_Father, Bishop, Alumni of Holy Cross, and you, My Fellow-Citizens, men
and women of Worcester, of Massachusetts_:
It is a pleasure to me to be the guest of Holy Cross. It is eminently
characteristic of your State, and of all our Nation, that we should
have institutions of learning like this, in which the effort is
constant to train not merely the body and the mind, but the soul of the
man, so that he may be a good American, a good citizen of our great
country.
In this country of ours we are developing a new type of nationality,
a type kin to each of the various Old World races from which it in
part springs, and yet separate from all. Each stock that comes here
can furnish something of permanent value to the country as a whole;
and from each stock we have the right to expect the furnishing of that
element. Here in Holy Cross College I want to say one word spoken I
trust to ears willing to hear it. During the last three years I have
happened, by chance, to grow peculiarly interested in the great subject
of Celtic literature, and I feel that it is not a creditable thing to
the American Republic, which has in its citizenship so large a Celtic
element, that we should leave it to the German scholars and students
to be our instructors in Celtic literature. I want to see in Holy
Cross, in Harvard, in all the other universities where we can get the
chairs endowed, chairs for the study of Celtic literature. A century
and over ago the civilized world, which had been looking down upon old
Norse poetry as the production of a barbarous race, suddenly awoke
to the wealth of beauty contained in the Scandinavian sagas. If I am
not greatly in error we are now about to see a similar awakening to
the wealth of beauty contained in the Celtic sagas; and I wish to see
American institutions of learning take the lead in that awakening.