AIM HIGH.
AIM HIGH.
In addressing you as a graduating class, permit me to suggest for your consideration a few thoughts on the importance of regarding self-culture not only as a duty, but as the only means of elevating and ennobling your aspirations in life.
Though you have completed your academical course with a degree of success which does you credit, you should remember that the great work of education still lies before you, and that the formation of your characters and the shaping of your destinies are committed to your own hands. And here let me assure you that it is little rather than great things which mark the character of a true gentleman. In fact, there is but one way in which a refined education can be acquired, and that is, "little by little."
It is thus from day to day, from year to year, from everybody, and from everything, that you may learn, if you will, something new, something useful; and though you care not to do it, yet you will, in spite of yourselves, learn something, good or evil, just as you may choose to apply it.
You certainly have the power to choose between good and evil,—in other words, to achieve the loftiest aims. Yet in directing your aspirations, you must adapt means to ends; collect your materials and refine them, and in refining them give them the brilliancy of costly jewels,—jewels which you can wear with becoming grace and dignity wherever you may go, and at all times and under all circumstances.