Address of Mr. Justice Holmes Longfellow say "Morituri salutamus." If I should repeat that phrase of the gladiators soon to die, it would be from knowledge and reason, not from feeling,
' for I own that I am apt to wonder whether I do not dream that I have lived, and may not wake to find that all that I thought done is still to be
accomplished and that life is all ahead. — But we have had our warning.
Even
within the last three months Henry Bowditch, the world-known physi ologist, and Frank Emmons, the world known geologist, have dropped from the class, leaving only the shadow of great names. I like to think that they were types of '61, not only in their deeds, but in their noble silence. It has been my
fortune to belong to two bodies that seemed to me somewhat alike — the
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ourselves: To see so far as one may, and to’ feel, the great forces that are behind every detail-for that makes
all the difierence between philosophy and gossip, between great action and small; the least wavelet of the Atlantic Ocean is mightier than one of Buzzard's Bay - to hammer out as compact and solid a piece of work as one can, to try to make it first rate, and to leave it
unadvertised. It was a good thing for us in our college days, as Moorfield Storey pointed out a few years ago in an excellent ad
dress, that we were all poor. we lived as if we were.
At least
It seems to me
that the training of West Point is better fitted to make a man than for a youth to have all the luxuries of life poured
class of '61. The 20th never wrote about itself to the newspapers, but for its
into a trough for him at twenty. We had something of that discipline, and before it was over many of us were in barracks learning the school of the soldier. Man is born a predestined
killed and wounded in battle it stood
idealist, for he is born to act.
in the first half-dozen of all the regi ments of the north. This little class
Life is painting a picture, not doing
is to aflirm the worth of an end, and to persist in affirming the worth of an end is to make an ideal. The stem experience of our youth helped to accomplish the destiny of fate. It left us feeling through life that pleasures do not make happiness and that the root of joy as of duty is to put out all one's powers toward some great end. When one listens from above to the
a sum. As twenty men of genius looking out of the same window will paint twenty canvases, each unlike all the
roar of a great city there comes to one's ears—almost indistinguishable, but there-—the sound of church bells,
others, and every one great, so, one comes to think, men may be pardoned
in the rush, a moment for withdrawal
for the defects of their qualities if they have the qualities of their defects. But,
and prayer. Commerce has outsoared the steeples that once looked down upon
20th Massachusetts Regiment and the
never talked much about itself, but graduating just as the war of secession began, out of its eighty-one members it had fifty’one under arms, the largest
proportion that any class sent to that war. One learns from time an amiable latitude with regard to beliefs and tastes.
To act
chiming the hours, or offering a pause
after all, we all of us have our notions
the marts, but still their note makes
of what is best. I learned in the regi
music of the din.
ment and in the class the conclusion, at least, of what I think the best service that we can do for our country and for
are not churchmen the symbol still lives.
For those of us who
Life is a roar of bargain and
battle, but in the very heart of it there
