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."