Across campus, Harvard’s toiling employees might dream of taking an afternoon power nap. At the 1833 Beck-Warren House, home to the Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures, all they’d need to do is duck into a roomy bed chamber and doze off. Not that department administrator Mary Violette, whose desk is a few feet away, ever has. Yet, she appreciates the bed’s provenance.
Her office was once the domain of Henry Clarke Warren, A.B. 1879, a pioneering Sanskrit and Pāli scholar and polyglot. Disabled by a spinal injury as a child, Warren was virtually immobile and often in pain, but nevertheless traveled, studied at Johns Hopkins University, and led a rich life as an independent academic. As an adult he lived in Cambridge from 1891 to 1899, buying what had been the home of Harvard Latin professor Charles Beck (who hailed from Germany). Warren remodeled the second floor, installing aquariums, skylights, and a sun porch, along with a zinc tub and seat in the Victorian-styled bathroom (still used today). It was here, too, that Warren completed Buddhism in Translations, an octavo in 540 pages with some 130 Pāli scriptures converted to English prose and verse—part of the monographic serial the Harvard Oriental Series, founded by his former teacher and longtime friend, the influential Harvard Sanskrit scholar and professor Charles Rockwell Lanman.
With scant time and strength, Warren was devoted “not to the learned quisquiliae on which many scholars fritter their days away, but rather to one or two works of individuality and independent significance,” noted Lanman in his 1899 obituary for Warren, who bequeathed his home and land to Harvard. Students still study languages in the house—among them Old Irish, Middle Welsh, Scottish-Gaelic, French, and German. “So I think about what these walls have heard,” Violette says, and “wonder what languages the ghosts are speaking.”
