NORTON, CHARLES ELIOT (1827-1908), American scholar and man of letters, was born at Cambridge, Mass., on Nov. 16, 1827. The descendant of a long line of clergymen and of Anne Bradstreet, the Puritans' "tenth muse," in his idealism, restraint and dignity he was a member of the New England group already passing into its decline. Yet in him there was, too, an alien strain that made him, after graduation from Harvard in 1846, take employment with an Oriental trading firm, for which as supercargo he travelled out to India. The leisurely trip through Europe on his return and his early contact with the culture of an older civilization made him feel sharply what he had been losing in life—"pleasure, opportunities, happiness, indeed, of a sort that nothing else can supply." He felt himself to be "half starved" in America, yet he knew that in the Old World he would be "half starved for this strange new one." Thenceforth his work was to be largely that of torchbearer and interpreter. As lecturer on and first professor of the history of art at Harvard (from to 1898 when he became emeritus), he was long considered the "oracle of the humanities." From his first publication of church hymns (1852), he turned to Notes of Travel and Study in Italy (1860), and to his later Historical Studies of Church Building in the Middle Ages (1880). A translator of The New Life of Dante Alighieri as early as 1859, he did what was probably his best literary work in his prose translation of the Divine Comedy (1891-92). He helped to develop the creative abilities of his own countrymen in his editorship (1864-68) with Lowell of the North American Review. For long years with unfailing grace and tact he edited the literary remains of many of his friends. The
Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson (1883 ) , Letters of John Ruskin to Charles Eliot Norton (1904)— records of a rare friendship mutually profitable—the Orations and Addresses of George William Curtis (1894), Henry Wads worth Longfellow; a Sketch of his Life, together with Long fellow's Chief Biographical Poems (1907), the Letters of James Russell Lowell (1894) all bear testimony to the variety of his friendships in England and America and to his editorial discrim ination. In allusion to this phase of his life, he suggested to Lowell as an inscription over his grave, "He had good friends, whom he loved." Yet his was never too exclusive a disposition. A lover of the beautiful in art, he was also a worker for the beautiful in life. Between 1846 and 1849 when he was still in the counting-house, he opened a night school for men and boys in Cambridge; he was a director of the movement for model lodg ing-houses in Boston ; he was a zealous worker for the Union cause, especially through his editorial labours for the New Eng land Loyal Publication Society. When he died (Oct. 21, 1908) at "Shady Hill," the gracious house in which he had been born, he left the memory of a serene and well-ordered life.
The best record of his life is afforded by his Letters, which were edited with biographical comment by his daughter Sara Norton and M. A. De Wolfe Howe (1913). Tributes to his work and personality may be found in The Harvard Graduates' Magazine (vol. 16, Dec. 1907; vol. 17, Dec. 5908) and in T. W. Higginson, Carlyle's Laugh (19*.