Page:Modern Eloquence - Volume 1.djvu/49

2 different spirit. Memory insensibly reverts to other days—other scenes.

Forty-two years ago President Eliot and I passed each other on the steps of University Hall—he coming down them with his freshly signed bachelor's degree in his hand, while I ascended them an anxious candidate for admission to the college. His apprenticeship was over; mine was about to begin. For twenty-six eventful years now he has presided over the destinies of the University, and at last we meet here again; I to receive from his hands the diploma which signifies that the days of my travels—my Wanderjahre—as well as my apprenticeship, are over, and that the journeyman is at length admitted to the circle of master-workmen. So, while Mr. Curtis declared that he went away from here with a sense of ennoblement, my inclination is to sit down, not metaphorically but in fact, on yonder steps of University Hall, and think for a little—somewhat wearily, perhaps—over the things I have seen and the lessons I have learned since I first ascended those steps when the last half of the century now ending had only just begun—an interval longer than that during which the children of Israel were condemned to tarry in the wilderness!

And, were I so to do, I am fain to confess two feelings would predominate: wonder and admiration—wonder over the age in which I have lived, mingled with admiration for the results which in it have been accomplished and the heroism displayed. And yet this was not altogether what the prophet voices of my apprenticeship had, I remember, led me to expect; for in those days, and to a greater degree than seems to be the case at present, we had here at Cambridge prophet voices which in living words continually exhorted us. Such were Tennyson, Thackeray, Emerson, and, perhaps, most of all Carlyle—Thomas Carlyle with his "Heroes and Hero Worship," his "Latter Day Pamphlets," his worship of the Past and his scorn for the Present, his contempt for what he taught us to term this "rag-gathering age." We sat at the feet of the great literary artist, our 'prentice ears drank in his utterances; to us he was inspired. The literary artist remains. As such we bow down before him now even more than we bowed down before him then; but how different have we found the age in which our lot