the birthday feast for every one of us whose forehead has been sprinkled
from the font inscribed "_Christo et Ecclesioe_." We have no badges but
our diplomas, no distinctions but our years of graduation. This is the
republic carried into the university; all of us are born equal into this
great fraternity.

Welcome, then, welcome, all of you, dear brothers, to this our joyous
meeting! We must, we will call it joyous, tho it comes with many
saddening thoughts. Our last triennial meeting was a festival in a
double sense, for the same day that brought us together at our family
gathering gave a new head to our ancient household of the university. As
I look to-day in vain for his stately presence and kindly smile, I am
reminded of the touching words spoken by an early president of the
university in the remembrance of a loss not unlike our own. It was at
the commencement exercises of the year 1678 that the Reverend President
Urian Oakes thus mourned for his friend Thomas Shepard, the minister of
Charlestown, an overseer of the college: "_Dici non potest quam me
perorantem, in comitiis, conspectus ejus, multo jucundissimus, recrearit
et refecerit. At non comparet hodie Shepardus in his comitiis; oculos
huc illuc torqueo; quocumque tamen inciderint, Platonem meum intanta
virorum illustrium frequentia requirunt; nusquam amicum et
pernecessarium meum in hac solenni panegyric, inter nosce Reverendos
Theologos, Academiae Curatores, reperire aut oculis vestigare possum_."
Almost two hundred years have gone by since these words were uttered by
the fourth president of the college, which I repeat as no unfitting
tribute to the memory of the twentieth, the rare and fully ripened
scholar who was suddenly ravished from us as some richly freighted
argosy that just reaches her harbor and sinks under a cloudless sky with
all her precious treasures.