Repository: UIHistories Project: Booklet - Katharine Sharp Appreciation (1914) [PAGE 3]

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"There's rosemary, that's for remembrance; And there is pansies, that's for thoughts."

When your president came to me one day in the early summer and asked me to tell the librarians of Illinois something of what I know of the work of Miss Sharp, I hesitated to undertake the commission; I knew it would be a hard thing to do at all, an impossible thing to do well, for Katharine Sharp was my friend, and it is not an easy thing to speak fluently and readily of one's friends. God gives to each of us only a few and their remembrance is a very sacred thing. On the first day of last June, returning to the University from the Conference of the American Library Association at Washington, we were stunned to receive a message telling of the fatal injury to the woman who had been our former chief, followed a few hours later by one which told us that she had gone forth into the great Mystery. "If the life that has gone out has been like music, full of concords, full of sweetness, richness, delicacy, truth—then there are two ways to look at it: one is to say, *I have not lost it', another to say, 'Blessed be God that I have had it so long." It is fitting that we should on this occasion of the annual meeting of the Illinois Library Association suspend for a little time our more formal and regular business to do honor to the memory of Katharine Sharp because she was in every sense an Illinois librarian. Here was done practically all of her professional work; here she founded the School which will be perhaps her most enduring monument; it was the history of your libraries for which "she lived laborious days and nights." Born in lilgin, May 21, 1865, of an ancestry of Illinois pioneers the Sharps coming from Central New York, and the Thompsons (her maternal ancestors) from Connecticut, Miss