[Speech of Rev. Dr. Heman L. Wayland at the fourth annual dinner of
the New England Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, December 22,
1884. Dr. Wayland, as President of the Society, occupied the chair,
and delivered the following address in welcoming the guests.]
FELLOW NEW ENGLANDERS--Or, in view of our habitual modesty and
self-depreciation, I ought, perhaps, rather to say, Fellow Pharisees
[laughter]--I congratulate you that we are able to show our guests a
little real New England weather--weather that recalls the sleigh-rides,
and crossing the bridges, and the singing-school. You are reminded of
the observation of the British tar, who, after a long cruise in the
Mediterranean, as he came into the eternal fog which surrounds the
"tight little island," exclaimed, "This is weather as is weather; none
of your blasted blue sky for me!" [Laughter.]
Let me also apologize to our guests for the extreme plainness and
frugality of the entertainment. They will kindly make allowance, when
they remember that this is washing-day. [Laughter.]
I am aware that the occasion is so large as to dwarf all merely personal
considerations; but I cannot omit to return you my thanks for the
unmerited kindness which has placed me in the position I occupy. I must
add that the position is at once the more honorable and the more
onerous, because I am called to follow a gentleman whose administration
of the office has been so superlatively successful.
In making this allusion to my honored predecessor, I am reminded of an
event in which we all feel a common pride. On the 25th of last June,
amid the hills which overshadow Dartmouth College, our then president
laid the corner-stone of "Rollins Chapel" for Christian worship, while
on the same day, at the same place, on the grounds traversed in earlier
years by Webster and Choate, another son of New England laid the
corner-stone of the "Wilson Library Building." Thus does intelligent
industry, large-hearted benevolence, and filial piety, plant upon the
granite hills of New England the olive-groves of Academus and the palms
of Judea. [Applause.]
But perhaps there may be here some intelligent stranger who asks me to
define an expression which is now and then heard on these occasions:
"What is this New England of which you speak so seldom and so
reluctantly? Is it a place?" Yes, it is a place; not indeed only a
place, but it is a place; and he cannot know New England who has not
traversed it from Watch Hill to Mount Washington, from Champlain to
Passamaquoddy. In no other wise can one realize how the sterile soil and
the bleak winds and the short summer have been the rugged parents of
that thrift, that industry, that economy, that regard for the small
savings, which have made New England the banker of America. As the
population grew beyond the capacity of the soil, her sons from her
myriad harbors swarmed out upon the sea, an army of occupation, and
annexed the Grand Banks, making them national banks before the days of
Secretary Chase. [Laughter.] When the limits of agriculture were
reached, they enslaved the streams, and clothed the continent. They
gathered hides from Iowa and Texas, and sold them, in the shape of
boots, in Dubuque and Galveston. Sterile New England underlaid the
imperial Northwest with mortgages, and overlaid it with insurance. I
chanced to be in Chicago two or three days after the great fire of 1871.
As I walked among the smoking ruins, if I saw a man with a cheerful air,
I knew that he was a resident of Chicago; if I saw a man with a long
face, I knew that he represented a Hartford insurance company.
[Laughter.] Really, the cheerful resignation with which the Chicago
people endured the losses of New England did honor to human nature.
[Laughter.]
Perhaps it is well that New England is not yet more sterile, for it
would have owned the whole of the country, and would have monopolized
all the wealth, as it has confessedly got a corner on all the virtues.
And while the narrow limit of the season, called by courtesy "summer,"
has enforced promptness and rapidity of action, the long winters have
given pause for reflection, have fostered the red school-house, have
engendered reading and discussion, have made her sons and her daughters
thoughtful beings.
The other day, in reading the life of a New England woman,[8] I met with
a letter written when she was seventeen years old: "I have begun reading
Dugald Stewart. How are my sources of enjoyment multiplied. By bringing
into view the various systems of philosophers concerning the origin of
our knowledge, he enlarges the mind, and extends the range of our ideas,
... while clearly distinguishing between proper objects of inquiry and
those that must forever remain inexplicable to man in the present state
of his faculties. Reasonings from induction are delightful." [Laughter.]
I think you will agree with me that only where there was a long winter,
and long winter evenings, would such a letter be written by a girl in
her teens.
The question has often been asked why there are so many poets in New
England. A traveller passing through Concord inquired, "How do all these
people support themselves?" The answer was, "They all live by writing
poems for 'The Atlantic Monthly.'" [Laughter.]
Now, any one who thinks of it must see that it is the weather which
makes all these poets, or rather the weathers, for there are so many. As
Mr. Choate said: "Cold to-day, hot to-morrow; mercury at eighty in the
morning, with wind at southeast; and in three hours more a sea-turn,
wind at east, a thick fog from the bottom of the ocean, and a fall of
forty degrees; now, so dry as to kill all the beans in New Hampshire;
then, a flood, carrying off the bridges on the Penobscot; snow in
Portsmouth in July, and the next day a man and a yoke of oxen killed by
lightning down in Rhode Island." [Laughter.]
The commonplace question: "How is the weather going to be?" gives a
boundless play to the imagination, and makes a man a poet before he
knows it. And then a poet must have grand subjects in nature. And what
does a poet want that he does not find in New England? Wooded glens,
mysterious ravines, inaccessible summits, hurrying rivers; the White
Hills, keeping up, as Starr King said, "a perpetual peak against the
sky"; the Old Man of the Mountains looking down the valley of the
Pemigewasset, and hearing from afar the Ammonoosuc as it breaks into a
hundred cataracts; Katahdin, Kearsarge, setting its back up higher than
ever since that little affair off Cherbourg; the everlasting ocean
inviting to adventure, inspiring to its own wild freedom, and making a
harbor in every front yard, so that the hardy mariner can have his smack
at his own doorstep. [Laughter.] (Need I say I mean his fishing-smack?)
What more can a poet desire?
And then life in New England, especially New England of the olden time,
has been an epic poem. It was a struggle against obstacles and enemies,
and a triumph over nature in behalf of human welfare.
What would a poet sing about, I wonder, who lived on the Kankakee Flats?
Of course, the epic poet must have a hero, and an enemy, and a war. The
great enemy in those parts is shakes; so, as Virgil began, "I sing of
arms and the man," the Kankakee poet would open:
"I sing the glories of cinchona and the man
Who first invented calomel."
Yes, if the Pilgrims had landed upon the far Western prairies or the
Southern savannas, they would never have made America; they would never
have won a glory beyond that of Columbus, who only discovered America,
whereas these men created it. [Applause.]
But not a place alone. New England is also a race; the race that plants
colonies and makes nations; the race that carries everywhere a free
press, a free pulpit, an open Bible, and that has almost learned to
spell and parse its own language; the race which began the battle for
civil and religious liberty in the time of Elizabeth, which fought the
good fight at Edgehill, which, beside Concord Bridge, "fired the shot
heard round the world," which made a continent secure for liberty at
Appomattox. [Applause.]
And New England is not alone a place and a race; it is as well an idea,
or a congeries of ideas, so closely joined as properly to be called but
one; and this idea is not the idea of force, but the force of ideas.
But, gentlemen, I am in danger of forgetting that a marked
characteristic of New Englanders is an unwillingness to talk, and
especially to talk about themselves. And I know that you are eager to
listen to the illustrious men whom we have the honor to gather about our
humble board this evening.
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