The friendship between Charles Eliot Norton (1827-1908), the American scholar and professor of art history at Harvard, and George Perkins Marsh began in the winter of 1860-61, while Marsh was lecturing at the Lowell Institute in Boston. When Marsh...

The friendship between Charles Eliot Norton (1827-1908), the American scholar and professor of art history at Harvard, and George Perkins Marsh began in the winter of 1860-61, while Marsh was lecturing at the Lowell Institute in Boston. When Marsh was appointed Minister to Italy, he wanted Norton, who had spent some time in Italy, appointed secretary of Legation, but the choice was not Marsh's to make.

During the early period of the correspondence, Norton co-edited the North American Review(1864-1868) and helped E.L. Godkin to found the Nation (1865). Norton was also a committed abolitionist and the conduct of the Civil War figures prominently in many of the letters. In the summer of 1868 Norton returned to Europe with his family and visited the Marshes. Marsh helped Norton obtain material for Norton's prose translation of Dante's Divine Comedy (1891-92).

The correspondence continued intermittently until Marsh's death in 1882. At that time Caroline Crane Marsh asked Norton to return her husband's letters for a projected biography. In consequence, most of the correspondence is now in the Marsh Collection at the University of Vermont; the remainder is part of the Norton Papers at the Houghton Library at Harvard University.