Carlyle's laugh, and other surprisesHigginson, Thomas Wentworth
History
Carlyle's laugh, and other surprises
Higginson, Thomas Wentworth
American literature -- History and criticism; Authors, American
Cabot sums up his whole European reminiscences as follows: “As I look
back over my residence in Europe, what strikes me is the waste of time
and energy from having had no settled purpose to keep my head steady.
I seem to have been always well employed and happy, but I had been
indulging a disposition to mental sauntering, and the picking up of
scraps, very unfavorable to my education. I was, I think, naturally
inclined to hover somewhat above the solid earth of practical life, and
thus to miss its most useful lessons. The result, I think, was to confirm
me in the vices of my mental constitution and to cut off what chance
there was of my accomplishing something worth while.”
In March, 1843, he finally left Göttingen for home by way of Belgium and
England, and entered the Harvard Law School in the autumn, taking his
degree there two years later, in 1845. Renewing acquaintance with him
during this period, I found him to be, as always, modest and reticent in
manner, bearing unconsciously a certain European prestige upon him, which
so commanded the respect of a circle of young men that we gave him the
sobriquet of “Jarno,” after the well-known philosophic leader in Goethe’s
“Wilhelm Meister.” Whatever he may say of himself, I cannot help still
retaining somewhat of my old feeling about the mental training of the
man who, while in the Law School, could write a paper so admirable as
Cabot’s essay entitled “Immanuel Kant” (“Dial,” iv, 409), an essay which
seems to me now, as it then seemed, altogether the simplest and most
effective statement I have ever encountered of the essential principles
of that great thinker’s philosophy. I remember that when I told Cabot
that I had been trying to read Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” in an
English translation, but could not understand it, he placidly replied
that he had read it twice in German and had thought he comprehended it,
but that Meiklejohn’s translation was beyond making out, so that I need
not be discouraged.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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