gest legions prevailed. So it has been since wars
began. After history has done its best to fix men's thoughts upon
strategy and finance, their eyes have turned and rested on some single
romantic figure--some Sidney, some Falkland, some Wolfe, some Montcalm,
some Shaw. This is that little touch of the superfluous which is
necessary. Necessary as art is necessary, and knowledge which serves no
mechanical end. Superfluous only as glory is superfluous, or a bit of
red ribbon that a man would die to win.

It has been one merit of Harvard College that it has never quite sunk to
believing that its only function was to carry a body of specialists
through the first stage of their preparation. About these halls there
has always been an aroma of high feeling not to be found or lost in
science or Greek--not to be fixed, yet all-pervading. And the warrant of
Harvard College for writing the names of its dead graduates upon its
tablets is not in the mathematics, the chemistry, the political economy
which it taught them, but that, in ways not to be discovered, by
traditions not to be written down, it helped men of lofty natures to
make good their faculties. I hope and I believe that it will long give
such help to its children. I hope and I believe that long after our
tears for the dead have been forgotten, this monument to their memory
will still give such help to generations to whom it is only a symbol--a
symbol of man's destiny and power for duty, but a symbol also of that
something more by which duty is swallowed up in generosity, that
something more which led men like Shaw to toss life and hope like a
flower before the feet of their country and their cause. [Cheers.]

* * * * *

THE JOY OF LIFE

[Speech of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, at a banquet in his honor
given by the Suffolk Bar Association, Boston, March 7, 1900, upon his
elevation to the Chief Justiceship of the Supreme Judicial Court of
Massachusetts. Justice Holmes, upon rising to the toast of the
presiding officer, was received with cheers, the entire company
rising.]

GENTLEMEN OF THE SUFFOLK BAR:--The kindness of this reception
almost unmans me, and it shakes me the more when taken with a kind of
seriousness which the moment has for me. As with a drowning man, the
past is telescoped into a minute, and the stages are all here at once in
my mind. The day before yesterday I was at the law school, fresh from
the army,