[Footnote 1: A series which ran through Vol. XXV. of the Lit., 1909-1910.]

I. JOHN BASCOM

JOHN ADAMS LOWE '06

Already long past the threescore years and ten allotted man, Dr. Bascom exerted a vital influence on the college when we first met him. On the shadowy side of the valley, and even then silvery haired, he moved beneath these classic shades like a patriarch, "the grand old doctor."

The facts of his life and of his achievements require volumes for the telling. They speak of his genius-like career at Williams, of his keen philosophical insight, and of how, after being graduated in 1849, he tried the law and theology before accepting a tutorship in his alma mater. A score of years from 1855 to 1874, he served the college as professor of rhetoric, although his desire was to give his attention to philosophy. The times were filled with conflict and struggle, and Dr. Bascom accepted the presidency of the University of Wisconsin, where he made a glorious record covering fourteen years. In 1887 he returned to Williamstown with unimpaired powers, and became lecturer in sociology and later professor of political economy, a position which he filled till 1903. They speak of his degrees of honor: Wisconsin, Amherst, and Williams conferred the LL.D., Iowa College the D.D.

It is in the evening of his life that it has been our good fortune to know him. As when, the day's work done and the worries of its earlier hours laid aside, we look forward to the rest that awaits us and live over in thought the events of the day that is gone, the conflicts lose their bitterness. Here is a man whose limitless energy built up a great university; whose straightforward counsel for many years shaped the policies of one of the political parties of the Commonwealth; whose earnest teaching pointed out to many a man his civic duty; and whose personal life is an incentive to high intellectual morality. By a score of books covering the various fields of rhetoric, aesthetics, political economy, philosophy, and religion, he has moulded public opinion in his generation. The same undaunted ambition keeps his eye bright now as then; the same keen brain grapples with vital problems; the same magnetic personality commands respect and love.

II. HENRY MILLS ALDEN

LEVERETT W. SPRING '62

Henry M. Alden has been the editor of Harper's Monthly since 1869, and is still in active service. He was transferred to this position from Harper's Weekly, of which he was the editor for the five years preceding. For this long and distinguished service he seems to have had little or no preliminary training. The first six years of his life—he was born in 1836—were spent in Mount Tabor, a Vermont hamlet with the rude life of a remote country town three quarters of a century ago. From Mount Tabor he removed in 1842 to Hoosick Falls, New York. Here, after some service as an operative in a cotton mill and other tentative vocations, he prepared for college, and, in the autumn of 1853, entered Williams, where he supported himself by teaching during the long winter vacations and by such miscellaneous work as fell in his way. "I remember among other things," said the late President Henry Hopkins to the writer, "that he took care of my father's horse."

In Mr. Alden's day the opportunities at Williams in the way of preparation for an editorial career were very slender. The only student publication was a quarterly magazine of less than a hundred pages, and by some oversight his class-mates failed to elect him as one of the five editors. At Andover Theological Seminary, where he was a student from 1857 to 1860, the opportunities for 'prentice work as an editor were wholly wanting. Hence the preparation which the college and seminary afforded for his life-work was of a very general and indirect sort. Yet his success has been one of the notable landmarks in the history of modern periodicals. In the conduct of Harper's Monthly with its wide range of attractive material, he has done the world a service, high and fine. For the first thirty years of this service Mr. Alden seems to have devoted himself to the task of securing and organizing the material to be printed. In 1900 he added to the departments of the magazine an "Editor's Study," and begged "an audience speaking in his own name." Here he discusses from month to month such topics as the shiftings of popular taste, the story with a purpose, the volunteer contributor, rejected manuscripts, the "dullards of the college world for whom a Jowett or a Mark Hopkins is superfluous," and the present outlook of literature.

That such a career was possible for Mr. Alden—the career of an indefatigable editor, keenly alive to the various needs of the reading public, with an office in a great New York business establishment, bethumped without by the roar of elevated trains and confused within by the noise of incessant printing presses—no one who knew him in Williamstown from 1853 to 1857 had the slightest conception. Then and there he was a dreamer, and showed relatively little interest in this present material, workaday world. Dr. Gladden says in his Recollections that he could never find out how he got down from cloudland to Franklin Square. But as a matter of fact, in whatever hostile regions he may have sojourned, he never quite lost his residence in the supersensual world. Somehow he succeeded in reaching Franklin Square and becoming an editor without ceasing to be a mystic.

The literary history of Mr. Alden the mystic, as distinguished from the editor, seems to have begun with the appearance of an essay on "The Philosophy of Art" in the Williams Quarterly for December, 1856. Then, three or four years later, came "The Eleusinia," two articles printed in the Atlantic Monthly. These papers led to the delivery in 1864 of a course of lectures before the Lowell Institute on "The Structure of Paganism." Some thirty years afterward two books appeared—God in His World in 1893 and The Study of Death in 1895—which may be regarded as the culmination of the mental and spiritual characteristics revealed in the Williams Quarterly essay and in the Atlantic papers. Both of these books abound in rhythmic, melodious pages of prose poetry like the rhapsody on "The Coming of the Bridegroom" or on "The Lesson of the Sea." Mr. Alden's prose is perhaps more poetic than his verse. Of the latter, scanty in amount, the best is his "Ancient Lady of Sorrows," before whom pass

"All shapes that come, or soon or late,
Of this world's misery."

In general, the books may be described as an interpretation of the great problems of life by the mystic intuitions as distinguished from abstract intellectualism, which finds that many of these problems are hopelessly beyond its reach. If one cares for the philosophy of nature and history, of Christianity and other religions, brilliantly expounded by an idealizing, poetic optimist and seer, we commend him to "God in His World" and "The Study of Death."

III. WASHINGTON GLADDEN

STEPHEN T. LIVINGSTON '87

Washington Gladden, whose very name irradiates the nobility and wholesomeness of the man himself, has for years been a foremost interpreter of the perplexing problems of our time. His appeal is to honest intelligence in whatever concerns human welfare. He has done much to humanize theology and stimulate popular interest in modern scholarship. Moreover, in the region of industrial, social, and civic reform he stands out conspicuously as a bold champion of the Golden Rule in its application to every-day activities; and though sometimes charged with being a dreamer, he shows that the sky (to use his own figure) is less remote than is commonly supposed, and in fact adjoins the surface of the earth where human feet daily walk.

Dr. Gladden, who is now a little more than seventy, was born in Pennsylvania. He prepared for college in Owego, New York, and was graduated from Williams in 1859. After preaching in New York state for a few years, he came to Massachusetts, where he was settled first in North Adams, and then in Springfield. Since 1882 he has been minister of the First Congregational Church in Columbus, Ohio. As preacher, author, and lecturer he is famous throughout the English-speaking world, and all his recent books (the latest being his Recollections) are published simultaneously in England and the United States. The honorary degrees conferred on him are D.D. and LL.D.

The instructive and practical elements in Dr. Gladden's writings, the wide influence he exerts in the cause of aggressive righteousness, and his interesting personality, do not, however, measure the full extent of his gifts. One has only to read his well-known hymns to realize anew that here is lyric quality of the first order. Then, too, the Williams alumnus, whether he sings hymns or not, has the warmest place in his heart for "The Mountains," and when he comes back to the college with white hair will continue to thank Washington Gladden for that song. While serving as one of the trustees of Williams, Dr. Gladden was a familiar figure at commencement. His personal presence indicates the character of his thought, and the spirit which challenged him to high daring in the early days is still unflinching. During the present disintegration of old beliefs, this servant of the truth has always been eager to reconstruct the new with the clear and definite purpose of meeting the highest requirements of life.

IV. FRANKLIN CARTER

HENRY D. WILD '88

It was largely owing to her location that Williams College gained the son who was to become her sixth president. Born at Waterbury, Connecticut, and thus well within the centripetal sweep of Yale, Franklin Carter left New Haven at the close of his sophomore year for reasons of health, and later sought the more favorable climate of the Berkshire Hills. Thus, once a member of the class of 1859 at Yale, he was graduated from Williams in the class of 1862. There came a blending of these affiliations throughout his career. Williams was the first to claim him, as professor of French and Latin till 1868 and then as Massachusetts Professor of Latin until 1872, when Yale drew him to a professorship of German, to relinquish him in 1881 when he succeeded Dr. Chadbourne as president of Williams. For twenty years, the third longest administration in the history of the college, he stood at the head of her interests.

The history of education can show fewer periods more critical or more rapid in change than the last quarter of the nineteenth century in this country. Williams was in her own crisis when Dr. Carter came as president. How he met it, and how he guided the college in a steady movement toward larger things, a mere comparison of the catalogues marking the limits of his administration can tell the younger men of to-day, who enjoy the fruits without knowing the process. Such a comparison would show an increase of sixty per cent. in the number of students and over one hundred per cent. in the number of instructors. This period also saw an increase in real estate, buildings, and improvements of $600,000, and, in addition to this, of $900,000 in invested funds.

But educational realities go deeper than outward prosperity. A college reflects her president's personality in things of mind and of spirit. To business capacity Dr. Carter added distinguished scholarship and the genius of a teacher born. All this was made living effective by single-hearted loyalty to the best interests of the college as he saw them and by devotion to the highest moral and intellectual good of the students. He did not swerve from duty as he understood it to follow an easy popularity. The burdens that he bore and the labors that he accomplished, at personal cost in more ways than one, rested in the last analysis on this substratum of self-denying service.

His work has extended far beyond the college. His grace of expression in both speech and print, the keenness of his wit, his administrative power, and his command of educational resources have been recognized and made available beyond the limits of his presidency and apart from the demands of Williams alone. Honored in many spheres, he has thus brought added honor to the college. The solidarity of his achievements for Williams is revealed more clearly as time proceeds. More and more the alumni are coming to appreciate this as both historical fact and academic heritage. This shall be his reward as he continues, and may it be for long, to live close to the college and to the town that he has served and loved.

V. HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE

WILLIAM M. GROSVENOR '85

It would be easy enough for me to study critically Mr. Mabie's books, for he has written many and they are well known and widely read; I might give you a criticism of him as thinker and author. If criticism is, (as I believe Matthew Arnold once defined it) the discerning of the characteristic excellencies in things, I could easily show you the charm of Mr. Mabie's English, the wide range of his culture, the sweetness and light of his interpretations of nature and human life. But this is rather a brief tribute to the man himself whom we sons of Williams have known and admired these many years, and this or any like tribute, however inadequate, will serve to pay a little of the debt we owe him for all that he is and all that he has done.

Born in 1846, he graduated from college in 1867 and from the Columbia Law School in 1869. As I graduated eighteen years later, I never knew him in those earlier days. But the law did not claim him; almost at once he turned to literature, for that clearly was his God-given aptitude. For nearly thirty years he has been an editor of the Christian Union, which afterward became the Outlook.

… The boy is father to the man. The gentleness, the refinement, the generous outlook on life, the genial friendliness, have only grown into nobler forms through the strenuous years. But he is an editor as well as a litterateur. He has had his share in the fight to preserve our national ideals. The years have put iron into his soul and strength into his judgments, and the sweetness has become only the pleasing incasement of the strong medicine which our social and political life so often needs. So his personal influence has grown in weight and effectiveness. Mr. Mabie is serving the state, the church, human society, in all the wide range of its interests, with singular efficiency and is quietly achieving many very useful things; and withal it is done with methods that are constructive and with the gentle arts of a gracious persuasiveness and a winning courtesy.

May he have many years of rich and fruitful work, and a golden harvest of all the good deeds he has sown!

VI. HENRY LOOMIS NELSON

JULIAN PARK '10

To some of the college body the name of Henry Loomis Nelson is nothing more than a name, but the three upper classes, especially that considerable portion of them who at one time or another came under his influence, will not soon allow the memory of his personality to pass. The facts of his life are simple enough and as well known; the fruits of that life would take many pages to set forth. His power as educator, journalist, and man of public affairs reached infinitely further than most of us, who first saw in him the man of even, witty temperament, were used to realize.

Professor Nelson was graduated with the class of 1867, later taking the M.A. degree; the college further honored him and itself by conferring the degree of L.H.D. in 1902. Together with Mabie and Stetson of his class, he organized a little circle for literary discussion; and that group, each afterward to attain eminence, showed more vital interest in art and letters than can be found to-day. After taking his law degree at Columbia he went to Washington as newspaper correspondent and there began a great series of political and economic writings. Called to the editorial chair of Harper's Weekly in 1895, he resigned it after four years because, he said, he felt that he would be false to his own convictions if he wrote those of the publisher, false to the publisher if he used the magazine to voice his own. His writings include also a novel as well as treatises on political science. In 1902 he came back to his alma mater as head of the department of Government. He died on February 29, 1908.

In his devotion to the ideals of Williams as he saw them, Dr. Nelson was, many have said, more distinguished by manly but quiet zeal than any other graduate of his prominence in public life. He stood for scholarship, fine scholarship of course, but even above that he put honor, a gentleman's code of honor. He was unconditional in his contempt for hedging, for trickery, for meanness. Constantly he showed himself an idealist, as in his advocacy of an absolute honor system. But in all there was the play of a shrewd wit, the touch of sureness, lacking snobbery, of the man who knows where he stands, and a love of entertaining others. For only six years we knew him as a teacher, but the time was long enough for many of his ideals and ideas to take root, and the fruit of them will long be apparent.

VII. HARRY PRATT JUDSON

GEORGE EDWIN MACLEAN '71

Harry Judson entered Williams from Stillwater, New York, and it was said that he made the best entrance examinations ever passed up to that time. Immediately upon his graduation, the third in his class, in 1870, he taught public school in Troy, and was initiated as a reformer in municipal politics when Troy was infamous for corruption.

The second public era of his life, 1885 to 1892, witnessed his introduction to the West as professor of history in the University of Minnesota. This was the time of the refounding of that institution under the beginning of President Northrop's administration, to whom Professor Judson became a right hand. His career is an illustrious example of one rising slowly and patiently through every grade of the public school system, to its crown in the highest grades in the state university. It must have been of inestimable worth to him to become familiar with the genius of a state university, so peculiarly a people's institution and so characteristic of the middle West.

Unconsciously he was preparing for crowning his career in the new University of Chicago. It is not strange that, in 1889, three years before he became a member of the university's first faculty, President Harper's attention was attracted to him, and he brought the early drafts of his plan for a herculean university to Professor Judson for criticism. When the inner history of that university is written, in my opinion, the world will be surprised to learn of the contribution of Professor Judson, who was Dr. Harper's Secretary of the Interior from the beginning. What Mr. Rockefeller was as a silent partner in money matters, Dr. Judson was in matters of the mind.

As dean of the Faculty of Arts, Literature, and Science from 1892 till his accession to the presidency, he was in admirable training for that office. His facility in using his knowledge, his versatility of powers, fired by an innate energy, regulated by steadiness of purpose, and aimed at the highest ideals, make his name synonymous with efficiency incarnate. His modesty equals his ability. Harper stands as an heroic figure, a Napoleon with visions of educational conquest, selected by the far-seeing Rockefeller to build a university in the center of the nation and to give the West intellectual self-respect. With the same keenness of vision Mr. Rockefeller and the trustees selected as Dr. Harper's successor a human figure, one in almost every way a contrast to Dr. Harper; an Elisha succeeding an Elijah and fitted to balance and round out the creative stage in a university to be not only the biggest but the best in the West. Williams as the mother of many educators must place the name of Judson beside that of Mark Hopkins.

VIII. CHARLES CUTHBERT HALL

SOLOMON BULKLEY GRIFFIN '72

Dr. Hall was born in 1852, and died within a short time of two of his best and best-known college friends, H.L. Nelson and Isaac Henderson, on March 15, 1908. On being graduated from Williams in 1872 and from the Union Seminary, his first pastorates were spent in Newburgh, N.Y., and in Brooklyn, whence he was called to the presidency of Union Seminary in 1897. The most brilliant of his achievements was perhaps embodied in his two trips to India as the Barrows lecturer of the University of Chicago;—he had a wonderful aptitude in applying the principles of Christianity to an alien civilization. A class-mate, the editor of the Springfield Republican is the author of the tribute to his memory which follows.

* * * * *

It is around the thought of Cuthbert Hall the college boy, rather than the distinguished president of a great seminary and all the rest, with the world so much his parish, that any word of loving memory shapes itself. He was refined and winning. If ever the sunlight of a gracious nature touched any youth, it rested on him; the unworthy and the trivial passed him by. His adjustment of values even then was mature and firm. His literary taste and product were superior. He was a natural gentleman, and that meant a Christian by all the call of his nature. Love of the fine, the high, the genuine, and the generous, was instinctive. His breadth of charity and welcome for knowledge in youth became the distinction of his manhood.

Qualities were conspicuous in his life that bound worldlings to him in a bond of fellowship that grappled the best that was in them. Goodness of his sort is commanding—the practical power of a pure life is a pulpit asset that reenforces the spoken word beyond all human calculation. Under his leadership Union Seminary could not have been other than liberal and sympathetic toward devout scholarship that might seem to threaten the ancient foundations of faith.

When a class-mate late in life found repose in the Roman church, Dr. Hall could see and say that such anchorage was best for his friend. All paths that led to trust in God and the strengthening of the essentials of character were allowable in the brotherhood of the service of humanity.

The world of scholarship has its arrogancies—sometimes it is critical over-much, intolerant toward the lesser requirements of busy men outside. This man never lost touch with men as they passed. His own assurance of belief was a flame which lighted many torches. It was a sane and a glad evangel that he gave to his students, and brought in almost constant and always ardent addresses to the youth of many colleges.

Intellectual integrity was joined in him with the finest spiritual apprehension and expression, so that he was qualified to carry a message to the cultivated of India, where he got his mortal hurt. In the knightly loyalty with which he labored his zeal was a highly tempered blade. He respected all faiths, but an abiding assurance of the supremacy of the service of Christ gave him unwavering serenity and poise. It is easy to think of Charles Cuthbert Hall entering the Supreme Presence reverently, unafraid, rejoicing, as naturally as a child would come home.

IX. BLISS PERRY

CARROLL LEWIS MAXCY '87

The subject of this brief sketch may indeed be termed a Williams man both by heredity and by environment. He passed his boyhood and early youth under the very shadow of our hills; and his father, Professor A.L. Perry, was for years the most widely known as well as the most generally loved of its faculty.

Bliss Perry was born in 1860; after graduation, in 1881, he became instructor in English and elocution at his alma mater and in 1886 was advanced to the full professorship. In 1893 he accepted a call to the same chair at Princeton. Six years later he was appointed to the editorship of the Atlantic Monthly, thus becoming one of a famous line of editors including Lowell, Howells, and Aldrich. He remained at the head of the Atlantic for just ten years, resigning in August 1909 to devote himself wholly to the duties of the chair of English literature at Harvard, which he had accepted two years before and which had already been filled by Longfellow and Lowell. The year 1909-1910 he spent abroad as Hyde lecturer at the Sorbonne.

Professor Perry's publications extend over the fields of fiction, criticism, and the occasional essay. His Study of Prose Fiction, a clear exposition of narrative writing, is one of the best-known college textbooks on the subject. His Walt Whitman is without doubt his most careful and elaborate critical work and is a recognized authority. The Amateur Spirit, a series of familiar essays, shows Professor Perry at his best and should be read especially by those who delight to study the personality of an author as revealed in his work.

But whatever fame Professor Perry may have attained in the fields of literature, to Williams men he is the teacher. In The Amateur Spirit he has written: "Your born teacher is as rare as a poet…. Once in a while a college gets hold of one. It does not always know that it has him, and proceeds to ruin him by over-driving, the moment he shows power; or to let another college lure him away for a few hundred dollars more a year. But while he lasts—and sometimes, fortunately, he lasts till the end of a long life—he transforms the lecture-hall as by enchantment. Lucky is the alumnus who can call the roll of his old instructors, and among the martinets and the pedants and the piously inane can here and there come suddenly upon a man; a man who taught him to think, or helped him to feel, and thrilled him with a new horizon."

Those of us who have been under Professor Perry's instruction in the class-room must smile to note how—all unconsciously—he has here portrayed what we know him to be. Scholarly in his tastes, clear in his thinking, simple and direct in the expression of his thought, and always human in his personality, he "taught us to think, he helped us to feel, and he thrilled us with a new horizon." To us he seemed the ideal teacher, and as teacher and as man withal he has won the loyalty of Harvard, Princeton, and Williams men alike.