“But, gentlemen, I will not detain you with the inevitable suggestions of the occasion. These sentimentalities are apt to slip from under him who would embark on them, like a birch canoe under the clumsy foot of a cockney, and leave him floundering in retributive commonplace. I had a kind of hope, indeed, from what I had heard, that I should be unable to fill this voice-devouring hall. I had hoped to sit serenely here, with a tablet in the wall before me inscribed: ‘Guilielmo Roberto Ware, Henrico Van Brunt, optime de Academia meritis, eo quod facundiam postprandialem irritam fecerunt.’ [The reader must recognize here the distinguished architects of Memorial Hall, which was then newly built.] I hope you understood my Latin, and I hope you will forgive me the antiquity of the pronunciation, but it is simply because I cannot help it. Then, on a blackboard behind me, I could have written in large letters the names of our guests, who should make some brave dumb show of acknowledgment. You, at least, with your united applause, could make yourselves heard. If brevity ever needed an excuse, I might claim one in the fact that I have consented, at short notice, to be one of the performers in our domestic centennial next Saturday, and poetry is not a thing to be delivered on demand without an exhausting wear upon the nerves. When I wrote to Dr. Holmes and begged him for a little poem, I got the following answer, which I shall take the liberty of reading. I do not see the Doctor himself in the hall, which encourages me to go on:—
“‘My dear James,—Somebody has written a note in your name, requesting me to furnish a few verses for some occasion which he professes to be interested in. I am satisfied, of course, that it is a forgery. I know you would not do such a thing as ask a brother writer, utterly exhausted by his centennial efforts, to endanger his health and compromise his reputation by any damnable iteration of spasmodic squeezing. So I give you fair warning that some dangerous person is using your name, and taking advantage of the great love I bear you, to play upon my feelings. Do not think for a moment that I hold you in any way responsible for this note, looking so nearly like your own handwriting as for a single instant to deceive me, and suggesting the idea that I would take a passage for Europe in season to avoid college anniversaries.’
“I readily excused him, and I am sure you will be kind enough to be charitable to me, gentlemen. I know that one of the things which the graduates of the College look forward to with the most confident expectation and pleasure is the report of the President of the University. I remember that when I was in the habit of attending the meetings of the faculty, some fourteen or fifteen years ago, I was very much struck by the fact that almost every field of business that required particular ability was sure to gravitate into the hands of a young professor of chemistry. The fact made so deep an impression upon me that I remember that I used to feel, when our war broke out, that this young professor might have to take the care of one of our regiments,—and I know he would have led it to victory. And when I heard that the same professor was nominated for President, I had no doubt of the result which we have all seen to follow. I give you, gentlemen, the health of President Eliot, of Harvard College!”
Holding the same honorable though honorary office the next year, before introducing the speakers, he said:—
“The common consent of civilized mankind seems to have settled on the centennial commemoration of great events as leaving an interval spacious enough to be impressive and having a roundness of completion in its period. We are the youngest of nations, and the centuries to us are not yet grown so cheap and so commonplace as Napoleon’s, when he saw forty of them looking down in undisguised admiration upon his armies bronzed from their triumphs in Italy. For my own part, I think the scrutiny of one age is quite enough to bear, without calling in thirty-nine others to its assistance. It is quite true that a hundred years are but as a day in the life of a nation, are but as a tick of the clock to the long train of æons in which this planet hardened itself for the habitation of man and man accommodated himself to his habitation; but they are all we have, and we must make the best of them. Perhaps, after all, it is no such great misfortune to be young, especially if we are conscious at that time that youth means opportunity and not accomplishment. I think that, after all, when we look back upon the hundred years through which the country has passed, the vista is not so disheartening as to the indigestive fancy it might at first appear. If we have lost something of that Arcadian simplicity which the French travelers of a hundred years ago found here,—perhaps because they looked for it, perhaps because of their impenetrability by the English tongue,—we have lost something also of that self-sufficiency which is the mark as well of provincials as of barbarians, and which is the great hindrance to all true advancement. It is a wholesome symptom, I think, if we are beginning to show some of the talent for grumbling which is the undoubted heirloom of the race to which most of us belong. Even the Fourth of July oration is changing round into a lecture on our national shortcomings, and the proud eagle himself is beginning to have no little misgiving as to the amplitude between the tips of his wings. But while it may be admitted that our government was more decorously administered one hundred years ago, if our national housekeeping to-day is further removed from honest business principles, and therefore is more costly, morally and financially, than that of any other Christian nation, it is not less true that the hundredth year of our existence finds us, in the mass, very greatly advanced in the refinement and culture and comfort that are most operative in making a country civilized and keeping it so.”
On three occasions, at least, Lowell substituted for a prose lecture a poem to which he gave the name of “The Power of Sound.” It is constructed on the simple system which runs back as far as “The Pleasures of Imagination,” giving us, for instance, the “Pleasures of Hope” and the “Pleasures of Memory.” In these prehistoric days of which I write, it was what you rather expected in a college poem: a convenient thread on which to string the beads which might else have been lying unused in box or basket.
Lowell gave the original copy of this poem to Mr. Norton, who edited it carefully with interesting notes for an elegant edition of a few copies printed by Mr. Holden. Some of the lines and several of the illustrations in other forms were used by him elsewhere, and may be found in his published poems:—
“Steps have their various meanings—who can hear
The long, slow tread, deliberate and clear,
The boot that creaks and gloats on every stair,