GRACE HARRIET MACURDY
l866 - l946
The Faculty of Vassar College records with sorrow
the death on October 23, l946, of Professor Emeri-
tus Grace Harriet Macurdy, teacher, scholar, human-
ist and humanitarian. Miss Macurdy served Vassar
well for forty-four years as a teacher of Greek.
On her retirement in 1937 President MacCracken wrote
of her: "No description in wnrds can fittingly por-
tray the service which Miss Macurdy has rendered to
the life of Vassar. Her humor, her gayety and her
eloquence have combined with her rare learning to
bring a distinction to the Classical studies that
has made graduates of Vassar desired in every grad-
uate school. The spirit of youth is still hers and
her outlook has grown with the years."
The long list of her published works bears testimony
to her distinguished scholarship, which won her re-
cognition and acclaim both at home and abroad. The
humane quality of her writings brought many tributes
and was appreciated by an American Army officer just
returned from the war in these words: "Of all the
work done by American scholars in the field of Clas-
sics I had rather been the author of The Quality of
Mercy than of any other book I know. What impressed
me most was the fact that pursuit of the gentler vir-
tues in Classical literature had breathed into your
pages their spirit."
Miss Macurdy's human interests were universal, and
she brought to all of her associations a unique charm
and dignity which raised them above the level of the
commonplace. Her life centered in Vassar College and
in her devotion to friends in Great Britain, Italy
and Greece. Her warm sympathy and generous aid to
the stricken in those countries brought her in July
l9h6 the high honor of a British decoration, the
King's Medal "for service in the cause of freedo".
Both her spirit and her work bore the quality of
eternity, and, strangely, the very essence of them
both was voiced in a poem of her own found in her
desk after her death. Her stanza on the painter of
GRACE HARRIET MACURDY (Continued)
a black-figured Attic vase might well serve as her
own epitaph:
His work shall perish, but the artist's soul,
Imaging beauty changing endlessly,
Shapes still new visions of the Eternal Whole,
And finds for beauty imortality.
Evalyn A. Clark
Polyxenie Kambouropoulou
Mary Landon Sague
Theodore H. Erck
XII - 80