Since 1903, members of Arts and Letters have delivered commemorative tributes to fellow members who have passed away. These remarks celebrate and reflect on the lives and work of the members being honored and acknowledge their contribution to the arts. A selection of tributes is now available in the digital archive below. As we prepared this archive, we were reminded that these tributes reflect their times, and, in some instances, include terminology and social and moral judgments we do not endorse.
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Bred, like Furness, to the law, Donald Grant Mitchell found the attractions of literature stronger than those of forensic ambition. While Furness was frequenting the society of Elizabethan days, Mitchell, in his own quaint and quiet way, was preparing himself for the companionship of choice souls of another type. I doubt not that he has already received a warm welcome from the congenial spirits of Izaak Walton and Dr. Thomas Browne and our own Washington Irving; and has compared notes with Horace and Pliny about Sabine farms or Tuscan villas. For his was essentially the field of the contemplative essay, the dream or reverie, in which the autobiographical form adds charm to the style and felicity to the thought.
If he passed from the speculative to the practical side of life, it was to touch with deft hand upon the joys and cares of the country gentleman. Of this good old English type Mitchell was himself a superb representative; handsome in person, genial in manner, unfailing in kindness of heart. Living on a hillside farm just outside of the city, but during his lifetime untouched by the city's expansion,—“My Farm of Edgewood," of which he wrote so delightfully,—the view from his window over the spires of the town to the woods and the sea beyond them was symbolical of his whole outlook on life.
In the last public address which he delivered Mitchell summarized in characteristic fashion his attitude toward certain present-day educational movements:
There are oldish people astir, gone-by products of these mills of learning—who will watch anxiously lest harm be done to apostles of the old humanities. You may apotheosize the Faradays and Danas and the Edisons and Huxleys, and we will fling our caps in the air. But we shall ask that you spare us our Plato, our Homer, our Vergil, our Dante, and perhaps our "chattering" Aristotle and scoffing Carlyle. Truth, however and wherever won, without nervous expression to spread and plant it, is helpless—a bird without wings! And there are beliefs tenderly cherished—and I call the spires of nineteen centuries to witness—which do not rest on the lens or the scalpel.