[3][4][5] It was described by Henry James as having three main divisions: one of them a theater, for academic ceremonies; another a vast refectory, covered with a timbered roof, hung about with portraits and lighted by stained windows, like the halls of the colleges of Oxford; and the third, the most interesting, a chamber high, dim and severe, consecrated to the sons of the university who fell in the long Civil War.

This happy commemorative creation of the Union ... the great bristling brick Valhalla of the early "seventies," that house of honor and of hos­pi­tal­ity which [dispenses] laurels to the dead and dinners to the living.

[17][18] What was originally known as Alumni Hall[citation needed]—nine thousand square feet shaped by massive wooden trusses, walnut paneling, and a blue, stenciled ceiling—was dedicated in 1874.

[23] But "as the center of University life moved south toward the Charles, [the dining commons] became less popular and closed in 1925" [24] (see Harvard College § House system), after which Alumni Hall saw mostly light use, typically as a venue for dances, banquets, examinations, and the like.

[25] During World War II, the Crimson reported[24] that "the Great Hall" was being used "in winter-time for the 6 o'clock in the morning calisthenics of the [military] Chaplain's School" (though without explaining why Harvard Divinity students had been singled out for this treatment) and intimated that Stevens Laboratory, in the basement, "is doing secret work in acoustics".

Sanders features John La Farge's stained-glass window Athena Tying a Mourning Fillet; statues of James Otis (by Thomas Crawford) and Josiah Quincy III (by William Wetmore Story) flank the stage.

The exterior gables display busts of great orators: Demosthenes, Cicero, John Chrysostom, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham, Edmund Burke, and Daniel Webster.

Twenty-two stained-glass windows, installed between 1879 and 1902, include several by John La Farge, Louis Comfort Tiffany Studios, Donald MacDonald, Sarah Wyman Whitman,[28] and Charles Mills.

In 1897,[30] added was what a 1905 guidebook described as "an enormous [four-faced clock which] detonates the hours in a manner which is by no means conducive to the sleep of the just and the rest of the weary",[31] and which Kenneth John Conant termed "railroad Gothic".

[citation needed] Not with the anguish of hearts that are breaking / Come we as mourners to weep for our dead; Grief in our breasts has grown weary with aching, / Green is the turf where our tears we have shed.