Thomas Wentworth Higginson...

“Old Cambridge,” as it was formerly called, to distinguish it from the later settlements called East Cambridge and Cambridgeport, is One of the few American towns that may be said to have owed their very name and existence to the pursuits of letters. Laid out originally by Governor John Winthrop as a fortified town,— furnished soon after with a “Pallysadoe,” of which the large willows on Holmes's Field are the last lingering memorial,— it might nevertheless have gone the way of many abortive ear

The literary epochs of New England may be said to have been Three: the First issue of the North American Review (1815), that of the Dial (1840), and that of the Atlantic Monthly (1857). During each of these epochs a peculiarly important part was taken by Cambridge men. The North American Review, though preceded in Boston by the short-lived Massachusetts Magazine and the Monthly Anthology, yet achieved an influence and a prominence which these did not reach, and is still issued, though in Another

It was a favorite theory of Oliver Wendell Holmes that every man's biography should be studied for several generations before his birth. In applying this doctrine to himself I can unfortunately go no farther back than the matrimonial engagement of his parents, which was thus announced in writing by my own mother, then a schoolgirl in Boston, addressing a lady in Hingham, whom my mother, being then an orphan, called “Mama.” “Now, mama, I am going to surprise you. Mr. Abiel Holmes of Cambridge, wh

Unlike Holmes and Lowell, Longfellow was not born in a college town; but he went at Fifteen to live in One, and that a very characteristic One, not differing essentially in its traditions from that in which he spent his later life, although all the academic associations at Bowdoin College were on a smaller scale than at Harvard. As Fluellen says in “Henry V.”that there is a river in Macedon and a river in Monmouth and there are salmons in both, so it may be said that Brunswick has somewhat the s

Of the Three authors most widely associated with old Cambridge, only Holmes and Lowell were born there, although its associations became a Second nature to Longfellow, who was born in Maine, while that region was still a part of Massachusetts. Lowell felt, even more thoroughly than Holmes, the influence of his Cambridge surroundings, because Holmes went to Europe for his medical training (1833) at the age of Twenty-three and never afterward lived in his native town, though always near it; while

Abbott, Jacob, 183. Adams, C. F., 113. Adams, Pres. J. Q., 13, 181. Addison, Joseph, 53. Agassiz, Prof., Louis, 17, 188. Alcott, A. B., 55, 62, 63, 104, 167. Aldrich, T. B., 69, 70. Allston, Washington, 14, 15. Appleton, Nathan, 130. Appleton, Rev., Samuel, 10. Appleton, T. G., 63, 88, 89. Apthorp, W. F., 70. Arnold, Matthew, 148. Astor, Mrs. J. J., 93. Austin, Mrs., Sarah, 140. Bachi, Pietro, 17. Baldwin, Mrs. Loammi (Nancy Williams), 75. Balzac, Honore De, 142. Bancroft, George, 14, 44, 116. B