Carlyle's laugh, and other surprises Part 2

In the second half, Higginson recalls General Rufus Saxton, a woman connected with Thackeray, John Bartlett, Horace Elisha Scudder, Edward Atkinson, and James Elliot Cabot, showing how soldiers, editors, reformers, and intellectuals all contributed to American cultural life. His portraits of Emily Dickinson, Julia Ward Howe, and William James Rolfe present sharply different personalities linked by poetry, literature, education, and personal memory. The final essays revisit Göttingen and Harvard, the vanished world of old Newport, and fifty years of American literature, transforming literary history into a living record shaped by writers, readers, institutions, places, and the changing experiences of an entire generation.