Page:On Shakespeare, or, What You Will, Furness, 1908.djvu/3



you permit me to say a few words of a nature purely personal? I know it is not in good taste, but, nevertheless, I beg your indulgence. It is supposed that I now appear before you to deliver an Oration. Do you realize what a paralyzing word “Oration” is? Think how brilliant orations stud, like jewels, not only the pathway of the Phi Beta Kappa, but also that of civilization, far back into Greece and Rome. And to deliver an oration, there must be an orator. I am no orator, but merely a humble student; and am I to be dragged from my dusty corners and beloved cobwebs, to deliver an oration? I cannot bring my tongue to such a pace. No “Oration” will you hear from me to-day. If you will permit, I will only speak right on and tell you that which you yourselves do know, and consider you simply as a gathering of friends, met charitably to listen to the maunderings of an old man, who has been enticed hither by the venerable apothegm that “Philosophy is the guide of life.” Ay, it may be so, but it does not guide us at all seasons. When Friar Lawrence offers philosophy as a comfort, the despairing Romeo cries: ‘‘Hang up philosophy! It helps not, it prevails not.”

Permit me, therefore, to hang up Philosophy, and be this hour dedicate, in a humble way, to the works and words of him who bears the “greatest name in our literature,—the greatest name in all literature.”