James Burrill Angell

“ But the appeal to a college student to work for the sake of learning is an appeal of a noble sort, and if heartily responded to, yields a result of a higher order than an appeal to ambition for class rank.
I was early impressed with the great advantages both to teachers and students of having the three departments: the Collegiate, known here as the Literary, and the Medical and the Law Departments all upon the same ground. It gave a certain breadth and catholicity to the views of all. ”

“ He made her show her teeth, coarse men came to feel of her ankles and the calves of her legs, to test the quality of her muscles. It was the most repulsive and disgusting spectacle we had ever seen. We felt that this scene and that at the hotel were showing us a side of slavery that we had learned nothing of in the hospitable homes of South Carolina. Near the town there were constantly camps of negroes, whom slave dealers had brought from the northern slave states. ”

“ A man of singular personal charm, I have never known one in public life of higher and nobler sense of public duty. He scorned the mean arts of the mere politician and whatever was unworthy in the spirit and policy of his own party. ”

“ Some of the Jesuit missionaries who wielded so great an influence at the court of the Emperors in the seventeenth century, were men of large mould as scholars, divines, and statesmen. It was with great reverence that I stood in the cemetery, just outside the walls of Peking, where Ricci, Schaal, Verbiest, and others lie buried, and thought how near, as it seems to me, they came to making China a Roman Catholic country. For a time they won the favour of Emperors, and led scholars and high officials to adopt their faith. ”

“ He informed me that Russia trained its men in diplomatic service, especially for Asiatic or for European posts. He had been much in Persia and under-stood the operations of the Oriental mind. Russia treats Turkey as belonging to the Asiatic department.
Sir Philip Currie, the British Ambassador, had been taken, as Pauncefote was, directly from the Foreign Office for diplomatic service. He was a man of the finest presence; but he could not get on with the Sultan. His English love of justice and honesty made him impatient with the artful devices and the wickedness of the Turkish officials. ”

“ It has been a singular good fortune to be allowed to work with so many excellent men in the Board of Regents and in the Faculties and to come in touch with so many students who have gone forth to careers of usefulness in all parts of the world.
The life of the President of a college or university is often spoken of as a hard and trying life. A laborious life with its anxieties it is. ”

“ But to us country boys, as we entered upon college life, nothing was more fascinating and more novel and more helpful than the access to well-furnished libraries and the society of students of marked ability and scholarly enthusiasm. The boys who are reared in the neighbourhood ,of libraries can have no appreciation of the sensations which we country lads, whose supply of books had been the most meagre imaginable, but whose thirst for reading was insatiable, experienced in being ushered into a large library and told that all these books were now at our service. ”

“ Subsequent visits to Rome never yielded a full repetition of the first experiences. Rome was also more interesting then to the young American traveller than it is now because it was completely under ecclesiastical control, and the streets were always gay with processions, celebrations, church festivals of one kind and another. We saw Pius IX (to whom the liberals everywhere were still looking as friendly to their cause) on two occasions, a man with so benignant a face that no one who saw him could expect from him anything but benevolence and love. ”

“ Afterwards in Vermont, I was repeatedly asked when introduced to a stranger, how old I was. I know of no explanation, out of China, for such a usage, except that some of the recent Presidents had been advanced in years and infirm, and there was genuine surprise at seeing one so young as I was.
I also once learned how much it was worth to attend the funeral of a relative who was a benefactor of the college. A man who had given his little property to endow some scholarships on condition the college should pay his board with a nephew and niece so long as he lived, finally died. ”