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.