During this period of something over fifteen years, I have been frequently summoned from these duties, which were especially agreeable to me—first, in 1892, as minister to Russia; next, in 1896, as a member of the Venezuelan Commission at Washington; and, in 1897, as ambassador to Germany. I have found many men and things which would seem likely to draw me away from my interest in Cornell; but, after all, that which has for nearly forty years held, and still holds, the deepest place in my thoughts is the university which I aided to found.
Since resigning its presidency I have, in many ways, kept in relations with it; and as I have, at various times, returned from abroad and walked over its grounds, visited its buildings, and lived among its faculty and students, an enjoyment has been mine rarely vouchsafed to mortals. It has been like revisiting the earth after leaving it. The work to which I had devoted myself for so many years, and with more earnestness than any other which I have ever undertaken, though at times almost with the energy of despair, I have now seen successful beyond my dreams. Above all, as I have seen the crowd of students coming and going, I have felt assured that the work is good. It was with this feeling that, just before I left the university for the embassy at Berlin, I erected at the entrance of the university grounds a gateway, on which I placed a paraphrase of a Latin inscription noted by me, many years before, over the main portal of the University of Padua, as follows:
``So enter that daily thou mayest become more learned
and thoughtful;
So depart that daily thou mayest become more useful
to thy country and to mankind.''
I often recall the saying of St. Philip Neri, who, in the days of the Elizabethan persecutions, was wont to gaze at the students passing out from the gates of the English College at Rome, on their way to Great Britain, and to say: ``I am feasting my eyes on those martyrs yonder.'' My own feelings are like his, but happier: I feast my eyes on those youths going forth from Cornell University into this new twentieth century to see great things that I shall never see, and to make the new time better than the old.
During my life, which is now extending beyond the allotted span of threescore and ten, I have been engaged after the manner of my countrymen, in many sorts of work, have become interested in many conditions of men have joined in many efforts which I hope have been of use; but, most of all, I have been interested in the founding and maintaining of Cornell University, and by the part I have taken in that, more than by any other work of my life I hope to be judged.
PART V
IN THE DIPLOMATIC SERVICE
CHAPTER XXVI
AS ATTACH<E'> AT ST. PETERSBURG—1854-1855
While yet an undergraduate at Yale, my favorite studies in history and some little attention to international law led me to take special interest in the diplomatic relations between modern states; but it never occurred to me that I might have anything to do directly with them.