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rounds America's oldest Alma Mater. Still, figurative though it was, for George William Curtis to refer to Harvard's honorary degree as an ennoblement was a graceful form of speech; but I, to the manner born, stand here under similar circumstances in a different spirit. Memory insensibly reverts to other days-other scenes.

66

'Forty-two years ago President Eliot and I passed each other on the steps of University Hall, — he coming down them with his freshly-signed bachelor's degree in his hand, while I ascended them an anxious candidate for admission to the College. His apprenticeship was over; mine was about to begin. For twenty-six eventful years now he has presided over the destinies of the University, and at last we meet here again; I to receive from his hands the diploma which signifies that the days of my travels,—my Wanderjahre, — as well as my apprenticeship, are over, and that the journeyman is at length admitted to the circle of Master-workmen.

"So, while Mr. Curtis declared that he went away from here with a sense of ennoblement, my inclination is to sit down, not metaphorically but in fact, on yonder steps of University Hall, and think for a little — somewhat wearily, perhaps over the things I have seen and the lessons I have learned since I first ascended those steps when the last half of the century now ending had only just begun, an interval longer than that during which the children of Israel were condemned to tarry in the wilderness!

"And, were I so to do, I am fain to confess two feelings would predominate : wonder and admiration, - wonder over the age in which I have lived, mingled with admiration for the results which in it have been accomplished and the heroism displayed. And yet this was not altogether what the prophet voices of my apprenticeship had, I remember, led me to expect; for in those days, and to a greater degree than seems to be the case at present, we had here at Cambridge prophet voices, which in living words continually exhorted us. Such were Tennyson, Thackeray, Emerson, and, perhaps, most of all, Carlyle - Thomas Carlyle, with his Heroes and Hero Worship, his Latter Day Pamphlets, his worship of the Past and his scorn for the Present, his contempt for what he taught us to term this 'rag-gathering age.' We sat at the feet of the great literary artist, our 'prentice ears drank in his utterances; to us he was inspired.

"The literary artist remains. As such we bow down before him now even more than we bowed down before him then; but how different have we found the age in which our lot was cast from that he had taught us to expect! I have been but a journeyman. Only to a small, a very small extent, I know, can I, like the Ulysses of that other of our prophet voices, declare

None the less

'I am a part of all that I have met.'

'Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.'

"We were told in those, our 'prentice days, of the heroism of the past and

the materialism of our present, when 'who but a fool would have faith in a tradesman's wares or his word,' and 'only not all men lied;' and yet, when, in 1853, you, Mr. President, the young journeyman, descended, as I, the coming apprentice, ascended those steps, 'the cobweb woven across the cannon's mouth' still shook 'its threaded tears in the wind.' Eight years later the cobweb was swept away; and though, as the names graven on the tablets at the entrance of this hall bear witness, many were crushed in the clash of jarring claims,' yet we, too, felt the heart of a people beat with one desire, and witnessed the sudden making of splendid names. I detract nothing from the halo of knighthood which surrounds the heads of Sidney and of Bayard; but I was the contemporary and friend of Savage, of Lowell, and of Shaw. I had read of battles and the imminent deadly breach;' but it was given me to stand on the field of Gettysburg when the solid earth trembled under the assault of that Confederate Virginian column, then performing a feat of arms than which, I verily believe, none in all recorded warfare was ever more persistent, more deadly, or more heroic.

"And our prophet spoke to us of the beauty of silent work, and he held up before us the sturdy patience of the past in sharp contrast with the garrulous self-evidence of that deteriorated present, of which we were to be a part; and yet, scarcely did we stand on the threshold of our time, when a modest English naturalist and observer broke years of silence by quietly uttering the word which relegated to the domain of fable that which, since the days of Moses, had been accepted as the foundation of religious belief. In the time of our apprenticeship we still read of the mystery of Africa in the pages of Herodotus, while the sources of the Nile were as unknown to our world as to the world of the Pharaohs; then one day a patient, long-suffering, solitary explorer emerged from the wilderness, and the secret was revealed. In our own time and before our purblind eyes, scarcely realizing what they saw or knowing enough to wonder, Livingstone eclipsed Columbus, and Darwin rewrote Genesis.

"The Paladin we had been told was a thing of the past; ours was the era of the commonplace; and, lo! Garibaldi burst like a rocket above the horizon, and the legends of Colchis and the crusader were eclipsed by the newspaper record of current events.

"The eloquent voice from Cheyne Row still echoed in our ears, lamenting the degeneracy of a time given over to idle talk and the worship of Mammon - defiled by charlatans and devoid of workers; and in answer, as it were, Cavour and Lincoln and Bismarck crossed the world's stage before us, and joined the immortals.

"We saw a dreaming adventurer, in the name of a legend, possess himself of France and of imperial power. A structure of tinsel was reared, and glittered in the midst of an age of actualities. Then all at once came the nineteenth-century Nemesis, and, eclipsing the avenging deity of which we had read in our classics, drowned in blood and obliterated with iron the shams and the charlatans who, our teacher had told us, were the essence and characteristic of the age.

"And the College- the Alma mater ! she who to-day has placed me above the rank of journeyman, what changes has she witnessed during those years

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of probation? — rather what changes has she not witnessed! Of those President, professors, instructors, and officers-connected with it then, two only remain; but the young bachelor of arts who, degree in hand, came down the steps that I was then ascending, has for more than half those years presided over the destinies of the University, and, under the impulse of his strong will and receptive mind, we have seen the simple, traditional College of the first half of the century develop into the differentiated University of the latter half. In 1856, when I received from the University my first diploma, the College numbered in the aggregate of all its classes fewer students than are found in the average single class of to-day. And in the meanwhile what have her alumni done for the Alma Mater? In 1853, when my apprenticeship began, the accumulated endowment of the more than two centuries which preceded amounted to less than one million of dollars; the gifts and bequests of the forty-two years covered by my apprenticeship and travels have added to the one million over ten millions! And this, we were taught, was the 'rag-gathering age' of a 'trivial, jeering, withered, unbelieving' generation !—at least it gave ! “Thus, as I stand here to-day in the high places of the University, and try to speak of the lessons and the theories of life which my travels have taught me, as I pause for a brief space by the well-remembered college steps, which more than forty classes have since gone up and descended, and, while doing so, look back over the long vista of my probation, — my impulse is to bear witness to the greatness and splendor, not to the decadence and meanness of the age of which I have been a part. My eyes, too, have seen great men accomplishing great results, —I have lived and done journeyman work in a time than which none history records has been more steadfast and faithful in labor, more generous in gift or more fruitful in results; none so beneficent, none so philanthropic; none more heroic of purpose, none more romantic in act.

"More than thirty years ago, while those cannon of Gettysburg were booming in my ears, sounding the diapason of that desperate onslaught to which I have already referred, there came up in my memory these lines from the Samson Agonistes:

'All is best, though we oft doubt,
What th' unsearchable dispose
Of highest wisdom brings about,
And ever best found in the close.

Oft he seems to hide his face,
But unexpectedly returns,

And to his faithful champion will in place
Bear witness gloriously.'

"These lines, I say, I repeated over and over to myself, somewhat mechanically, I suppose, in the dust and heat and crash of that July day. I was young then; I am young no longer. But, now as then, those verses from Milton's triumphant choral chant bring to me, clad in seventeenth-century words and thought, the ideas of evolution, continuity, environment, and progression, and, above and beyond all, abiding faith in man and in our mother age, which are the lamps the last half of the nineteenth century has lit whereby the steps of the twentieth century shall be guided."

am.

Joseph Jefferson was the next speaker; he said:

"Mr. President and Brethren :- If I am familiar in calling you thus you have yourselves to blame for this presumption. Only a few days, I might say a few hours ago, I did not dream of such an honor. It was a surprise to me, an agreeable one, it is true, but still a surprise. I am rather hard of hearing, still I could hear the applause, and that is about the only sound I did hear. All actors cultivate a keen ear for applause, and often hear that sound when we are completely deaf to others of a less agreeable nature. When your President, in his Latin speech, called me the Roscius of the stage, I caught the word as Roxbury. When a moment later the word omnibus was uttered, the two sounds became connected in my mind, and all I could think of was a Roxbury omnibus. What the Roxbury omnibus had to do with the occasion I am still at a loss to understand. I shall continue in blissful ignorance of the meaning of the words. Until I get my diploma, I shall not quite know who I I am more grateful to you than I can express in words, but I don't want to be melancholy. The late O. W. Holmes, when in conversation with me one day, said to me that he wanted me to talk shop. I answered that talking shop delighted me, especially when I was doing the talking. While I was acting a certain character in a Western city some time ago, I received a complimentary letter from a man, who said that he was overcome by my acting, and wished to offer me his tangible thanks in some way. He confided to me that his name was Dunks, and that he was manufacturing a patent spring bed. Mr. Dunks declared himself perfectly disinterested, and offered to send me a Dunks spring bed for my family. Dunks was perfectly disinterested. All he wanted of me was that at the end of the first act, when I got out of bed, I should say that I should not be feeling so uncomfortable if I had been sleeping on one of Dunks's spring beds. In gratitude for the honor which you have shown me, I shall sleep more comfortably to-night, although I shall not in all probability occupy a Dunks spring bed."

Mr. Norton next proposed the toast, "Harvard at the Supreme Court," and called up J. H. Choate, '52, and J. C. Carter, '50, who had recently argued before that court on opposite sides of the Income Tax question. Mr. Choate said:

"President Eliot says that there is nothing good in Harvard achievement unless it results in practical good to Harvard College. A stupendous event in the course of education has recently occurred in the city where we live. A single alumnus of Columbia College has thrown into her lap $1,000,000 for a library. The deplorable condition of the Harvard College Library is known to all. It possesses an unsurpassed collection of books, but what is a library without proper housing? Now, are we united alumni unwilling or unable to do for Harvard what one alumnus has alone done for Columbia? How much did Boston save by the wisdom of the Supreme Court? Ten or fifteen millions, perhaps. I propose that the alumni, or the people of Boston and Massachusetts, to whom this decision came like the rain, falling upon the just and the unjust without any expense to them whatever, send a generous part of the

income tax they might have been obliged to pay, to Alma Mater. Were they to give but a tithe of that tax the gift would be greater than that which has come to Columbia through the beneficence of one man. This is a splendid opportunity for you to show your appreciation of Justice Gray's work and

ours!"

After Mr. Choate had finished Mr. Carter spoke briefly, referring to the Income Tax decision, the need of a library, and his own college days. The last speaker, the Rev. Dr. G. A. Gordon, '81, commended Harvard's attitude of hospitable non-sectarianism, and praised Harvard's democracy.

At 5.15 the gathering broke up.

ELECTION OF OVERSEERS.

The following candidates were voted for: R. M. Morse, '57, Edmund Wetmore, '60, Robert Bacon, '80, T. C. Clarke, '48, D. W. Cheever, '52, C. F. Adams, '56, Winslow Warren, '58, A. H. Hardy, '61, F. H. Appleton, '69, Robert Grant, 73, Sigourney Butler, 77, Theodore Roosevelt, '80. The ballot resulted as follows: Theodore Roosevelt, New York, 687; C. F. Adams, Lincoln, 512; *Edmund Wetmore, New York, 476; *Robert Bacon, New York, 442; Robert Grant, Boston, 428; *R. M. Morse, Falmouth, 392. The Board now has five Overseers from New York, and one each from Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Chicago.

man.

THE UNIVERSITY.

THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE.

Commencement Day has gone through many evolutions since it was Commence the great public holiday for Eastern Massachusetts, and every ment. year makes it more evident that the exercises in Sanders Theatre have lost attractiveness. The query has been put whether for the Commencement parts by representatives of the graduating classes ought not to be substituted an address to the body of students by some notable Then might follow, as at present, the impressive bestowal of degrees, the most stately function of the University. The truth is, Commencement has ceased to be a day and has become a week. This year Sanders Theatre was occupied four times successively by large public gatherings. Tuesday, June 25, was the first Commencement Day of Radcliffe College; in it the principle above suggested was followed, since no students had any part. Addresses by the Dean of Radcliffe and the

Reëlected.

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