f
dollars to the college.

"During one of his winter vacations, President Tyler started with his
own horse and sleigh on his mission, going through the State of
Vermont into New York. He returned after six weeks' earnest and
arduous labor, having been very successful in his mission.

"Dr. Tyler's invaluable services to the church were continued, in
various spheres, till his death May 14, 1858, his wife, Mrs. Esther
(Stone) Tyler, surviving him only one week."

CHAPTER XV.

INAUGURATION OF PRESIDENT LORD.

Rev. Nathan Lord, D.D., of Amherst, New Hampshire, was elected the
sixth president of the college. We insert entire his inaugural
address, delivered October 29, 1828.

"The revival of learning, like that of religion, originally effected
through the instrumentality of the press, though long hindered by the
successive political convulsions and changes of the world, is now
evidently in the course of rapid advancement, and is producing a deep
and wide impression upon the mass of civilized society. It is
pervading all classes, and affecting all interests. Its influence
penetrates every public and private institution, and is exciting the
best energies of the human mind, both to the invention of new methods
of intellectual cultivation and the application of knowledge to the
practical purposes of life. Fostered by the spirit of freedom, which
goes before to disenthral the mind from that state of servitude in
which its powers had been made to minister to ignorant and wayward
ambition, or still more cramping and perverting superstition, it
promises to gain an universal ascendancy, and to render all that
influence which had been arrayed against it, henceforth subservient
only to its triumphs.

"But it is characteristic of the human mind, when set at liberty from
ancient prejudices, and permitted to range in search of expected good,
to become extreme in its calculations and projects of improvement, and
to distract itself amidst the variety of its experiments. And more
especially when its enterprises are favored by the encouragement of
wealth, and sustained by the indiscriminate approval of the multitude.
It is then, that overlooking the maxims of sound philosophy, and
disregarding the safe lessons of experience, it is beguiled into the
adoption of untried theories, and wastes its strength in the
prosecution of plans, which are found at length to accord neither with
the constitution of our nature nor with the appr