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Address of Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

It was my experience in England, eleven years ago, as I suppose it is often the experience of Americans in their first hurried run through Europe, more than once to have to make the selection for a given day between two different objects of interest.[…]I shall be forever grateful that on a certain spring day I gave up York Minster for Darwin; for York Minster is only more beautiful with every year, while the visitor to England to-day finds it empty of its greatest naturalist. And I never shall forget, —what American ever forgets his first English lane and his first English village?—I never shall forget the delicious, dewy ride in early morning through the lovely lanes of Kent, amid all that soft greenness, that ancient moss, that venerable village, those haunts of ancient peace, up the gently sloping hill that led to one of those ideal English country houses, one of those cottages embowered, or as one might almost say, coining a word, enlawned in verdure, which was in this case the home of Darwin. I remember that I felt as I approached it as Emerson felt, he said, at the foot of the stairs that led to an observatory, "This is the ladder to the stars." I never can quite hope to approach with more reverence any human home than that which filled my hear as I found myself there. Then came the hospitable welcome, the successive glimpses of that great man. I remember him as I first saw him coming toward me to meet me in the parlor,—a man whom I looked up physically as well as spiritually to recognize. He struck me at the moment, at the first glance, as looking like a more gracious and genial and benignant Bryant; having that noble aspect in his face which, mingled with too much coldness of expression, marked that great dead poet of ours. I remember that first impression of him; and I remember afterward, when, after dinner, his sons and I strolled out in the garden, he came to meet us. There was still this lofty figure, walking with some difficulty (for he was in poor health, then), resting one hand upon the shoulder of his wife, and the other hand propped upon a staff taller than himself, and singularly recalling some of his own speculations and some of the suggestions that I had heard made on his personal appearance. I remember still further, following out the same association, how, when he came back into the house afterward and sat high, as he always did, on a sofa, with two or three thick cushions beneath him, that there, by his own fireside, he still held this long staff upright in both hands and resting against it. I thought I had seen a similar figure in books of natural history.

I remember, at a later visit,—[1878] for again, after an interval of six years, it was my privilege to spend a night in his house,—I remember the changed aspect of the man, the somewhat drooping figure, the rather shrunken form, the same infinite benignity and sweetness of bearing; and I remember then, early in the morning, looking out, before even the early family breakfast, and seeing him hurrying in from the remoter part of the green garden, with a great shawl wrapped around his head, his white hear and beard emerging from it,—a singularly unconscious, absorbed, eager figure. I asked his son afterward what his father was out there at that time in the morning for, in his impaired condition of health. "Oh, yes," said his son: "he is always at it. He always says he is not doing anything at all. But he always has one of his little experiments, as he calls them, going on out there in the garden; and he has to  look at them two or three times every night."

Those glimpses, slight though they may be, with many that I cannot so freely speak of (for I cannot overcome the reluctant to give details of private interviews, which still lingers, as I think, among Americans, although our English cousins seem to have got bravely over it), fill my memory of Darwin. I never can see a man whose personal aspect is more in keeping with one's expectations, never one in whom the nobleness and sweetness of the inner life identify themselves more with all the action and the demeanor of the outward man.

And, turning from Darwin in his English home, his ancestral home, I might almost call it,—I do not know whether it was so, but every English home looks ancestral when a family has been in it for ten years—[…]

When I asked Darwin what he thought of what seemed then a singular circumstance,—that Huxley, antagonistic to the English Church, had had his child baptized into it, and that Tyndall was said to have approved that measure,—Darwin gently and charitably put the question by. But when I said that sometimes it happened to men to feel that their children ought to begin a little farther back than their own position, that it was fair to children not to start them at the utmost verge of the father's progress, but to begin in a little more conservative attitude, Darwin shook his head at that. "I see no need of it," said he. "My father and grandfather, so far as I can find out,were just as much heretics as I am; and when I look at my sons," he said, turning with an expression of infinite happiness to his two affec-

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tionate and high-minded sons, who sat by us,—"when I look at my sons, I do not see but that they have turned out as well as other people's sons, in spite of it."

[…]

How promptly Emerson came from his closet to answer every call of public duty we know; and nothing was more delightful to me than to find Darwin, in the only letter I ever received from him,—a letter written after reading a little book of mind in regard to coloured soldiers of the South,—expressing the most warm, cordial, trustful interest in the whole nature and prospect of the negro race, saying that for forty years he had been inclined to that opinion, and that time had only justified it. "Forty years ago," he said, "the observations I made in Brazil were such as your book only confirms."

This is a paraphrase of this letter from Darwin (the relevant line given here in bold):

"Down, February 27th [1873].

MY DEAR SIR,—My wife has just finished reading aloud your 'Life with a Black Regiment,' and you must allow me to thank you heartily for the very great pleasure which it has in many ways given us. I always thought well of the negroes, from the little which I have seen of them; and I have been delighted to have my vague impressions confirmed, and their character and mental powers so ably discussed. When you were here I did not know of the noble position which you had filled. I had formerly read about the black regiments, but failed to connect your name with your admirable undertaking. Although we enjoyed greatly your visit to Down, my wife and myself have over and over again regretted that we did not know about the black regiment, as we should have greatly liked to have heard a little about the South from your own lips.
Your descriptions have vividly recalled walks taken forty years ago in Brazil. We have your collected Essays, which were kindly sent us by Mr. [Moncure] Conway, but have not yet had time to read them. I occasionally glean a little news of you in the 'Index'; and within the last hour have read an interesting article of yours on the progress of Free Thought.
Believe me, my dear Sir, with sincere admiration,
Yours very faithfully,
CH. DARWIN." Life and letters, vol. 3, p. 176.