Mr. Thoreau was discussed, and his approaching
departure; in respect to which we agreed pretty well.... We talked of
Brook Farm, and the singular moral aspects which it presents, and the
great desirability that its progress and developments should be observed
and its history written; also of C. N----, who, it appears, is passing
through a new moral phasis. He is silent, inexpressive, talks little or
none, and listens without response, except a sardonic laugh; and some of
his friends think that he is passing into permanent eclipse. Various
other matters were considered or glanced at, and finally, between five
and six o'clock, Mr. Emerson took his leave. I then went out to chop
wood, my allotted space for which had been very much abridged by his
visit; but I was not sorry. I went on with the journal for a few minutes
before tea, and have finished the present record in the setting sunshine
and gathering dusk....

UNIVERSITY REFORM.

AN ADDRESS TO THE ALUMNI OF HARVARD, AT THEIR TRIENNIAL FESTIVAL, JULY
19, 1866.

We meet to-day under auspices how different from those which attended
our last triennial assembling! We were then in the midst of a civil war,
without sight of the end, though not without hope of final success to
the cause of national integrity. The three days' agony at Gettysburg had
issued in the triumph of the loyal arms, repelling the threatened
invasion of the North. The surrender of Vicksburg had just reopened the
trade of the Mississippi. The capture of Port Hudson was yet fresh in
our ears, when suddenly tidings of armed resistance to conscription in
the city of New York gave ominous note of danger lurking at the very
heart of the Union. In the shadow of that omen, we celebrated our
academic festival of 1863.

The shadow passed. With varying fortunes, but unvarying purpose, the
loyal States pursued the contest. And when, in the autumn of 1864, by a
solemn act of self-interrogation, they had certified their will and
their power to maintain that contest to the end of disunion, and when a
popular election expressing that intent had overcome the land like a
summer-cloud without a bolt in its bosom, the victory was sown with the
ballot which Grant and Sherman reaped with the sword.

Secession collapsed. Its last and most illustrious victim, borne to his
rest through territories draped in mourning, through sobbing
commonwealths, through populations of uncovered heads, revealed to all
time the spiri