Charles William Eliot cast a long shadow for a good many of his descendants, naturally enough. As a great-grandchild of his I felt it, too. The summers of my earliest boyhood, at Northeast Harbor, Maine, were spent partly in his austere presence. When he died in 1926, at ninety-two, I was only seven; and yet an incident that occurred only a day or two before his death is still extremely vivid in my memory. My elder sister and I, together with a couple of cousins, had been called into the old gentleman’s sickroom to entertain him with a song. Quaveringly, for I at least was trembling with awe, we offered “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Eliot was meanwhile engaged in a furious battle to breathe. He knew very well that his last hours were at hand. There was no possible way for him to mask his suffering from us. I don’t believe he would have deemed concealment necessary in any case. But what he did want very much to demonstrate was that the part of him that was not in tragic straits enjoyed the song. He showed this with his eyes. They brimmed, not with tears, but with affection and a distant, tender delight. When our song was done, he made a supreme effort and gasped in sufficient breath to say “Thank you.” I bowed, the girls curtsied, and we trailed out again.

Not long after that my grandmother took me aside somewhere and told me personally, quite alone, that Greatgrandfather had “passed on.” At once “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” sang back into my mind, and I had a feeling of bearing witness in some sense to his departure from this earth. It was not until years later, of course, that I understood the song had been selected with just such an end in view for us children. I cannot prove this, but I would guess that it was Eliot himself who had requested that particular song. It would have been quite in character for him to put his mind to our childish experience at such a time and to try to make it right for us.

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