,
he faltered and remained mute. Doubtless the multitude of thoughts which
rushed into his mind was such as even he could not easily arrange or
express. In truth there are few spectacles more striking or affecting
than that which a great historical place of education presents on a
solemn public day. There is something strangely interesting in the
contrast between the venerable antiquity of the body and the fresh and
ardent youth of the great majority of the members. Recollections and
hopes crowd upon us together. The past and the future are at once
brought close to us. Our thoughts wander back to the time when the
foundations of this ancient building were laid, and forward to the
time when those whom it is our office to guide and to teach will be the
guides and teachers of our posterity. On the present occasion we may,
with peculiar propriety, give such thoughts their course. For it has
chanced that my magistracy has fallen on a great secular epoch. This
is the four hundredth year of the existence of your University. At such
jubilees, jubilees of which no individual sees more than one, it is
natural, and it is good, that a society like this, a society which
survives all the transitory parts of which it is composed, a society
which has a corporate existence and a perpetual succession, should
review its annals, should retrace the stages of its growth from infancy
to maturity, and should try to find, in the experience of generations
which have passed away, lessons which may be profitable to generations
yet unborn.

The retrospect is full of interest and instruction. Perhaps it may be
doubted whether, since the Christian era, there has been any point of
time more important to the highest interests of mankind than that at
which the existence of your University commenced. It was at the moment
of a great destruction and of a great creation. Your society was
instituted just before the empire of the East perished; that strange
empire which, dragging on a languid life through the great age of
darkness, connected together the two great ages of light; that empire
which, adding nothing to our stores of knowledge, and producing not one
man great in letters, in science, or in art, yet preserved, in the midst
of barbarism, those masterpieces of Attic genius, which the highest
minds still contemplate, and long will contemplate, with admiring
despair. And at that very time, while the fanatical Moslem were
plundering the churches and pal