Mark De Wolfe Howe

His death is the beginning of a long sadness. For it is not just that with him is blanked out an immense treasury of sympathy and scholarship whose doors were always open. Editors of this paper were among the many who drew frequently and gratefully on his knowledge and judgement. Yet more even than wise counselor and true friend was he the living presence of fighting integrity.

Friends who watched the spare figure, leave Widener in the evening worried that the work he had undertaken was too much. Before the last war he had bound his life to Justice Holmes, seeming to efface himself behind his great subject. Each sentence in his work was a glass, into which his patience had to pour the exact measure of learning and subtle reflection before he might take up the next. Sacrificed to such loving discrimination, the goal of finishing the work receded ever further. One wondered if, like Holmes, he was wearing his heart out after the unattainable.

Yet how could it have been otherwise in a man so courageous in the quest of his ideals? One of the many stories told of him yesterday in this city may catch the quality of his influence. A student whose fervor for a certain cause of civil liberty had been dampened by the shrillness of its adherents went to hear Howe defend it. To the student it seemed that every word was a fiery dart of reasoned anger that pierced beyond all doubts. Possibly Mark Howe never guessed how many there were whose hearts he touched with fire because they sensed in him the best they might hope to bring out in themselves.