The scientific age, then far advanced, and the growing emphasis on athletics demanded laboratory equipment and gymnasiums and fieldhouses which cost much money. The old claim that a log with Mark Hopkins sitting on one end with a student on the other constituted a college was long out of date. Under such conditions it was only a question of time until Burritt ceased to function in the form in which it had had a remarkable influence for good for nearly one hundred years.
We have all watched the deterioration, decay, and death of our beloved institution with painful forebodings but without power to help. God grant that the College is not actually dead but only sleeping, and that we may hear soon of its awaking to a new life as fruitful of good as it was in the past.
Joseph Conrad declared, “The dead can live only with the exact intensity and quality of the life imparted to them by the living.” The truth of this, as applied to man, is open to serious doubt, but it is applicable to institutions like Burritt. Our College can never really die as long as there are those who love it and who live by the high intellectual, moral, and religious principles learned within its walls. Burritt College lives in the influence still alive in the hearts and minds, and spirits of its alumni scattered far and wide.
That we still love the old College is evident by our presence here on this historic occasion. We are here to drink from a kind of Ponce de Leon “Fountain of Youth.” We would not drink, as did the characters in Hawthorne’s “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” of a magic elixir that would make us physically children again “just for tonight.” But we may be restored imaginatively to that golden youthful period of life, and the imagination works more easily and effectively in the physical surroundings of our youth.
I question the truth of Robert Browning’s lines in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,”
“Grow old along with me;
The best of life is yet to be.”
As I grow older, this seems to me like the whistling in the dark I used to try when passing a country churchyard to keep my courage up. No, from my vantage point, I hold rather with Wordsworth who declared in The Prelude with regard to his youth:
“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very Heaven! O times,