I am glad that writing this biography fell to Mr. Howe. He is at the same time the most modest editor and one of the finest masters of the biographic art now practising in America. A New Englander and a Harvard man, full of Latin piety toward the men and mores and institutions which for three hundred years have had their center in his corner of Massachusetts, he has sat up there in Boston for decade after decade, like an infatuated and self-effacing recording angel, editing Beacon Biographies, "The Harvard Alumni Bulletin," "The Harvard Graduates' Magazine," "The Atlantic Monthly," the lives and letters of Phillips Brooks and Charles Eliot Norton, the monumental tomes of "The Memoirs of the Harvard Dead in the War Against Germany," "Memories of a Hostess" and the like. In much of this work there has been for Mr. Howe great labor, a beautiful service of commemoration, and a minimum of personal glory. In performing it, however, Mr. Howe has perhaps become the mind of our times most fully and constantly aware of the meaning of Harvard College and New England as elements in the historic, intellectual, literary and social life of the nation. His latest biography proves, moreover, to any discerning eye, proves by all sorts of subtleties in the composition, that he himself has achieved a certain blessed critical detachment from the traditional Boston outlook—or should not one rather say, the traditional Boston inlook—thinking of that rapt and reverent contemplation of the umbilicus which conceivably some colonial Yankee skipper imported from the Orient?
At this point I wish to say a word, by way of sidelighting, about my own feeling for Mr. Howe's subject. I love New England with all my heart, tenderly and
