Higginson begins with the unexpected warmth he discovered in Thomas Carlyle and then turns to manuscripts by Shelley and Keats, using intimate details to reveal the human beings behind celebrated literary reputations. Through Massasoit, James Fenimore Cooper, and Charles Brockden Brown, he reflects on early American history and literature, while his portraits of Thoreau and Bronson Alcott emphasize independence and the distinctive spirit of the transcendentalist generation. His recollections of George Bancroft, Charles Eliot Norton, Edmund Clarence Stedman, and Edward Everett Hale further portray nineteenth-century American culture as a world in which literature, friendship, intellectual life, and public responsibility were closely connected.
