None the less willingly do I acknowledge my debt to Yale, a debt which would have been heavier had I been more industrious. The President of the University in our time was the Reverend Dr. Wolseley—learned, austere, kindly, but remote. We boys saw little of him except on a pedestal or in the pulpit. When he bade the class farewell, he made us a friendly little speech and proposed a toast: "The Class of 1853. I drink their healths in water. May their names not be writ in water." Nor were they. Perhaps no class contained so many members who have filled larger spaces for a longer time in the public eye and the public press.
There was Stedman, the poet and poet critic. He left poems which will live forever, but no such body of poetical achievement as he might have produced had not circumstances obliged him to devote to business and to editorial work abilities superior to either. He is not remembered pre-eminently as a poet of patriotism, but the only poem of Stedman's included in Emerson's Parnassus is his "John Brown of Osawatomie," written—was it not for The Tribune?—in November, 1859, while Brown lay in his Virginian jail waiting to be hanged. Stedman, his genius flowering in a prophetic insight, warned them; but his "Virginians, don't do it" rang unavailingly through the land; and his
...Old Brown,
Osawatomie Brown,
May trouble you more than ever when you've nailed
his coffin down
never reached the Virginian mind till Northern regiments sang their way through Southern States to the tune of "John Brown's Body." Stedman's range was wide. He set perhaps most value on his Lyrics and Idylls. That was the title he gave to the volume of poems published in London in 1879; selected by himself for his English readers. His American friends will like to be reminded that the first third of the volume is given to "American Lyrics and Idylls," including "Old Brown," and that tender monody on Horace Greeley which no Tribune reader can have forgotten.
There was Charlton Lewis, an Admirable Crichton in his versatility,—if the serious meaning of that name has survived Mr. Barrie's travesty of it on the stage. We knew him at Yale as a mathematician who played with the toughest problems proposed to us by mathematical tutors and professors; whose very names I forget. We knew him afterward as lawyer, insurance expert, Latin lexicographer, journalist, financier, and editor of Harper's Book of Facts, the best of all books of facts; but now, or when I last inquired, out of print and not easily procurable. He understood cards also. Playing whist, which I think was forbidden in college, he dealt to his partner and two adversaries the usual miscellaneous hand; and to himself, by way of jest, all thirteen trumps. When the enemy remonstrated Lewis answered: "If you will specify any other order in which it is mathematically more probable that the hands would be distributed, I will admit that this is not the product of chance." An answer to which there was no answer. He delighted in puzzling minds less acute and less scientific than his own. Few men have had a more serviceable brain than his, or known better how to use it; and his power of work knew no limit.
There was Mr. Justice Shiras of the United States Supreme Court. There was Fred Davies, a dignitary of the Church—in whom professional decorum never extinguished a natural sense of fun and good-fellowship. There was, and happily still is, Andrew White, historian, writer of books, President of Cornell University, Ambassador, and, in a forgetful moment, one of President Cleveland's commission to determine the boundary line between a British colony and a foreign state; neither of whom had asked him to draw it. There was Isaac Bromley, one of the world's jesters who make life amusing to everybody but themselves; whom all his colleagues on The Tribune valued for qualities which were his own and not ours. Not the least of the many eulogies which death brought him was the testimony of those who knew him best, that his humour was good-humoured.
The most casual reader must have noticed how various are the talents and characters among the hundred and six graduates of 1853. There are many more. There is Wayne MacVeagh, the most delightful of companions, counsel in great causes all his life, Attorney-General of the United States, Ambassador to Rome, one of the men who paid least respect to social conventionalities, yet in Washington a central figure in society. But neither law nor society gave full scope for the restless energy of his mind. During all the later years I have known MacVeagh he has been a thinker, serious, daring, too often unsound. His reading has been largely among books dealing with those new social problems which vex the minds of men, often needlessly, and disturb clear brains. Novelties interested him; and the drift of his thoughts was toward radical reconstruction and toward one form or another of socialism. He espoused new opinions with vehemence; and sometimes reverted with vehemence to the old. We met again in London some five and twenty years ago. MacVeagh delivered to a little company at lunch a brief but reasoned and rather passionate discourse against our diplomatic service in Europe. When I suggested that we had none, he retorted:
"But we have Ministers and Legations and though some of our Ministers are good and able men, they are wasted. No Minister is needed. All the business of the United States in Europe could be done and ought to be done by Consuls, and all the Legations ought to be abolished, and the Ministers recalled."
I forget just how long it was after this outburst that MacVeagh was appointed Minister to Constantinople; and accepted and served; with credit and distinction, and afterward more efficiently still as Ambassador to Rome.