fairs that could equal that happiness! [Laughter.]
Well, college life in my generation--and I certainly had a singular
reminder to-night from you, Mr. President, that I belonged to a
generation that has passed out of memory, for you have excited the
enthusiasm of this company only in the applause that you have drawn
from those who were graduated under Presidents Woolsey and Porter. What
are you to say for us who graduated under President Day? College life, I
was about to say, is a charming life. The best men, we may presume, are
collected from the community, placed under the happiest relations one to
another and under the happiest influences from above and around them.

The President of the college has spoken to you of the pleasing fact that
there is an endowment of seventy thousand dollars for fellowships. Well,
when I was in college, a very moderate endowment of five dollars
contributed by those who were associated as companions was a very good
endowment for good fellowship. [Laughter.] And now in looking at life as
it is, as we remember it in college and have seen it since, who is there
that would compare mere fellowship with good-fellowship? What is there
that is heartier, what sincerer, what more generous and what more just
than the relations of young men of a liberal spirit toward one another
in college? How many of us as we have gone on in life, prosperous, as we
may have been, with nothing to complain of as to our success or our
situation--how many of us have been disposed to repeat that lament of
AEneas where he was continually baffled in holding closer conversation
with his goddess-mother who was always carried off in a nimbus or her
accents lost in the whisper of the wind:--

"cur dextrae jungere dextram
Non datur, ac veras audire et reddere voces?"

Maybe in the good-fellowship of after-life, you, Mr. President, will not
hesitate to walk down Broadway with your arm over General Jackson's
shoulder and his about your waist, and then all the people shall cry
with applause: "See how Yale men love one another!"

You will observe, from this little classic allusion that I am on the
side of those who favor in the curriculum the maintenance of the learned
languages. For myself, whether an education in the classic languages and
in the classic literature should or should not be discarded from the
education of the noble youth of the country is the question whether it
is worth while in the advancing