k to complete my second centennial on Saturday
afternoon [laughter and applause], there is a kind of repose, as it
seems to me, in coming back here to sit in the lap of this dear old
nurse who is well on toward her three hundred, and who will certainly
never ask any of us to celebrate her centennial either in prose or
verse. To this college our Revolution which we are celebrating this year
is modern. And I think also one of the great privileges which she
confers upon us is that she gives us a claim of kindred still with the
mother country--a claim purely intellectual and safe from the
embitterment of war or the jealousies of trade. It was an offshoot of
Cambridge and Oxford that was planted on the banks of the Charles, and
by men from Cambridge and Oxford; and when I visited those renowned
nurseries of piety, scholarship, and manliness of thought, my keenest
pleasure in the kindness I received was the feeling that I owed the
greater part of it to my connection with Harvard, whom they were pleased
to acknowledge as a plant not unworthy of the parent stock. [Applause.]

In their halls I could not feel myself a stranger, and I resented the
imputation of being a foreigner when I looked round upon the old
portraits, all of whom were my countrymen as well as theirs, and some of
whom had been among our founders and benefactors. In this year of
reconciliations and atonements, too, the influence of college
associations is of no secondary importance as a bond of union. On this
day, in every State of our more than ever to be united country, there
are men whose memories turn back tenderly and regretfully to those
haunts of their early manhood. Our college also, stretching back as it
does toward the past, and forward to an ever-expanding future, gives a
sense of continuity which is some atonement for the brevity of life.
These portraits that hang about us seem to make us contemporaries with
generations that are gone, and the services we render her will make us
in turn familiar to those who shall succeed us here. There is no way so
cheap of buying what I may call a kind of mitigated immortality,--mean
by that an immortality without the pains and penalty attached commonly
to it, of being dug up once in fifty years to have your claims
reconsidered [laughter]--as in giving something to the college.
[Applause.] Nay, I will say in parenthesis, that even an intention to
give it secures that place of which I have spoken. [Laughter.] I find i