James Herbert Morse

The active life of James Herbert Morse was devoted to teaching, but his personal interests were absorbed in scholarship and in literature. A graduate of Harvard and a fine classical scholar, he was one of the best Greek scholars within reach of New York. Morse carried on for many years a training school in New York. He had keen personal sympathy with his pupils, and they came to regard him during their school days, and later, as a personal friend. He was keenly interested in citizens’ movements, although a certain sensitiveness of temperament prevented him from taking up any committee work.

Outside of school hours and entirely apart from that life, he had two absorbing interests; literary work and his friends. He published various articles, poems, essays, reviews, in the Anti-Slavery Standard, Independent, Christian Union, Critic, Commercial Advertiser, Harper’s Monthly, Scribner’s Monthly, and Century Magazine; including some hundreds of contributions, signed and unsigned, to the critical departments. In 1886, G. P. Putnam’s Sons published a volume of his earlier verse, entitled, “Summer Haven Songs.” His favorite literary workshop was at Cotuit, Mass.,—for upwards of forty years his Cape Cod summer home,—where he wrote in a hammock or a tent among the pines, facing the sea. A constant visitor at the Century Club, he rarely missed a meeting even in his later years.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1924 Century Association Yearbook