land. His first American ancestor of his
own name was the Reverend Francis Hig
ginson, who came to Salem, Massachu-

lO

HENRY LEE HIGGINSON
setts, in 1629. This Puritan divine had,
in the words of Cotton Mather, 'a most
charming voice, which rendered him unto
his hearers, in all his exercises, another
Ezekiel, for Lo, he was unto them, as a
very lovely song oj one that hath a pleas
ant voice, and can play well upon an in
strument.' This suggestion of music in a
pioneer of bleak New England may be
associated, by no overstraining of fancy,
with his distant descendant.
The generations between the Salem
minister and Major Higginson's father,
George Higginson, were constantly fed
from the streams of Massachusetts blood
and tradition. To cite these tributaries
would be to make a catalogue of family
names intimately associated with the civil
and religious direction of New England.
It is enough to say here that in his father
Major Higginson had a friend and ex
emplar who definitely affected the course
of his life. George Higginson's early mer
cantile ventures in New York came to
grief in the financial disturbances of 1837.
He then came to Boston, where in 1 848 he
formed, with his cousin, John C. Lee, the
II

A GREAT PRIVATE CITIZEN
stock-brokerage firm of Lee & Higginson.
It was a day of comparatively small
things, and George Higginson never owned
a house or a horse of his own until within
a few years of his death in 1889. But he
gave his children, four sons and a daugh
ter, all that the time and place afforded in
the way of education, and set them a high
standard of helpfulness and integrity. One
day a business friend, irritated by some
misconception, walked into his office and
said, 'Mr. Higginson, I always supposed
you were an honest man.' 'No, you did
not,' was the answer ; ' you knew it.' Tak
ing such facts for granted, and a constant
readiness to do things for others, were thus
bred in the bone of his son Henry.
When he was a boy at the Boston Latin
School, he took his part with a fierce en
ergy in the snowball fights on Boston
Common. Henry Adams, in his Educa
tion, recalls the battles between the Latin
School boys and all comers on the Com
mon, the trick of inserting stones in snow
balls, and his own depression one day at
' seeing one of his trustiest leaders, Henry
Higginson — "Bully Hig," his school
12

HENRY LEE HIGGINSON
name — struck by a stone over the eye,
and led off the field bleeding in rather a
ghastly manner.'
His college career was cut short before
the end of one year by a weakness of his
eyes. This did not disqualify him for
business, and for several years he was em
ployed in the counting-house of S. & E.
Austin, a well-known firm of Boston mer
chants. But 'Trade,' as he wrote from
Europe to his father in 1857, 'was not
satisfying to the inner man as a life-occu
pation.' Having gone abroad, in 1856,
without definite plans, he soon found him
self bent on the serious study of music.
' If I find that I am not profiting at all by
my work,' he wrote to his father, ' I shall
throw it up and go home. If I gain
something, I shall stick to it. You will
ask, " What is to come of it all if success
ful.?" I do not know. But this is clear.
I have then improved my own powers,
which is every man's duty. I have a re
source to which I can always turn with
delight, however the world may go with
me. I am so much the stronger, the
wider, the wiser, the better for my duties
13

A GREAT PRIVATE CITIZEN
in life. I can then go with satisfaction to
my business, knowing my resource at the
end of the day. It is already made, and
has only to be used and it will grow.
Finally, it is my province in education,
and having cultivated myself in it, I am
fully prepared to teach others in it. Edu
cation is the object of man, and it seems
to me the duty of us all to help in it, each
according to his means and in his sphere.
. . . And now, old daddy, I hope you will
be able to make something out of this
long letter. You should not have been
troubled with it, but I thought you would
prefer to know all about it. It is only
carrying out your own darling idea of
making an imperishable capital in educa
tion. My money may fly away ; my knowl
edge cannot. One belongs to the world,
the other to me.'
These were thoughtful and prophetic
words to proceed from a youth of twenty- ,
three. A letter written to his father in
the same year contains another significant
bit of self-revelation: 'What is money
good for, if not to spend for one's friends
and to help them.? You've done so all
14

HENRY LEE HIGGINSON
your life — let me do so too, when I can,
for it is in me (I have always known it)
to be a close man, a miser. I know about
this.' For about four years the young man
remained in Europe, at first preparing
himself, — chiefly in Vienna, — by hard
study of the piano, singing, and composi
tion, for such possibilities as a musical
career might open to him, and afterwards
adjusting himself to the necessity of aban
doning it. This was the direct result of
over-exertion. A headache that lasted for
three days drove him to a barber, who let
blood from his left arm to relieve his suf
fering. He returned to his piano practice
too soon after this experience, and dis
abled his arm, as an eminent physician
assured him, permanently. ' I came home,'
he wrote, 'and swore like a pirate for a
day; then, coming to my senses, I decided
to sing away, study composition, etc.,
hard, magnetize, and await the result.
. . . I've hurt myself many times by doing
things which other people avoid as a mat
ter of course.'
While reconciling himself to his disable- 15

A GREAT PRIVATE CITIZEN
ment, and to a growing realization that
his musical gifts were not such as to make
him a musician of the first order, he sup
plemented his personal economies by giv
ing lessons in English. Some months be
fore returning to America in November
of i860, he wrote to his father, who must
have wondered at his protracted absence
from home, confessing the disappointment
he had met, and adding, ' If you consider
the whole thing and remember that I en
joy in the depths of my soul music as
nothing else, you'll easily comprehend my
stay.' Long afterwards, when the orchestra he
founded had been established in Boston
for more than twenty-five years, he wrote
to an old friend who had advised him
wisely at its origin, a letter which con
firmed the modest estimate he had made
of himself as a musical student in Vienna,
and at the same time revealed, in his words
about Beethoven's Third Symphony, an
appreciation of music, and a response to
its appeal, which were a life-long justifica
tion of his early studies. Thus, in part,
the letter runs :
16

HENRY LEE HIGGINSON
' A few words about our talk last night.
Of course I loved music, and therefore
studied it — and found no talent whatso
ever. 'We young folks used to consider the
problems of life, and the rights and needs
of men and women, and the injustices of
both, also the need of refreshment and not
of luxuries or even comforts. And it
seemed to me that we of the young beauti
ful country should and could have music
of the best. Hence my hopes and efforts,
both for the sake of art and the sake of
humanity. Do you see.? But talent, or
even keen perception of musical talent in
others, I have little or none; nor have I
ever found talent for anything, except
power of work, and of recognizing friends
of the best, and the enormous value of
them to me. It is all second or third class,
and I've been built up and lifted up to a
wrong place by friends.
'As to the "Eroica," I had meant to
tell you how I felt about it, but it opens
the flood-gates, and I can't. The wail
of grief, and then the sympathy which
should comfort the sufferer. The won-
17

A GREAT PRIVATE CITIZEN
derful funeral dirge, so solemn, so full, so
deep, so splendid, and always with cour
age and comfort. The delightful march
home from the grave in the scherzo — the
wild Hungarian, almost gypsy in tone —
and then the climax of the melody, where
the gates of Heaven open, and we see the
angels singing and reaching their hands
to us with perfect welcome. No words
are of any avail, and never does that pas
sage of entire relief and joy come to me
without tears — and I wait for it through
life, and hear it, and wonder.'
The dreams of youth and the realities
of old age — for Major Higginson was
nearly seventy-five when he wrote this
letter — have not often stood in a closer
relationship.

II
When he returned to the United States
late in i860, realities were soon to super
sede the dreams. Within six months Sum
ter was to fall, and the mettle of individual
Americans to be tried. Henry Higginson
met the test by immediate participation
in the forming of the Second Massachu
setts Regiment of Infantry, begun April
18, 1861. A remarkable group of young
men joined in this undertaking, and be
came officers of the regiment. The name
of Robert Gould Shaw typifies the quality
of them all. It was a band of chosen
spirits, aflame with the ideals for which a
war is most nobly fought ; and it was en
tirely characteristic of Henry Higginson
that his friendship with these men entered
into the very warp and woof of his army
life, and permanently influenced him. A
passionate devotion to his country may
fairly be counted the controlling motive
of all his years. With it was inextri
cably interwoven a passionate devotion to
19

A GREAT PRIVATE CITIZEN
friends. Indeed, he seems to have con
ceived virtually all the relations of life in
terms of friendship. In his attitude toward
his country, his city, his college, even
toward the art of music, there was some
thing intensely personal — just as there
was in his dealings with individual men
and women. It was in blended patriotism
and friendship that he made his two chief
gifts to Harvard College — the Soldiers
Field for athletic games, the Harvard
Union for social intercourse. He set up
on Soldiers Field the names of six soldier
friends, and said about them to the stu
dents of Harvard College : —
' Now, what do the lives of our friends
teach us .? Surely the beauty and the holi
ness of work and of utter, unselfish,
thoughtful devotion to the right cause, to
our country, and to mankind. It is well
for us all, for you and for the boys of
future days, to remember such deeds and
such lives and to ponder on them. These
men loved study and work, and loved play
too. They delighted in athletic games,
and would have used this field, which is
now given to the College and to you, for
20

HENRY LEE HIGGINSON
your health and recreation. But my chief
hope in regard to it is, that it will help to
make you full-grown, well-developed men,
able and ready to do good work of all
kinds — steadfastly, devotedly, thought
fully; and that it will remind you of the
reasons for living, and of your own duties
as men and cirizens of the Republic'
An older man does not wholly impro
vise thoughts of this kind. He brings
them out of an experience like war because
he takes a great deal into it. As a young
officer Henry Higginson took into the war
a full measure of enthusiasm and energy.
He worked hard at recruiting and drilling
his men before they went to the front.
They recognized a fighter in him, and liked
him. One day he overheard a soldier
swearing in the ranks, and checked him,
saying, ' If there is any swearing to be
done in this company, I will attend to it.'
No doubt he did, and by means of the
vigor it implied stiffened the discipline for
which he was responsible. Talking to
some college students in 19 13 about dis
cipline in the army, he said, —
'One incident of the time showed the
21

A GREAT PRIVATE CITIZEN
power of obedience which our men had
learned. One afternoon, as the regiment
came in from drill, I, being on guard,
noticed a man who was talking and talk
ing. I knew he was a blackguard, having
noted him before. In a few moments he
was sent down by his captain to the guard
house, to be kept there until he was sober.
I said to the corporal, "Get the man's
knapsack and rifle and bring him here."
(In those days we expected an attack, and
our rifles were kept loaded.) The man
was brought back and told to march up
and down. The guard-tents were in a
row, and the muskets stacked about fifteen
yards from the officers' tents, where I
stood. The man marched up and came
back, clubbed his musket, and told me
he would like to knock my head off. " No
matter," said I, "march on." (We had
taken the cap off his rifle in order that he
should do no harm.) He marched up and
down once or twice, and then stopped
where the rifles were stacked, took a per
cussion-cap out of his pocket, put it on the
rifle, and took a good aim at my belt, and
used queer language about a " hole in my
22

HENRY LEE HIGGINSON
body." There was not much chance for
me, for if he had fired, I should not be here
talking to you. All I said was, " Bring
that piece to your shoulder!" and he
brought his rifle up to his shoulder; and
then I said, " March on !" and he marched
up to where I was. Then the sergeant
took charge of him, unloaded his rifle,
and the man marched until he dropped
from fatigue. He was a miserable soldier,
and about ten years ago I saw him in
Charles Street coming out of a rumshop.'
While the young officer was imparting
discipline after this fashion, he was also
acquiring his own experience of it. The
infantry regiment he had joined at its in
ception went to the front in July, 1861,
when he was promoted from second to first
lieutenant. In October he was transferred
from the Second Massachusetts Infantry
to the First Massachusetts Cavalry, formed
in September, and received a captain's
commission. In his brief infantry ex
perience he saw no battle, but was much
engrossed in the routine duties of soldier
ing. With the cavalry, which had by de
grees to disprove its inferiority to the
23

A GREAT PRIVATE CITIZEN
mounted forces of the Confederacy, his
fighting began. It continued through the
Antietam campaign, in the autumn of
1862, through the winter months before
Fredericksburg, and the spring campaign
of 1863 in Virginia. On June 17 it came
to an end, at the beginning of the battle of
Aldie, when Major Higginson, sent to re
call a fellow officer. Captain Sargent, who
had gone beyond the point to which he
had been ordered to advance, followed
him, in the zest of an unexpected fight,
and found himself and his men overpow
ered by superior numbers. His horse was
shot under him, and in the hand-to-hand
encounter that ensued he was wounded
by pistol-shot and sabre-cuts, one of which
left a scar on his face for life. When he
recovered consciousness, he contrived to
save himself from capture, but the wounds
he had received incapacitated him from
any further active service. As soon as he
could do anything, he made himself use
ful again in recruiting, and for a brief time
served on the staff of General Francis C.
Barlow. He would himself have been the first to
24

HENRY LEE HIGGINSON
say that his war-record was not excep
tional. The passionate spirit of patriotism
in which it was rendered, and his com
munion in that spirit with noble young
contemporaries, many of whom gave their
lives for the Union cause, left their indel
ible marks upon his character. Like many
another fighter against disunion, he gave
to the reunited country in its entirety the
same devotion through life that he had
given to the cause of the North in his
earlier years, and again and again spoke
of the men against whom he had fought
as only a chivalrous foe could speak.
An incident of later years, related by
one of his business partners, is significant.
A Confederate officer nearly eighty years
of age came into the firm's office one day,
and said he would like to shake hands with
Major Higginson. He was asked to sit
down and await the major's return, which
was expected at any moment. While
waiting, the visitor, subject to an old
heart trouble, fainted away, and was car
ried to an inner room where restoratives
were bringing him back to consciousness
when Major Higginson returned. 25

A GREAT PRIVATE CITIZEN
'What's the trouble.? Who is that.?' he
asked. 'Colonel  , Confederate officer in
the Civil War. He came in to see you.'
Mr. Higginson stepped forward, leaned
over the old man as he opened his eyes,
and said, ' I am sorry, colonel ; but there's
one good thing — you can't die here. This
is an Abolitionist's office.'
A flickering smile was the visitor's reply,
soon followed by his sitting up and enter
ing into conversation. Before long the
two old men left the office arm in arm,
and the Southern colonel was heard to say,
'You certainly did put my trolley on the
wire to-day, major!'
Still another story illustrates the quiz
zical humor that was quite his own and ac
companied him into all surroundings. He
was discussing truth-telling one day with
a younger associate. ' It is essential in
business,' he is quoted as declaring, 'but
socially it is very diverting to lie. For
instance, I was standing on the corner of
Park and Tremont Streets the other day
when a motor came down the hill, locked
wheels with another, and turned over. In
26

HENRY LEE HIGGINSON
a moment a crowd was buzzing round ; it
was just like kicking a hornet's nest. A
lady came by — uncertain of age, nonde
script clothes, flat heels, carrying a bag —
you know the type, you see them in Boston.
Addressing no particular person, she said
as she passed me, "Anybody hurt.? Any
body hurt.?"
' Very politely I replied with a bow, " I
hope so, madam."
' She looked at me sharply, and discover
ing that I was old and gray and probably
deaf, she repeated the inquiry in a louder
tone. "Yes, madam, I heard the first
time; I said, I hope so; think how dis
appointed all the people would be if no
body were hurt."
'Murmuring, " What a wretched, wicked
old man!" she walked on about ten feet;
then, turning, she came back, and scruti
nizing me closely, said, "Aren't you Mr.
Higginson.?" "No, madam." "You look
very much like him." " I have been told
so." I lifted my hat and bowed most po
litely as the lady walked away in a quan
dary.' The twinkling look that went with
27

A GREAT PRIVATE CITIZEN
words like thesey never deceiving the quick
witted for more than a moment, cannot
be reproduced in any telling of the anec
dote. Such chaffing of a woman encountered
by chance was characteristic of him in all
his social relations. But of women in gen
eral, and especially of their high place in
the true partnership between man and
wife, he was the unfailing champion. His
own marriage, with a daughter of Louis
Agassiz, about six months after his dis
abling fight at Aldie, placed him in a rarely
harmonious domestic relation which to the
end of his days afforded the basis of hap
piness, sympathy, and cooperation in
which all his other relations were rooted.
Through this marriage, moreover, his in
timacy with his brother-in-law, Alexander
Agassiz, his classmate in college, became
so close as to count among the positive in
fluences of his life, with notable results
both in affairs and in thought.
Yet it was from his comrades in arms
that the incentives to the citizenship he
practised were primarily derived. Even
before the war one of them, Charles Russell
28

HENRY LEE HIGGINSON
Lowell, a kinsman with whom he was in
the closest sympathy, had revealed in a
letter to their common friend, John C.
Bancroft, son of the historian, the attitude
toward life which their little circle of idea
lists was taking. ' Last February,' he
wrote from Rome in 1857, 'when Henry
[Higginson] joined me in Florence, we
laid our heads together to get you across
the water ; as a preliminary standpoint we
concocted an extensive plan of migration,
you and Jim Savage and Henry and I were
all to move to Virginia or somewhere —
we were to cultivate the vine and the olive,
to think none but high thoughts, to speak
none but weighty words, and to become,
in short, the worthies of our age.'
After they had 'moved to Virginia'
several years later, for a purpose then
quite unforeseen, the future took on a new
aspect, and Lowell, who had discovered
'a thorough bom merchant' in his friend
Higginson while they were traveling as
youths together in Europe, wrote to him
in the last year of the war, ' I hope, Mr.
Higginson, that you are going to live like
a plain Republican, mindful of the beauty
29

A GREAT PRIVATE CITIZEN
and the duty of simplicity. Nothing fancy
now. Sir, if you please. ... I hope you
have outgrown all foolish ambitions and
are now content to become a " useful citi
zen." . . . Don't grow rich; if you once
begin, you will find it much more difficult
to be a useful citizen.'
The attempts to attain independence
were at first unsuccessful, both in an oil-
venture in Ohio and in a cotton-planting
enterprise in Georgia, an experiment in
which a patriotic motive played an import
ant part. With his joining the firm of
Lee, Higginson & Co., in Boston, in 1868,
more prosperous days began to dawn ; but
it was only after thirteen years of hard,
self-denying work that he found himself
in a position to carry out a purpose he had
long been forming, the establishment and
maintenance of a great orchestra which
should give to the people of his own city
and country music of the same supreme
order of merit as that which had nourished
his spirit as a young man in Europe. This
was essentially a patriotic purpose, con
ceived in the desire to enrich the life of his
own beloved country. Music, as he had
30

HENRY LEE HIGGINSON
long before written to his father from
Europe, was his province in education.
Long afterwards he quoted the words that
Fanny Kemble had once spoken to him:
' Life in the United States is hard and dry.
Your country is a great cornfield. See that
you plant flowers in it.' Still later he
amplified the same thought in saying, ' This
beautiful land is our workshop, our play
ground, our garden, our home ; and we can
have no more urgent or pleasant task than
to keep our workshop busy and content,
our playground bright and gay, our garden
well tilled and full of flowers and fruits,
our home happy and pure.' It was pre
cisely for these objects that he established
the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1881.

Ill
At that time public benefactions of this
general nature were far less familiar than
they have since become, and such a bene
faction in the realm of music was wholly
original. The endowed or privately sup
ported orchestra is now an accepted in
stitution in many American cities, and this
is so in large measure because of the pio
neering example set by Mr. Higginson.
The value of that example lay by no means
only in the spectacle of large annual ex
penditures, the fruit of annual earnings
and income which might otherwise have
been employed in the rolling up of a mod
ern fortune, but also in the devotion of
personal energies to an immensely difficuh
and complicated task. How exacting this
task was, — in the selection and judicious
handling of conductors, to say nothing of
the whole company of highly tempera
mental persons who constitute the orches
tra ; in dealing with the genus irritabile of
soloists and with a public sometimes only
32

HENRY LEE HIGGINSON
a little less difficult, — few could realize.
Humor, patience, a decisive will, an in
finite desire to serve his generation carried
him over many rough patches of the long
road. At the very end of it, when he had
carried on this work with increasing suc
cess for thirty-seven years, the tensity of
war-time feeling and the sorrow that came
from clinging too long to the trust he had
placed in one who proved unworthy of it,
imposed a burden he could no longer bear,
and, broken by the bitter experience, he
committed to other hands the institution
he had created. But on the very last day
of his life he found occasion to deplore the
course of a contemporary who had recently
bequeathed a great fortune to a worthy
object, on the ground that his wealth might
have been doing good through many years
of its accumulation, and to pity him for
having missed all the fun of spending it for
others. When Mr. Higginson wrote an article,
'A Word to the Rich,' for the Atlantic
nine years ago, he began and ended it with
this quotation from the gravestone of Ed
ward Courtenay, Earl of Devonshire: —
33

A GREAT PRIVATE CITIZEN
What we gave, we have;
What we spent, we had;
What we left, we lost.
There was his whole philosophy of riches.
His practice was itself a hint to the rich,
for his constant refusal to count the cost
in what he did for others was offset at every
turn by the little severities he imposed
upon his own mode of life. ' I look at
fifty cents myself,' he wrote in a private
letter soon after the war broke out in
Europe, ' and think whether I will take a
carriage or walk. Indeed I nearly missed
my train on Sunday because I did not take
a carriage. There is something about " the
spigot and the bung" that applies to every
body.' Personal indulgence of any kind was
as alien to him as to his Puritan forebears.
' Puritanism !' he wrote to a friend in 1889;
'the older I grow, the more I incline to
their ideal, and the luxury and the waste
fulness and a thousand things send me that
way — in thought, though hardly in deeds
and living perhaps.' It could not have
been entirely from the Puritans of tra
dition that he derived, for example, his in-
34

HENRY LEE HIGGINSON
terest in schemes of profit-sharing. It was
a cardinal principle of his economic creed
that the wage-earner should have ' a larger
piece of the pie.' The same sympathy
which prompted this feeling kept him
youthful to the last, drew him and his
young associates, in business and friend
ship, together, and placed him constantly
with those whose eyes were turned toward
the sunrise.
His personal presence truthfully bespoke
the man within. Compact of stature, vis-
aged with distinction, military in bearing,
alert and vigorous, forthright and staccato
of speech, both in public and in private,
he visibly embodied the qualities of utter
fearlessness and honesty, joined with a for
tunate capacity for quick and righteous
anger. These qualities, moreover, were
not wholly unrelated to a human and en
dearing tendency to make impulsive mis
takes. But they stood in an equally close
relation to a definite gift for bestowing and
winning affection. To a remarkable de
gree his letters spoke with his living voice.
Nothing of good or evil fortune could
befall his friends without his writing to
35

A GREAT PRIVATE CITIZEN
them, briefly or at length, in terms appro
priately compact of sympathy and humor.
His good letters were not the product of
accident, for he had a theory of letter-writ
ing which he once communicated to a busi
ness associate as follows: 'You sit down
and visualize the person you are address
ing; you dictate exactly as if he were
present ; you watch the changes in his face
and anticipate his replies. You go through
it and cut out all the adjectives and ad
verbs; then you probably have a good
letter.' A point of his own practice is not
enumerated here — namely, the addition
of a postscript in long hand, to almost
every type-written letter, making it even
more personal than it was before.
Major Higginson's letters will long con
tinue to speak, with authentic inflection,
for the man himself, to all who may read
them. In this place a single letter pub
lished twenty years ago in Dr. A. V. G.
Allen's Lije of Phillips Brooks will surely
not be unwelcome to readers who have
seen it before; to them and to others it
will carry a clear suggestion of the personal
quality of its writer — not a churchman,
36

HENRY LEE HIGGINSON
or a regular church-goer himself, but a
holder of the simple faith that 'without
God the bottom drops out of everything.'
It needs only to be said that the letter was
written to Phillips Brooks, his school and
college classmate, at the time when he was
considering an urgent call to quit his work
at Trinity Church, Boston, and become
preacher to Harvard University, from
which any call came to either of these two
friends, these devoted sons of the college,
almost as a command : —
Boston, ^pn7 12, 1881.
Dear old Chap, —
Forty years is it since we began learning Latin
and mischief together — you the Latin and I the
mischief? Since which we have never had a cross
word, and so I will run the chance of one by
impertinence. Folks say that the College is asking for you;
and it is true, I know. Since you took your course
for life, you have gone on steadily and enthusi
astically until you've won a great place. Just
think of the empty old church and of the present
full church! Just think of the men and women
of the intelligent and educated classes whom
you've drawn into your fold! Think what these
men will do for the less fortunate people of our

A GREAT PRIVATE CITIZEN
city, and still more, think how your women work!
We have not seen the like for a great, great while.
It has fallen to you to do this thing, and I will not
pass on your deserts, but merely on your luck to
have done something in this life worth doing. Is
not that what we all are after, and what goes far
to save us from remorse or despair? How can a
chap be content for a day, unless he is aiming
at something of a serious kind? It is the only
theory on which one can explain this life, is n't it?
And how many of our comrades have made a
success of their lives? or how often does it occur
in our experience to see it?
You have — no matter how or why; and still
more, the future for you is greater in promise
than the past has been in performance. Don't
dream of leaving your own field. Your personal
contact with all these folks is a necessity, if you
will go on. How can you then think of Cambridge
and the dear old University? You can't work on
those boys in the same way, simply because they
are at the questioning, critical, restless age. The
worst of them are not bad, but frivolous or idle-
minded. The best of them are seeking for the
truth everywhere, and had better seek by them
selves. Let them ferment. Of course you can
help many a restless spirit, when he wishes to be
helped — but you can do it as well here as at
Cambridge. You certainly can talk to or preach
to or teach them at Cambridge occasionally —
as in Boston. But, for Heaven's sake, don't leave
38

HENRY LEE HIGGINSON
your stronghold for this new field. It would be
the mistake of your life — and you will rue it
deeply and forever.
Now how do I know? I do not know, and yet
I feel absolutely sure of it. I've talked to some
of the middle-aged and some of the younger folk
of it, and listened with much interest — to but
one reply.
You know that personally I get nothing from
your being in town. We both are too busy to
meet often unless at church; and there I do not
go. So I am free from bias. But I can't but
feel much interested in your work, and glad of
your great influence. Don't risk losing it — don't
go away until your sun sets.
This letter calls for no reply. If it annoys you,
burn it and forgive me for the sake of old times.
I know that it is presuming, impertinent, arrogant
even. It has not one word of praise or admiration
for you. Such a word is not called for or needed,
but no one can value work and enthusiasm more
than I. You know full well how I feel about
your life. God bless you, old fellow.
Henry L. Higginson.
There is much, very much more that
might be said and quoted. From the many
fields of activity of this great private citi
zen — fields of business, education, art,
friendship, and public service privately 39

A GREAT PRIVATE CITIZEN
rendered — ^ instances innumerable might
be drawn to illustrate the living out of
his avowed belief that 'there seems no
other outcome, no other foundation for a
happy mankind, for civilization, than a
full, generous, wise use of our powers for
the good of our fellow men, and a happy
forgetfulness of ourselves.' But this is far
less a memoir than a suggestion, a turning
of consideration to the immediate meaning
of such a life as Major Higginson's.
When the eighty-fifth birthday he did
not quite attain was drawing near, and
some observance of it had been proposed
to him, he wrote to a friend : ' I've had only
too many kind words of praise for doing
my duty, and only my duty, as my eyes
and those of dear, dead friends saw it. The
simple tale — that he tried to fill up gaps
and sought to bring sunshine into the lives
of his fellow men and women, that he
usually kept his word, given and implied,
and that he worshipped his country and
had the very best and most far-seeing of
friends — is the whole story.'
Thus in retrospect he saw his life. To
others it may stand preeminently, as these
40

HENRY LEE HIGGINSON
pages began by suggesting, for the possi
bility of sustaining from youth to old age
an idealism born in time of war. This
central meaning of it was richly symbolized
at his burial. Into and out of the aca
demic surroundings- of a college chapel the
veteran soldier, the indomitable lover of
righteousness and beauty, was borne in the
uniform of his army days, his sword at
his side ; and over his grave the ' grieving
bugle' sounded its martial note of fare
well. For his country and its ideals he
enlisted in the war of more than half a
century ago. The enlistment proved to
be for life. He believed with all his heart
that the young men of this later day were
the true spiritual sons of their fathers. It
is for them, in the light of such a life as
his, to justify this faith of the older genera
tion.

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