MEMORIAL ADDRESS
Delivered by the Editor at the First American Congress of Philologists, Whitney Memorial Meeting, December, 1894.
AN ESTIMATE OF WHITNEY'S CHARACTER AND SERVICES
Ladies and Gentlemen,—There are some among us who can remember the time when "a certain condescension in foreigners" easily gave us pain. There was little achievement behind us as a people to awaken us to national self-consciousness and to a realizing sense of our own great possibilities. Time is changing all that. The men have come, and some, alas! are already gone, of whose achievements we may well be proud wherever we are. In the battles for the conquests of truth there are no distinctions of race. It needs no international congress to tell us that we belong to one great army. But to-night—as the very titles of these gathered societies show—Science has marshalled us, her fifties and her hundreds, as Americans. We look for the centurion, for the captain of the fifties; and he is no more! And we call, as did David, lamenting for Abner, "Know ye not that there is a prince and a great man fallen this day in Israel," yea, and like Jonathan, "in the midst of the battle?"
It is in the spirit of generous laudation that we are assembled to do honor to our illustrious countryman. And it is well. We may praise him now; for he is gone. But I cannot help thinking of a touching legend of the Buddha. Nigh fifty years he has wandered up and down in Ganges-land, teaching and preaching. And now he is about to die. Flowers fall from the sky and heavenly quires are heard to sing his praise. "But not by all this," he answers,—"but not by all this, O Ananda, is the Teacher honored; but the disciple who shall fulfil all the greater and lesser duties,—by him is the Teacher honored." It is fitting, then, that we pause, not merely to praise the departed, but also to consider the significance of a noble life, and the duties and responsibilities which so great an example urges upon us,—in short, the lesson of a life of service.
It would be vain to endeavor, within the narrow limits which the present occasion imposes, to rehearse or to characterize with any completeness the achievements that make up this remarkable life. Many accounts[1] of it have been given of late in the public prints. Permit me rather to lay before you, by way of selection merely, a few facts concerning Mr. Whitney which may serve to illustrate certain essential features of his character and fundamental motives of his life.
And indubitably first in importance no less than in natural order is the great fact of his heredity. William Dwight Whitney was born, in 1827, at Northampton, Massachusetts, and in his veins flowed the best blood of a typical New England community, of the Dwights and the Hawleys,—heroes of the heroic age of Hampshire. His stock was remarkable for sturdy vigor, both of body and of intellect, and was in fact that genuine aristocracy which, if it be true to its traditions, will remain—as for generations
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- ↑ Most notable among them is the one by Professor Thomas Day Seymour of Yale, in the "American Journal of Philology," vol. 15.
