Morison graduated from the College and except for a brief period in the early 1910s when he pursued private study, he spent his entire life either as a student or as a professor of history at Harvard. For almost 60 years Morison wrote novels and journal pieces. Arguably, his most famous work is his 1935 History of the Founding of the College, where he traces the scholarly antecedents of Harvard in both the British and French models.

Another one of Morison's great works is a book he authored in 1965 entitled Spring Tides.

"I think one of the two volumes to his left has to be Spring Tides. Why else would you place a venerable, old professor's memorial statue in the middle of the Commonwealth Avenue Pedestrian Mall, in a neighborhood in which he never lived, looking like he just spent a day at sea, and not depict one of his best works?" says Mary Ann Rothstein of Newton.

According to Anthony Tonelli '51 of Boston's Beacon Street, the Boylston Street monument helps immortalize Morison, who died in 1976.

"He was a great human being, and the best part about his classes was the way he would begin each one by asking us to describe our familiarity with such-and-such a geographical region or such-and-such element of culture and style," Tonelli says.

"This way, every person who wants to stop and appreciate his quotation will know a little bit about Professor Morison as a human being," he adds.

Unlike some monuments that may come-and-go, the Samuel Eliot Morison sculpture features something different. Somehow, the image of Morison up on a rocky bluff implies what Orchard Professor of Landscape and Landscape Architecture John R. Stilgoe would call an "alongshore" image.

Both Morison and the passerby stay dry, but the image gained reminds one of the sea and of the spring tides and of the touch of local history.