Charles Eliot Norton is dead, and with his death the last link between the present age and that immortal coterie of men of letters--Longfellow and Lowell, Holmes and Emerson, Whittier and Hawthorne--is gone. He was of that same golden period of American literature which we shall not see renewed in the course of many years, the companion as well as the contemporary of those great men. It was his good fortune to have enjoyed the intimate friendship of many of the noblest personalities of his day, both at home and abroad, and the result was a unique breadth of intellectual as well as personal sympathies. The country has lost a scholar who stood for the beautiful in art, in literature, and in human life, and spread his teachings among great numbers; Harvard has lost a teacher through whom many of her sons have come in contact with what is best in literature and the fine arts, and a friend, besides, whose memory will be cherished in even higher esteem by those who knew his worth.