He was married on September 28, 1857, to Elizabeth Dwight, daughter of Edmund Dwight, Esq., a woman of rare qualities and great public usefulness, who singularly carried on the tradition of those Essex County women of an earlier generation, who were such strong helpmates to their husbands. Of Mrs. Cabot it might almost have been said, as was said by John Lowell in 1826 of his cousin, Elizabeth Higginson, wife of her double first cousin, George Cabot: “She had none of the advantages of early education afforded so bountifully to the young ladies of the present age; but she surpassed all of them in the acuteness of her observation, in the knowledge of human nature, and in her power of expressing and defending the opinions which she had formed.”[21] Thus Elliot Cabot writes of his wife: “From the time when the care of her children ceased to occupy the most of her time, she gradually became one of the most valuable of the town officials, as well as the unofficial counselor of many who needed the unfailing succor of her inexhaustible sympathy and practical helpfulness.”
Cabot visited Europe anew after his marriage, and after his return, served for nine years as a school-committee-man in Brookline, where he resided. He afterwards did faithful duty for six years as chairman of the examining committee of Harvard Overseers. He gave for a single year a series of lectures on Kant at Harvard University, and for a time acted as instructor in Logic there, which included a supervision of the forensics or written discussions then in vogue. The Civil War aroused his sympathies strongly, especially when his brother Edward and his personal friend, Francis L. Lee, became respectively Lieutenant-Colonel and Colonel of the 44th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. Elliot Cabot himself enlisted in a drill club, and did some work for the Sanitary Commission. He also assisted greatly in organizing the Museum of Fine Arts and in the administration of the Boston Athenæum.
Though a life-long student, he wrote little for the press,—a fact which recalls Theodore Parker’s remark about him, that he “could make a good law argument, but could not address it to the jury.” He rendered, however, a great and permanent service, far outweighing that performed by most American authors of his time, as volunteer secretary to Ralph Waldo Emerson, a task which constituted his main occupation for five or six years. After Emerson’s death, Cabot also wrote his memoirs, by the wish of the family,—a book which will always remain the primary authority on the subject with which it deals, although it was justly criticised by others for a certain restricted tone which made it seem to be, as it really was, the work of one shy and reticent man telling the story of another. In describing Emerson, the biographer often unconsciously described himself also; and the later publications of Mr. Emerson’s only son show clearly that there was room for a more ample and varied treatment in order to complete the work.
Under these circumstances, Cabot’s home life, while of even tenor, was a singularly happy one. One of his strongest and life-long traits was his love of children,—a trait which he also eminently shared with Emerson. The group formed by him with two grandchildren in his lap, to whom he was reading John Gilpin or Hans Andersen, is one which those who knew him at home would never forget. It was characteristic also that in his German copy of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” already mentioned, there were found some papers covered with drawings of horses and carts which had been made to amuse some eager child. Akin to this was his strong love of flowers, united with a rare skill in making beautiful shrubs grow here and there in such places as would bring out the lines and curves of his estate at Beverly. Even during the last summer of his life, he was cutting new little vistas on the Beverly hills. His sketches of landscape in water-color were also very characteristic both of his delicate and poetic appreciation of nature and of his skill and interest in drawing. In 1885, while in Italy, he used to draw objects seen from the car window as he traveled; and often in the morning, when his family came down to breakfast at hotels, they found that he had already made an exquisite sketch in pencil of some tower or arch.
His outward life, on the whole, seemed much akin to the lives led by that considerable class of English gentlemen who adopt no profession, dwelling mainly on their paternal estates, yet are neither politicians nor fox-hunters; pursuing their own favorite studies, taking part from time to time in the pursuits of science, art, or literature, even holding minor public functions, but winning no widespread fame. He showed, on the other hand, the freedom from prejudice, the progressive tendency, and the ideal proclivities which belong more commonly to Americans. He seemed to himself to have accomplished nothing; and yet he had indirectly aided a great many men by the elevation of his tone and the breadth of his intellectual sympathy. If he did not greatly help to stimulate the thought of his time, he helped distinctly to enlarge and ennoble it. His death occurred at Brookline, Massachusetts, on January 16, 1903. He died as he had lived, a high-minded, stainless, and in some respects unique type of American citizen.