Baxter Perry Smith

“ What can be more admirable than the workings of the trained legal or rather judicial mind, as it walks firmly through labyrinths of [195] statute and precedent and principle, holding fast its strong but tenuous thread, till it stands forth in the bright light of day;—it may be some Sir John Jervis, unraveling in a criminal case the web of sophistries with which a clever counsel has bewildered a jury; or it may be Marshall or Story, in our own college case, shredding away, one by one, its intricacies, entanglements, and accretions, till all is delightfully, restfully clear. ”

“ Shall the American College student follow his option, or his curriculum? And shall the college itself be a school for schoolmasters, a collection of debating clubs, a reading-room with library attached, an intellectual quarantine for the plague of riches? or, a place of close and protracted drill, of definite methods, of prescribed intellectual work? Shall it fulfill the statement of the Concord sage,—'You send [191] your son to the schoolmasters, and the schoolboys educate him?' or, shall a strong faculty make and mark the whole tone of the institution? ”

“ Helena,—the one grand fact of the living power of Jesus Christ in history, and to-day; a force that is mightier than all other forces; a force that all other forces have in vain endeavored to destroy, or counteract, or arrest; a force that has pushed its way against wit and learning and wealth and power, and the stake and the rack and the sword and the cannon, till it has shaped the master forces of the world, inspired its art, formed its social life, subsidized, its great powers, and wields to-day the heavy battalions ”

“ The alumni of a college which has moulded the intellectual and moral character of not a few of the illustrious living, or the more illustrious dead,—the oldest college in the valley of the Connecticut, and the only college in an ancient and honored State,—would neglect a most fitting and beautiful service, should they suffer the cycles of a century to pass, without gathering in some modest urn the ashes of its revered founders, or writing on some modest tablet the names of its most distinguished sons. ”

“ We commend the cause of our beloved country to all the Alumni of this Institution; and we invoke from them, and pledge our own most efficient and cordial support, and that of Dartmouth College, to the Government, which is the only power by which the rebellion can be subdued. We hail with joy and with grateful acknowledgments to the God of our fathers, the cheering hope that the dark cloud which has heretofore obscured the vision and depressed the hearts of patriots and statesmen, in all attempts to scan the future, may in time disappear entirely from our horizon ”

“ Earth is our training place—time is our curriculum; eternity will but furnish to the true pupil the higher forms of his limitless advancement. We have our lessons in all providence, in all beings and things, God teaching us in and through all. No mean vocation, then, is that of the earthly educator; no unimportant theme that now in hand. Yet even of the school in the more technical sense of the term, we cannot speak at large, except as in touching on any one department we more or less affect every other. ”

“ What a help to any college class is the influence of one such man! His connection with the class of 1843, was, no doubt, the presentation to some of its members of an ideal such as they had not formed before; an ideal, not only of enthusiasm for the largest acquisitions and the finest culture, but of that enthusiasm sustained by the love of excellence for its own sake, and not alloyed by any merely selfish ambition to surpass others. ”

“ He never thrust himself into a place of responsibility, or sought distinction for distinction's sake.
He had in college the desire and purpose which he always retained,—to complete himself in every art and every manly exercise. Hence his study of music, not only as a recreation, but as a discipline; not merely to gratify the ear, though exquisitely fond of the art, and receiving from it a refined and exalted pleasure, but also that he might become acquainted with the thoughts and conceptions of men great in musical genius. ”

“ What God has joined together let not man put asunder. Let the studies which we call moral, have all a Christian baptism; and, with all our getting, let us not stop short of the cardinal points of our most holy faith. Let the Will be still investigated, not as a brute force, or in a merely intellectual light, but in those high spiritual aspects in which our great New England metaphysician delighted to present it. Let Butler, with his curious trestle-work of analogy, bridge, to the forming mind, the chasm between natural and revealed religion. Let the Christian Evidences be fully unfolded. ”

“ Fertile in theory, he preserved the truth of science so pure as 'in the sight of God,' not 'to write the very smallest thing as certain, of which he was not fully convinced,' nor to overstrain the weight of a conjecture, nor even to cite as his own the verified quotation he had gained from another. Practicing on his own maxim to 'open the heart to sincere veneration for all excellence' in human act and thought, not even his profound admiration for the surpassing genius of Goethe could draw him into sympathy with the heartlessness and colossal egoism of his later career. ”

“ Many years later, in the great hospitals of Paris, Louis made and published his own observations in regard to the same disease, and the whole medical world rang with plaudits of admiration at his genius and learning. But in the modest little tract of Nathan Smith, the gist and germ of all the magnificent discoveries of Louis are anticipated. And thus it is again demonstrated that men of genius are confined to no age and to no country, but whether in the wilds of New Hampshire or in the world's gayest capital, they form a fraternity as cosmopolitan as useful. ”

“ President Lord brought to the accomplishment of his task a fine physique; a countenance serene, yet impressive; a voice rare both for its richness and its power; a pleasing, almost magnetic, dignity of mien; a mind most capacious and discriminating by nature, richly stored by severe application, and thoroughly disciplined by varied professional labor; and a heart always tender, yet always true to the profoundest convictions of duty. A deep, rich, and thorough religious experience well fitted the graceful and earnest man to be a graceful and earnest Christian teacher. ”

“ She has given full honor to the masterpieces of human language and human thought, through which, while we come to a more complete knowledge of peoples and nations, of poetry and eloquence, we feel more profoundly the life of history, and comprehend the changes of custom and thought, while the finer and more subtle powers of fancy and imagination stir within the sensitive mind, and gradually by constant and imperceptible inspiration lift the soul to regions of larger beauty and freedom. ”

“ In most lines the highest gift is the gift of toil. Indeed, men of genius have often been the most terrible of toilers, and in the regions of highest art. How have the great masters of music first welded the keys of the organ and harpsichord to their fingers' ends and their souls' nerves before they poured forth the Creation or the Messiah, the symphonies and sonatas! Think of Meyerbeer and his fifteen hours of daily work; of Mozart's incessant study of the masters, and his own eight hundred compositions in his short life ”

“ The power to take a subject by its handle and poise it on its centre is perhaps the consummation of merely intellectual culture. When all its nutriment has been converted into bone and muscle and sinew and nerve, then the mind bounds to its work, lithe and strong, like a hunting leopard on its game. It was exactly the power with which our Webster handled his case, till it seemed to the farmer too simple to require a great man to argue. ”

“ Nor has it for a moment been forgotten that education, to be truly and in the largest degree beneficent, must also be religious,—must affect that which is deepest in man,—must lead him, if it can, to the contemplation of truths most personal, central, and essential, must open to him some of those depths where the soul swings almost helplessly in the midst of experiences and powers unfathomable and infinite,—where the intellect falters and hesitates and finds no solution of its perplexities till it yields to faith. ”

“ Let it be studied, not in a professional, much less in a partisan way; but with the conviction that it is indispensable [182] to the broadest culture; that without theology we have but a straitened anthropology; that we see not nature aright, but as we look up through it to Nature's God. Be ours, in its largest significance, the sentiment so devoutly uttered by the old Hebrew bard: 'In Thy light shall we see light.' And let the discipline of college, so intimately connected with its prosperity, be fashioned on the model of the Gospel. ”

“ My long and intimate connection with a most beloved and affectionate people—a connection rendered interesting not only by its duties and delights but by its very solicitudes and afflictions—a diffidence of my powers to meet the expectations of the Trustees, and the demands of the college; the exchange, at my age, of a sphere whose duties, though arduous and exhausting, are yet familiar, for another in which new duties, new responsibilities, new anxieties arise ”

“ All great explorers have been largely their own teachers, and each young scholar has made the best use of all helps and helpers when he has learned to teach himself. His emancipation, once fairly purchased, confers on him potentially the freedom of the empire of thought; and, as evermore, the freeman toils harder than the slave. The strong stimulus of such a self-moved activity, thoroughly aroused, becomes in Choate or Gladstone the fountain of perpetual youth, and forms the solid basis of the titanic scholarship of Germany. ”

“ The very vigor of thought and power of eloquence with which many, with a parricidal spirit, have assailed the literature of antiquity, were borrowed from its stores; and should their schemes of reform prevail we might fear that other generations, inheriting only their prejudices, without their refinement, would degenerate into comparative barbarism, and with that of learning, that the light also of religion would be extinguished. It is the worst of this spirit that it would seal up the treasures of heavenly wisdom, and take away the armor in which we trust for assailing the enemies of God. ”

“ At that time the college was visited by a revival of religion of uncommon power, and my reverend president suddenly awoke (at least to my view) in an entirely new character.
"He came to the students with a power and unction which were quite irresistible, and manifested a depth of religious feeling for us which made us at once love him and admire him. He seemed to have found his appropriate sphere of labor; to have got into an atmosphere which filled his soul and body with life and energy; to have work to do which was congenial, which he loved, and which he knew how to do as few men did. ”

“ We celebrate to-day the founding of our college. We come hither to testify our veneration and our affection for our benign Alma Mater. We can hardly think she is a hundred years old, she looks so fresh and so fair. We are sure that many, many blessed days are before her, but a mother's days are made happy and delightful by the love and faithfulness of her children. Much has been done for this institution, recently, much which makes our hearts glad. The names of the benefactors of the institution, mentioned here to-day, dwell freshly in the hearts of every graduate, and will live forever ”

“ No man could be more affectionate, kind, generous, or public-spirited. He was never a recluse or an ascetic. He was ready to take anything in hand, and liked to have his hands full. He desired an estate, he studied a profession, he amused himself with useful arts, he loved a farm, a garden, an orchard, a fruitery, an apiary; and occasionally, to do the work proper to them all himself; and he did it well. But knowledge, science, in the largest sense, was his beau ideal.
"Professor Chase, as might be expected, had great excellence as a teacher and governor of college. ”

“ More disposed to make others pleased with themselves than to excite their admiration, it is not strange that he was universally beloved. His heart was impressed with an exquisite sense of moral obligations. In every passing event, in every work of nature, the formation of a lake, a river, a cataract, a mountain, he saw God. When as a philosopher, surrounded with the apparatus of science, extending his researches to the phenomena of the universe, amazed at the minuteness of some objects, astonished at the magnitude and magnificence of others, his mind was transported ”

“ If, then, we might, almost on the threshold of a public education, habituate the mind to itself, and aid it in some of the more simple essays of its own powers, it would seem, that we should prepare it for the readier perception of classic beauties, and for mastering more effectually the elements of mathematical, political, and moral science. Study [152] in every department ceases to be a mechanical process, when the mind is thus accustomed, and then we have assurance that study will be a pleasure, and that what becomes a pleasure will be gain and glory. ”

“ The college should be distinctly and eminently Christian. Not in the narrow, sectarian sense—that be far from us—but in the broadest evangelical view. Our course of thought culminates here; and here does all else that has been affirmed find its proper centre and unity. Christianity is the great unity. In it, as was intimated at the outset, are all the chief elements of organic influence. It is itself the very acme of completeness, and it tends to all symmetry and finish. It is at once conservative and progressive, balancing perfectly the impelling and restraining forces ”

“ No aggregation of volumes would adequately portray the whole work of Dartmouth's alumni. In quiet places, the great majority, day by day, and year by year, have performed their allotted tasks. In such places all over America, and in other lands, they have built their most enduring monuments. The calm lustre of their lives is almost as widely diffused as the morning light.
Eleazer Wheelock founded the college, in faith and hope, for the enlightenment and evangelization of future generations in that mighty storehouse of thought and action, central New England. ”