Thomas Wentworth Higginson...

These brief papers were originally published in “The literary world” (Boston), and are here reprinted in a revised form, with some additions....

I do not know when I have been more surprised than on being asked, the other day, whether Hawthorne was not physically very small. It seemed at the moment utterly unconceivable that he should have been any thing less than the sombre and commanding personage he was. Ellery Channing well describes him as a One can imagine any amount of positive energy that of Napoleon Bonaparte, for instance— as included within a small physical frame. But the self-contained purpose of Hawthorne, the large resource

It happens to us rarely in our lives to come consciously into the presence of that extraordinary miracle we call genius. Among the many literary persons whom I have happened to meet, at home or abroad, there are not half a dozen who have left an irresistible sense of this rare quality; and, among these few, Poe stands next to Hawthorne in the vividness of personal impression he produced. I saw him but once; and it was on that celebrated occasion, in 1845, when he startled Boston by substituting

There is no fame more permanent than that which begins its real growth after the death of an author; and such is the fame of Thoreau. Before his death he had published but Two books, “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” and “Walden.”Four more have since been printed, besides a volume of his letters and Two biographies. One of these last appeared within a year or Two in England, where he was, up to the time of his death, absolutely unknown. Such things are not accidental or the result of

It has perhaps been a misfortune to Mr. Howells, that in his position of editor of “The Atlantic Monthly” he has inevitably been shielded from much of that healthful discussion which is usually needed for the making of a good author. Sir Arthur Helps says, that, if ordinary criticism gives us little, it is still worth having: if it is not marked by common sense, it still brings to us the common nonsense, which is quite as important. But the conductor of the leading literary magazine of a nation

Mlle De Montpensier, grand-daughter of Henri Quatre, is said to have been “So famous in history that her name never appears in it;” she being known only as “La Grande Mademoiselle.”This anonymousness may help the fame of a princess, but it must hurt that of an author. The initials “L. E. L.,” so familiar to some of us in childhood, stood for a fame soon forgotten; and this not so much because her poetry was weak, but because her name was in a manner nameless. However popular might be the poems o

We are growing more cosmopolitan and varied, in these United States of America; and our authors are gaining much, if they are also losing a little, in respect to training. The early career of an American author used to be tolerably fixed and clear, if limited; a college education, a few months in Europe, a few years in some profession, and then an entrance into literature by some side-door. In later times, the printing-office has sometimes been substituted for the college, and has given a new ph