[Speech of James Russell Lowell at the Harvard Alumni dinner at
Cambridge, Mass., June 30, 1875. Mr. Lowell was the presiding
officer.]
BRETHREN OF THE ALUMNI:--It is, I think, one of the greatest
privileges conferred upon us by our degree that we can meet together
once a year in this really majestic hall [Memorial Hall], commemorative
of our proudest sorrows, suggestive only of our least sordid ambitions;
that we can meet here to renew our pledge of fealty to the ancient
mother who did so much for the generations that have gone before us, and
who will be as benign to those who, by-and-by, shall look back and call
us fathers. The tie that binds us to our college is one of the purest,
since it is that which unites us also with our youth; it is one of the
happiest, for it binds us to the days when we looked forward and not
backward, for in hope there is nothing to regret, while in retrospect
there is a touch of autumn and a premonition of winter.
In this year of centennials, when none of us would be surprised if a
century plant should blossom in our back yard [laughter], when I myself
am matured, as I look to complete my second centennial on Saturday
afternoon [laughter and applause], there is a kind of repose, as it
seems to me, in coming back here to sit in the lap of this dear old
nurse who is well on toward her three hundred, and who will certainly
never ask any of us to celebrate her centennial either in prose or
verse. To this college our Revolution which we are celebrating this year
is modern. And I think also one of the great privileges which she
confers upon us is that she gives us a claim of kindred still with the
mother country--a claim purely intellectual and safe from the
embitterment of war or the jealousies of trade. It was an offshoot of
Cambridge and Oxford that was planted on the banks of the Charles, and
by men from Cambridge and Oxford; and when I visited those renowned
nurseries of piety, scholarship, and manliness of thought, my keenest
pleasure in the kindness I received was the feeling that I owed the
greater part of it to my connection with Harvard, whom they were pleased
to acknowledge as a plant not unworthy of the parent stock. [Applause.]
In their halls I could not feel myself a stranger, and I resented the
imputation of being a foreigner when I looked round upon the old
portraits, all of whom were my countrymen as well as theirs, and some of
whom had been among our founders and benefactors. In this year of
reconciliations and atonements, too, the influence of college
associations is of no secondary importance as a bond of union. On this
day, in every State of our more than ever to be united country, there
are men whose memories turn back tenderly and regretfully to those
haunts of their early manhood. Our college also, stretching back as it
does toward the past, and forward to an ever-expanding future, gives a
sense of continuity which is some atonement for the brevity of life.
These portraits that hang about us seem to make us contemporaries with
generations that are gone, and the services we render her will make us
in turn familiar to those who shall succeed us here. There is no way so
cheap of buying what I may call a kind of mitigated immortality,--mean
by that an immortality without the pains and penalty attached commonly
to it, of being dug up once in fifty years to have your claims
reconsidered [laughter]--as in giving something to the college.
[Applause.] Nay, I will say in parenthesis, that even an intention to
give it secures that place of which I have spoken. [Laughter.] I find in
the records of the college an ancestor of my own recorded as having
intended to give a piece of land. He remains there forever with his
beneficent intention. It is not certain that he didn't carry it out. The
land certainly never came to me, or I should make restitution. [Laughter
and applause.]
Consider, for example, William Pennoyer; how long ago would he have sunk
in the tenacious ooze of oblivion, not leaving rack nor even rumor of
himself behind. No portrait of him exists, and no living descendant, so
far as I know, and yet his name is familiar with all of us who are
familiar with the records of the college, and he always presents himself
to our imaginations in the gracious attitude of putting his hand into
his pocket. [Laughter.] And tell me, if you please, what widow of a
London alderman ever insured her life with so sure return or perdurable
interest as Madame Holden. Even the bodiless society, _pro propaganda
fide,_ is reincorporated forever in the perpetuity of our gratitude. It
is the genteelest of immortalities, as the auctioneer would call it, the
immortality of perfect seclusion.
The value of such an association as this as a spur to honorable exertion
is also, as it seems to me, no small part of its benefit. Leigh Hunt,
says, somewhere, that when he was writing an essay he always thought of
certain persons and said to himself, "A will like this, B will rub his
hands at that"; and it is safe to say that any graduate of this college
would prefer the suffrages of his brethren here to those of any other
public. And when any of the sons of Harvard who has done her honor and
his country upright service, meets us here on this day, it is not only a
fitting recognition, but a powerful incentive, that he receives in the
"Well done" of our plaudits. I had hoped that we should have heard
to-day the voice of one graduate of Harvard who sits almost immediately
upon my right. [Charles Francis Adams.] I will not press upon his
modesty, but I will ask you to bear witness once more that Peace hath
her victories, and more renowned than war [long continued applause]; and
honor with me those truly durable years of service and that of victory,
which if it hath not so loud an echo as that of the battle-field, will
be seen to have a longer one. [Renewed and loud applause.] It appears to
me that there is nothing more grateful to the human heart than this
appreciation of cultivated men. If it be not the echo of posterity, it
was something more solid and well-pleasing. But better and more
wholesome than even this must it be, I should think, for men spending
their lives in the dusty glare of public life, to come back once a year
to our quiet shades and be, as Dr. Holmes has so delightfully sung,
plain Bill and Joe again. It must renew and revive in them the early
sweetness of their nature, the frank delight in simple things which
makes so large a part of the better happiness of life.
But, gentlemen, I will not longer detain you with the inevitable
suggestions of the occasion. These sentimentalities are apt to slip from
under him who would embark on them, like a birch canoe under the clumsy
foot of a cockney, and leave him floundering in retributive commonplace.
I had a kind of hope, indeed, from what I had heard, that I should be
unable to fill this voice-devouring hall. I had hoped to sit serenely
here with a tablet in the wall before me inscribed: _Guilielmo Roberto
Ware, Henrico Van Brunt, optime de Academia meritis, eo quod facundiam
postprandialem irritam fecerunt._ I hope you understood my Latin
[laughter], and I hope you will forgive me the antiquity of my
pronunciation [laughter]; but it is simply because I cannot help it.
Then on a blackboard behind me I could have written in large letters the
names of our guests who should make some brief dumb show of
acknowledgment. You, at least, with your united applause, could make
yourselves heard. If brevity ever needed an excuse, I might claim one in
the fact that I have consented at short notice to be one of the
performers in our domestic centennial next Saturday, and poetry is not a
thing to be delivered on demand without an exhausting wear upon the
nerves. When I wrote to Dr. Holmes and begged for a little poem, I got
the following answer, which I shall take the liberty of reading. I don't
see the Doctor himself in the hall, which encourages me to go on:--
"MY DEAR JAMES:--Somebody has written a note in your name
requesting me to furnish a few verses for some occasion which he
professed to be interested in. I am satisfied, of course, that it
is a forgery. I know you would not do such a thing as to ask a
brother rhymer, utterly exhausted by his centennial efforts, to
endanger his health and compromise his reputation by any damnable
iteration of spasmodic squeezing. [Laughter.] So I give you warning
that some dangerous person is using your name, and taking advantage
of the great love I bear you, to play upon my feelings. Don't think
for a moment that I hold you in any way responsible for this note,
looking so nearly like your own handwriting as for a single instant
to deceive me, and suggest the idea that I would take a passage for
Europe in season to avoid all the college anniversaries."
I readily excused him, and I am sure you will be kind enough to be
charitable to me, gentlemen.
I know that one of the things which the graduates of the college look
forward to with the most confident expectation and pleasure is the
report of the President of the University. [Applause.] I remember that
when I was in the habit of attending the meetings of the faculty, some
fourteen or fifteen years ago, I was very much struck by the fact that
almost every matter of business that required particular ability was
sure to gravitate into the hands of a young professor of chemistry. The
fact made so deep an impression upon me that I remember that I used to
feel, when our war broke out, that this young professor might have to
take the care of one of our regiments, and I know that he would have led
it to victory. And when I heard that the same professor was nominated
for President, I had no doubt of the result which all of us have seen to
follow. I give you, gentlemen, the health of President Eliot of Harvard
College. [Applause.]
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