My first Phi Beta dinner was, like yours, my first public dinner. It was on the day, which this year everybody remembered who was old enough, when Mr. Emerson delivered his first Phi Beta oration at Cambridge. How proudly he has the right to look back on the generation between, all of which he has seen, so much of which he has been! Well, he is no older this day, to all appearance, than he was then,—and your uncle, my dear boy, though older to appearance, is not older in reality. What is it dear G—— Q—— sings,—who sat behind me that early day at Phi Beta?
"When we 've been there ten million years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We 'll have more days
To sing God's praise,
Than when we first begun!"
Remember that, my dear oldest nephew, as the ten million years go by,—and, remembering it, keep young or grow young.
Mr. Emerson was young, I say,—and I. We were all young.
Mr. Edward Everett was young. He was then Governor,—and, I think, presided, certainly spoke, at that Phi Beta dinner. By the almanac he must have been that year forty-five years old,—just as old, dear Tom, as some other people are this year by the almanac. He had been pretty much everything, had gone most everywhere, had seen almost all the people that were worth seeing, and remembered more than all the rest of us had forgotten. And he was very young. To those who knew him he always was. The day he died he was about the youngest man in most things that I knew.
And so it happened that he made the first dinner speech that I remember. We were all in the South Commons Hall of University, now used as somebody's lecture-room, say, at a guess, Professor Lovering's. And he gave some charming reminiscences of Charles Emerson, brother of the philosopher, too early lost, and everywhere loved,—and then, speaking of the oration of the day, and of the new philosophy to which it belonged, and of which the orator was, is, and will be the prophet, he said, in his gracious, funny, courtly, and hearty way, that he always thought of its thunders as he did of the bolts of Jupiter himself! Could one have complimented an orator more than to compare him to Jupiter? And then he went on to verify the comparison, by quoting the description,—
"Tres imbris torti radios, tres nubis aquosæ
Addiderant, tres rutili ignis, tres alitis Austri,"—
and translated the words for his purpose,—
"Three ports were raging fire, and three the whelming waves!
But three were thirsty cloud, and three were empty wind!"
Ah well, my boy! You do not remember what all the world, except a few of the elect, then said of "Transcendentalism." So you cannot imagine the scream of fun and applause which saluted this good-natured analysis of its thunder.