Everything about Colonel Higginson’s house indicates a refined and cultivated taste, but nothing of the dilettante spirit is to be seen. He loves what is artistic, but he prefers not to sacrifice to it the home feeling and the home comforts. He writes all the better for his quiet and home-keeping environment, and for the wide circle of his social and personal relations with the best men and women of his time. His literary work is done in the morning, and he seldom takes up the pen after the task of the forenoon is accomplished. Most of his work is done slowly and deliberately, with careful elaboration and thorough revision. In this manner he wrote his review of Dr. Holmes’s “Emerson” in _The Nation_; and his essays in the same periodical following the deaths of Longfellow, Emerson, and Phillips. He thoroughly enjoyed the writing of the papers published in _Harper’s Monthly_, which were reissued in book form as his “Larger History of the United States,” and he entered on the task of hunting out the illustrations and the illustrative details with an antiquarian’s zeal and a poet’s love of the romantic. His address on a Revolutionary vagabond shows the fascination which the old-time has for him in all its features of quaintness, romance and picturesqueness. Colonel Higginson finds the morning hour the most conducive to freshness and vigor of thought, and the most promotive of health of body and mind. After dinner he devotes himself to his family, to social recreation, to communings with and studies of Nature, and to business. He is quite at home in Cambridge society; and, being to the manner born, he enters into its intellectual and social recreations with relish and satisfaction. He is a ready and interesting converser, bright, witty, full of anecdote, and quick with illustrations and quotations of the most pertinent kind. His wide reading, large experience of life, and extensive acquaintance with men and women give him rich materials for conversation, which he knows how to use gracefully and with good effect. He readily wins the confidence of those he meets. Women find him a welcome companion, whose kindliness and chivalric courtesy win their heartiest admiration. They turn to him with confidence, as to the champion of their sex, and he naturally numbers many bright and noble women among his friends.