406 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY. 



which he was the anonymous editor, and "Considerations of Some 

 Recent Social Theories," written by himself. From 1855 to 1857 he 

 was again in Europe, widely extending his circle of friends, of whom 

 from this time he counted John Ruskin and Mrs. Gaskell among the 

 most intimate, and beginning in Italy his serious, life-long studies of 

 Dante. The nine ensuing years were passed in America, largely in 

 editorial and patriotic labors. Through his intimate friendship with 

 James Russell Lowell he bore a close relation to the Atlantic Monthly in 

 the earliest years of its existence, and with the North American Review, 

 of which for a time he was the editor. Through the period of the Civil 

 War he rendered his country a valuable service by means of his edi- 

 torial work for the New England Loyal Publication Society, an agency 

 for distributing to the American press the best editorial expressions on 

 behalf of the Northern cause. In 1862 he married Susan Ridley Sedg- 

 wick of Stockbridge and New York, and in 1868 returned to Europe 

 with his wife and young children. During the five years that followed, 

 old friendships were renewed and new and vital intimacies were begun : 

 his letters and journals abound in illuminating records of intercourse 

 with Carlyle, Ruskin, Leslie Stephen, Burne-Jones, and many others 

 who made the England of the period what it was. But this period of 

 Norton's life had its overwhelming shadow in the death of his wife at 

 Dresden in 1872. When he returned to America in the following year, 

 it was to take up his life on new terms. 



It is not often that a man begins at nearly fifty years of age the work 

 which makes him a distinguished figure in his generation. The oppor- 

 tunity to effect this remarkable achievement came to him when his 

 cousin, President Eliot, had the foresight, growing from the knowledge 

 of Norton's training in a field hitherto but slightly tilled in America, 

 to offer him in 1874 a lectureship at Harvard College on the History of 

 the Fine Arts as Connected with Literature, and in 1875 a professor- 

 ship in the History of Art — a post which he held for the remainder of 

 his active life, until 1898, and thereafter, until his death ten years later, 

 as Professor Emeritus. His influence on a long series of college genera- 

 tions was incalculable. Into American society, dominated more and 

 more by material things, he brought a sense of appreciation of beauty 

 as expressed in all the arts which must be counted among the great, 

 if imponderable, influences of his time. He was unsparing in his 

 criticism of American tendencies which seemed to him at war with the 



