lowing up orators, and company after
company of educated young men, has been remarked. But it is almost
incredible to me now that the class of 1851, with its classic sympathies
and its many revolutionary ideas, disappeared in the flood of the world
so soon and so silently, causing scarcely a ripple in the smoothly
flowing stream. I suppose the phenomenon has been repeated for twenty
years. Do the young gentlemen at Hamilton, I wonder, still carry on their
ordinary conversation in the Latin tongue, and their familiar vacation
correspondence in the language of Aristophanes? I hope so. I hope they
are more proficient in such exercises than the young gentlemen of twenty
years ago were, for I have still great faith in a culture that is so far
from any sordid aspirations as to approach the ideal; although the young
graduate is not long in learning that there is an indifference in the
public mind with regard to the first aorist that amounts nearly to
apathy, and that millions of his fellow-creatures will probably live and
die without the consolations of the second aorist. It is a melancholy
fact that, after a thousand years of missionary effort, the vast majority
of civilized men do not know that gerunds are found only in the singular
number.

I confess that this failure of the annual graduating class to make its
expected impression on the world has its pathetic side. Youth is
credulous--as it always ought to be--and full of hope--else the world
were dead already--and the graduate steps out into life with an ingenuous
self-confidence in his resources. It is to him an event, this
turning-point in the career of what he feels to be an important and
immortal being. His entrance is public and with some dignity of display.
For a day the world stops to see it; the newspapers spread abroad a
report of it, and the modest scholar feels that the eyes of mankind are
fixed on him in expectation and desire. Though modest, he is not
insensible to the responsibility of his position. He has only packed away
in his mind the wisdom of the ages, and he does not intend to be stingy
about communicating it to the world which is awaiting his graduation.
Fresh from the communion with great thoughts in great literatures, he is
in haste to give mankind the benefit of them, and lead it on into new
enthusiasm and new conquests.

The world, however, is not very much excited. The birth of a child is in
itself marvelous, but it is so common. Over and over a