MANUSCRIPT: BPL (Higg 78). Ink.

PUBLICATION: AM LXVIII (October 1891) 455, in part; L (1894) 323, in part; LL 302, in part; L (1931) 301, in part.

This and the following letters to Higginson and his wife (nos. 458- 460) were all written about the same time in the spring of 1876. The order of their arrangement here is conjectured from their contents.

ED correctly guessed that Higginson wrote the unsigned review of Lowell's Among My Books: Second Series for the March 1876 issue of Scribnerıs Monthly. (It is so identified in Mary Thacher Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson . . ., Boston, 1914, 413). The review of Emerson's Letters and Social Aims in the April issue, likewise unsigned, may be Higginsonıs but has not been so identified. The "friend" referred to in the third paragraph is Mrs. Higginson, whose illness was increasing. Higginsonıs reply to the letter ED wrote to him in February (no. 450) told her that he would be glad to refrain from reading Daniel Deronda until he had received the copy she wished to send him. It was published late in the year, after being completed serially in the October issue of Scribnerıs Monthly. The second volume of the presentation set, containing Higginsonıs signature, is now among the books from his library at HCL. The comment on "Immortality" might apply to the poem "'Faithful to the end' Amended" (see letter no. 449). "My earliest friend" in all probability was B. F. Newton (see the postscript to letter no. 110). The quotation in the first paragraph is from Revelation 22.16.