And if this disease is so pernicious in its sporadic form, turning a home here and a home there into a habitation of wretchedness, what must it be when concentrated in a public institution, a multitude countenancing and stimulating each other, "despising the shame," and by their united strength. breaking down every barrier! A college thus tainted is like our great Western river, with all its swollen affluents, bursting all the embankments and carrying terror and devastation and malaria over the fruitful valley which it ought to adorn and fertilize. For this single vice is at the root of all collegiate disturbances and delinquencies. Of every drinking student may be said what was said of Judas Iscariot: "With the sop Satan entered into him." Hence all the counsels of educators, all the ingenuity of physicians, all the discoveries of chemistry, all the wisdom and power of legislative bodies, should be put in requisition to contend with this portentous mischief. And he who shall discover a cure or even an alleviation of this curse of humanity will deserve a monument higher and more enduring than the pyramids, and be entitled to a gratitude deeper and wider than that accorded to Dr. Jenner, who has relieved the world of the terrors of smallpox. Premiums are offered for all improvements in the industrial and economical arts, and for the best essays on all moral subjects; but the richest premium will he deserve, who, by some chymic art, shall make young collegians loathe intoxicating drinks, or by some happy improvement in political economy, shall drive ardent spirits out of the land as an article of manufacture or of commerce. The might of man has failed; may we not appeal to the softer but more potent influence of woman? Will not the ladies, themselves safe and superior to this infirmity, come to the rescue of our powerless sex? We are called the stronger sex and they the weaker; but as to temptations to vice, they are the stronger and we the weaker sex. I have the same opinion of them that Lord Chatham had of the English soldiers: "They can achieve anything but impossibilities." They are not good at making large bargains, I admit, as is proved by the price they have agreed to give for Mt. Vernon; but even there the bargain is to their credit, showing that they estimate the "value received," not in the worth of the land, but in the testimony of national gratitude and in sending an ambassador around the land to teach, in honeyed accents, the grandest lesson this family of nations can learn, namely: by loving their common father, to love and cherish the united republic which he lived and labored and suffered to establish. Let those who have entered with so much zeal into this national "labor of love" now join their hearts in another, touching more nearly the happiness of their country and of the world. Let them proclaim with their sovereign voice, from one end of the continent to the other, that their smiles and their hands are the prize of sobriety alone. From all their lips let there be heard the general chorus: Young men, young men who love your drink, Your bark of hope and bliss must sink; We'll never trust with you our life You cannot, shall not have a wife. After so long an address, can I, ought I to be insensible to the flattering attention and marks of approbation with which it has been received? I well know what has worked so mightily in my favor. Never was speaker more fortunate in the temper of the house. Among the charms which, according to old Homer, Jove conferred upon his darling daughter, Venus, was that of philommeides; she was the queen of smiles, the laughter-loving Aphrodite. So the presence of the Chief Magistrate of the Union has made every one joyous—it has given me a laughter-loving audience, and among them many a Venus, with lambent lightnings playing about her eyes, encircled with the irresistible Cestus, and with the little rogue Cupid sitting at her feet, ever sharpening his burning arrows on a bloody whetstone. And if I owe an apology to my kind and indulgent audience for the parti-colored character of this address, this motley mixture of the serious and the ludicrous, here is my defence: Such is life, in which shade and sunshine. chase each other over the plain-in which joy and sorrow rapidly alternate in our hearts-in which smiles often shine through our tears and dry them up-and again tears start forth and extinguish the light of our smiles. Such is life, and such. did Shakespeare, the greatest painter of life, represent it. His pictures of man are neither unmixed tragedies nor unmixed comedies, but tragi-comedies. Such alternations seem to be our Creator's design. The lights and shades, whose well-accorded strife, Sorrow in advance makes the arrival of gladness more glad, and sorrow apprehended in the future chastises and tempers the transports of present pleasure, and mingles all our rejoicings with salutary trembling. Alas! by some degree of wo, We ever bliss must gain; The heart can ne'er a transport know, That never knew a pain. And yet something whispers me that the retrospect I have taken ought to have inspired a more serious strain. Of the long line of alumni with whom I have been contemporary, how few survive! "Apparent rari nantes in gurgite vasto." Of seven eminent men with whom I have had the honor to coöperate as professor in this institution, six now have passed off the stage of action. Caldwell, Hentz, Mitchell, Andrews, Anderson, and Olmsted are no more. Their accents which once contributed to enlighten and adorn our State are now hushed in the voiceless grave, and perhaps ere another anniversary revolves around and brings you together again, the two who yet remain will be gathered with those who have gone before them. To one who looks back fifty or sixty years, what a shadow is man! how fleeting, how trifling do seem all his interests and schemes, his hopes and his fears! The thought extorted a sigh even from a pagan moralist: O! curas hominum! O! quantum est in rebus inane. How fading the honors of earth, how empty the applause of men! But happy, thrice happy we, that this fading pageant is not all that our deathless souls, never satisfied with the limited and transient, and always reaching after something illimitable and infinite, shall, if purified by religion, enter upon a state where all our companions and joy shall be perfect and unchangeable: Where Time, and Pain, and Chance, and Death expire; Where momentary ages are no more; Where seraphs gather immortality, On Life's fair tree, fast by the throne of God. [1829-1887] THE MORRIS P. TILLEY HE poets of the South of a generation ago are those nightingales of legend that sang their songs under the sharp pricks of thorns buried in their breasts. While enduring their keenest pangs of suffering, they were filling the air with sweetest music. Their sensitive souls were rent and torn by the crushing blows of war which fell upon the South with stunning effect, adding keen anguish and bitter suffering to the burden of poverty and disease which they, in common with their fellow sufferers, bore home from the struggles of arms. "Virginia's laureate," James Barron Hope, had already gained fame as a poet, before the secession of Virginia had hurried him to the front, to follow, for four years, the varying fortunes of the Civil War, and finally, after the surrender of Johnston in South Carolina, to return to find his home in ashes. Upon two notable occasions before the opening of the conflict, he had been chosen to acclaim in verse the fame and renown of his mother State; and had responded in the "Jamestown Ode," commemorating the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the English colony on the James, and in the "Washington Memorial Ode," delivered at the unveiling, in 1858, of the Washington monument at Richmond. In each of these efforts the heart of the writer had been revealed as the worshipper of the history and tradition of Virginia; on each occasion, too, the martial blood of his ancestors had been aroused in the contemplation of the proud record of the mother Commonwealth, and had poured out its tribute to the deeds worthy of song that are scattered on every page of the history of his State. There was in these odes, moreover, the same spirit of devotion and loyalty to Virginia that was to make him, in many a subsequent ode and memorial address, the Confederate soldier's poet. There was, too, the same spirit of elation in martial themes, which had struck off, in 1857, in an hour of inspiration, "The Charge of Balaklava," a poem filled with the wild rush of battle and the agony and victory of death. This poet of the late fifties, tall, slender, and graceful, with a pale face and deep-set eyes, was a Virginian descended of Virgin |