Waldo Emerson by letter and all three have promised to come.  In the evening with Mr. Jackson’s son James, Ellen Blackwell and I went to see Hamlet.  In spite of my Quaker training, I find I enjoy all these worldly amusements intensely.

Returning to Worcester, I attended the Anti-Slavery Bazaar.  I suppose there were many beautiful things exhibited, but I was so absorbed in the conversation of Mr. Higginson, Samuel May, Jr., Sarah Earle, cousin Seth Rogers and Stephen and Abby Foster, that I really forgot to take a survey of the tables.  The next day Charles F. Hovey drove with me out to the home of the Fosters where we had a pleasant call.[20]

[Autograph:  Theodore Parker]

Miss Anthony visited a baby show but she considered it “a sad exhibition, unless it may be the crude and rude beginning of arousing an interest in the laws which govern the production of strong, healthy, beautiful children.”  She heard Mr. Higginson preach every Sunday, and of one sermon on the “Secret Springs of True Greatness” she writes home: 

The minister read from the Book of Esdras in the Apocrypha.  It is astonishing that such a beautiful and forcible exemplification of the governing principle of life should have been cast aside as doubtful by those who presumed to sit in judgment upon the revealed will of the Almighty.  That they did fail to perceive in this the divine stamp, proves all the more conclusively to me that we, who have the experience of all past generations to enlighten our understanding and deepen our convictions, are infinitely more competent to discern between the good and evil in that wonderful book than were any king-appointed councils of olden times.

During Mr. Higginson’s absence his place was filled by Rev. David A. Wasson, who was temporarily a resident of the “water cure.”  His sermons and his daily companionship were a revelation to Miss Anthony of a higher intellectual and spiritual life than she had known before, and she records in her diary:  “It is plain to me now that it is not sitting under preaching that I dislike, but the fact that most of it is not of a stamp that my soul can respond to.”  While in Worcester she went to her first Republican meeting and heard John P. Hale.  Her cousin escorted her to a seat on the platform and Mr. Hale gave her a cordial welcome.  She was the only woman present, although several peeped in at the door but had not the courage to enter.  She also heard Henry Wilson, Charles Sumner and Anson Burlingame, and writes:  “Had the accident of birth given me place among the aristocracy of sex, I doubt not I should be an active, zealous advocate of Republicanism; unless, perchance, I had received that higher, holier light which would have lifted me to the sublime height where now stand Garrison, Phillips and all that small but noble band whose motto is ‘No Union with Slaveholders.’”