NOTED HARVARD MEN HONOR MEMORY OF MAJOR HIGGINSON

PRES. A. LAWRENCE LOWELL.

In Major Henry L. Higginson the University has lost a councillor and benefactor, the students a friend. Ever mindful of their welfare he gave them the Union and Soldiers' Field. Outside the University he created, and for years at his own expense maintained, the Symphony Orchestra. Without holding public office he was always quick to serve the public and unsparing in his denunciation of public wrong. Many will feel that a friend has gone from us, for he was much loved, because he loved much.

PRES. CHARLES W. ELIOT '53.

His chief direct service was that he served as a Fellow in the Corporation for twenty-six years, 1893-1919, with the utmost punctuality, assiduity, and devotion, and with high intelligence. Why was he chosen a member of the Corporation? Not because he was a successful banker and broker of State Street. Far from it. He was chosen because he was as fine an exemplar of the patriotic citizen-soldier as there was in the country or the world; because he gave the University two great gifts, one the Soldiers Field, on which he hoped that manly sports of many kinds would be generously cultivated through long generations of Harvard youth, and on which he erected a monument to youthful friends of his who fell in the Civil War, and the Harvard Union, where he hoped that democracy and good-fellowship among Harvard students would be forever cultivated; because he had proved himself to be the most successful promoter of good music that Eastern Massachusetts had ever known; and because he was the intimate friend of Alexander Agassiz, a great naturalist and a great administrator in varied fields, who had already served two terms in the Corporation, the last of which closed in 1890; and because the Corporation of that day knew no better example of the public spirit and courage which had made New England what it then was. The expectations and purposes with which the Corporation of 1893 elected Major Higginson a member of the Board were completely fulfilled.

WALTER R. SPALDING '87.

Professor in the Department of Music.

What Major Higginson did for the social and athletic aspects of College life is so prominently before us in such concrete forms as the Harvard Union and Soldiers Field, that we often overlook the great influence exerted by his foresight and generosity in the development of music--that art which, although it appeals so elementally to all human beings, is often difficult to estimate, just because it is so elusive and mysterious.

The facts are that, through the generosity and artistic judgment of Major Higginson over a course of more than 50 years, America has been enabled to have one of the leading orchestras in the whole world. Competent critics from the Continent have often considered it to be the finest; undoubtedly there is no finer.

The Symphony concerts, both those given in Boston and at the Sanders Theatre, have generated a love for good music in the lives of innumerable alumni and undergraduates. There is little doubt that music is going to bear an increasingly more and more important part in bringing together all classes of our mixed community in bonds of mutual sympathy and toleration; Major Higginson will always bear an immortal crown for having been a pioneer in its development.