Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/76

 488 Scholars only the most important member of the group. Charles Eliot Norton^ (1827-1908), the son of Andrews Norton, graduated at Harvard in 1846, spent five years in business and travel in India and in Europe, was abroad again in England and Italy in 1855- 57, and after his return busied himself with writing for the newly estabUshed Atlantic Monthly and with bringing out certain books of his own. The Civil War gave to his political opinions a stamp which they never lost. From 1864 to 1868 he edited, jointly with Lowell, The North American Review, and in 1865, with Frederick Law Olmsted, James Miller McKim, and Edward Lawrence Godkin, he helped to found The Nation, to which he contributed generously, and the success of which Godkin credited largely to him. From 1868 to 1873 he was in Europe again. From 1875 to 1898, when he became Emeritus, he held at Harvard the professorship of the History of Art. During his sojourns abroad, he formed lifelong friendships with Carlyle, Ruskin, FitzGerald, and Leslie Stephen. These men, as well as his American friends, Lowell, Longfellow, Emer- son, George William Curtis, and others, found in him a re- markably receptive and interpretative mind, together with an uncompromising rectitude and independence of judgment — traits which made him an admirable friend to men of gifts more conspicuous than his own, and eminently qualified him for his literary executorships and editorships. He brought out, for example, various portions of Carlyle's correspondence and reminiscences — the correspondence with Emerson (1883) and with Goethe (1887), Reminiscences (1887), and letters (1886 and 1889) ; the letters of Lowell (1893), George William Curtis's Orations and Addresses (1894), further Emerson letters (those to Samuel G. Ward, 1899), and Ruskin's letters to Norton himself (1904). A volume of Notes of Travel and Study in Italy (i860), a portion of which appeared in The Crayon^ during 1856, contains the beginnings, or more than the beginnings, of his accomplish- ment in the two other fields of scholarship for which he is not- able — the fine arts and Dante. Norton presents the extensive studies he has already begun in Dante's works : gathering from the Commedia, the Convito, and the De Vulgari Eloquentia the ' See also Book III, Chap. xiii. " The first magazine of art in America; it was edited by W. J. Stilhnan.