spotted are their names, and to us long memorable! Alas, not one of them now remains again to meet me here, again to receive the tribute of my unchanged respect. I remember, too, how, after years of absence had rolled by, I came here once more, summoned and welcomed by another youthful band, struggling with the same enthusiasm, in the same arena, for the same honorable prize. But now I come not, as on those occasions-not as one participating in collegiate struggles, or seeking to impart to those yet engaged in them, something of my own subsequent experience and reflection; I come to meet those who before me, as my companions, and in later days, here entered on the search for truth; and for whom, as much as for myself, I am to interpret those thoughts, which, as they rapidly retrace the retrospect of our lives, lead us to acknowledge influences here planted, and principles here formed, that, as they may have been followed or neglected, have since largely affected us, for evil or for good.

If it be to the severer toil of maturer years, that we must owe perfected knowledge in that line of labor, of science, or of thought, to which inclination or necessity may have drawn us; yet who will deny that, from the abundant fountain of various and diversified instruction, which he owes to his days of collegiate study, he has found that streams of information and acquirement have flowed, whose influence has not been less useful and refreshing,

because apparently less necessary and direct? For myself, I look back in vain for a single branch of intellectual inquiry, that I can now desire to have dispensed with. After many years devoted to one profession, I come forward, a willing witness to the blended happiness and utility conferred on all succeeding life, by those who have directed the opening mind to all the channels of moral and intellectual exertion.

Do not let us think it were better to limit or contract them? With what could we wisely dispense? What avenue of the young heart, opening to receive its store of intellectual truth, would we heedlessly close in the presumptuous anticipation that it will not minister to its future usefulness or happiness? Do we think that it possesses not capacity to receive it? Believe me, it absorbs with delight all the streams of knowledge, as the earth asks for and absorbs the genial rain. It is this that it pants for. It is alive with anxious searchings for it. Glancing, in its young eagerness, from heaven to earth, and from earth to heaven, it seeks to turn to shape all the things that are yet unknown to it, and unwise were we, rudely to thwart its ardent aspirations.

There is no one science-there is no one range of inquiry or of thought-that does not aid and illustrate every other. I ask you to remember that the names made most illustrious by the unerring judgment

of time, for contributions the most brilliant in one branch of science or of art, belong to those who have ranged over the whole circle of knowledge, and loved to store up rich treasures of observation, apparently the most foreign to those studies which have seemed to engross their exclusive devotion.

Do you think that the severest labors of scientific research cannot be aided by voluntary wanderings into the airy regions of fancy, and the expanded field of reflections and duties, moral and divine? Look at that illustrious sage, who, standing not merely unrivalled, but almost alone in the long vista of many centuries-without predecessors to guide him—with few facilities of communication-with no aids, now so various and abundant-yet has made and recorded investigations so patient, minute, diversified and extensive in natural history, in astronomy, in mechanics, in anatomy, in meteorology-nay, into the whole field of practical, physical inquiry, that they might well seem to have formed the sole object of his studyto have required and exhausted every moment of his occupation. But was it so? Far from it. He pored over, with a love no less intense, the creations of imagination; he studied with his whole heart the fabled pictures of human passion-the wrath of the son of Peleus, or the woes of the line of Pelops-as if his inclinations and his taste had never dwelt on things more practical or true than such as float before a poet's eye. Will you say that the Stagyrite sounded

less profoundly the depths of science, abstract or experimental, because his mind gathered new inspiration from the glowing pictures of Homer and Euripides?

Who is it that, beyond all intellects that the world has witnessed, developed, through the application of a severe and abstruse analysis, the grandest secrets of the universe? Whose life, whose thoughts, whose studies, and whose ambition, all seemed devoted, with undivided energy of purpose and inclination, to problems the most difficult in mathematical science-to researches the most exclusively directed to the laws of physical nature? Need I name the illustrious Newton? Yet at the very time when that great mind was evolving, by means so purely abstract and scientific, the truths which his immortal Principia disclosed, it was engaged, with a zeal scarcely less ardent, in studying, vindicating, and explaining various doctrines of revealed religion. I allude not to that summary, so eloquent and sublime, with which, as he closes his great work of scientific analysis, he anxiously records, in language ever memorable, his humble and confident recognition of the existence, attributes and power of the Supreme God, made apparent to us by the wisdom and excellence of all he had contrived; whom—and I use his own language-we admire for his perfections, and, as his servants, reverence and adore. But I refer to those essays in which he brought together his erudition, argument, piety and faith, to explain the mys

teries of Hebrew prophecy, and to cast their light on the records of Christian revelation.

Will you say then, that to train the mind to experiment and analysis; to fit it most surely for the bril liant discoveries or useful application of science; it were better to withdraw it from the dazzling attractions of imagination, and to turn it aside from studies which are conversant, not with external nature and its laws, but with the silent workings and judgments of the reason and the heart? How can I answer you so conclusively as by examples such as these?

Again. Do you think that the active duties of busy life, in stations humble or distinguished, are best performed by him who wanders not into the paths of intellectual occupation? Man's history and experience establish the reverse. It was by the power and spirit of his poetry, which through life he never ceased to cultivate, that Solon of all Athenian lawgivers the most practical and popular, first won and secured the notice and confidence of his country. Through that period, by far the most important in British history, in which those influences were developed and established that have affected, beyond all others of modern times, the destiny, the progress, and the social and political institutions of our race, what mind and pen discussed, with unequalled vigor and eloquence, the rights and duties of the ruler and the citizen; through nineteen years, vindicated, in every