ext century is to effect, we have sent with him Madame Boylston as
his colleague [applause]; and it may be that Alma Mater in this has
possibly shown a little feminine malice, for it is to a silent congress
that she is made her deputy. [Laughter and applause.] And in the hundred
years since we asserted for ourselves a separate place and proper name
among the nations, our college has been no palsied or atrophied limb in
the national organization. To the jurisprudence, to the legislation, the
diplomacy, the science, the literature, the art of the country, her
contribution has certainly not fallen short of its due proportion. Our
triennial catalogue is hung thick with our trophies from many fields. I
may say in parenthesis, gentlemen, brethren of the alumni, that I am
glad the July number of the "North American Review" is not yet
published. In the January number there was so disheartening a report of
everything--I am glad to say our religion is excepted, we have grown
perhaps in grace--but we had no science, we had none of this and none of
the other.

Brethren, we whom these dumb faces on the wall make in imagination the
contemporaries of eight generations of men, let us remember, and let us
inculcate on those who are to fill the places that so soon shall know us
no more, let us remember, I say, that if man seem to survive himself and
to be mutely perpetuated in these fragile semblances, it is only the
stamp of the soul that is eternally operative; it is only the image of
ourselves that we have left in some sphere of intellectual or moral
achievement, that is indelible, that becomes a part of the memory of
mankind, reproductive and beneficent, inspiring and admonitory.

But, brethren, as Charles Lamb said of Coleridge's motto, _Sermoni
propriori_, this is more proper for a sermon than for a dinner-table.
But birthdays, after all, gentlemen, are serious things; and as the
chance of many more of them becomes precarious, and the approaching
birthday of the nation begets in all of us, I should hope, something of
a grave and meditative mood, it would be an indecorum to break in upon
it too suddenly with the licensed levity of festival. You are waiting to
hear other voices, and I trust my example of gravity may act rather as a
warning than as precedent to those who are to follow me.

Brethren, at our table there is always one toast, that by custom and
propriety takes precedence of all others. It is, I admit, rather an
arduous