Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Poem, by George Wolf Buehler, and the Valedictory Oration, by Phineas Wolcott Calkins: Pronounced Before the Senior Class in Yale College, June 18, 1856
Loyalty to a great purpose is always a worthy emotion; especially if it blends with the impulses of youth, the sober convictions and solemn resolutions of the man. Such a tribute of loyalty - the last, and for many reasons the most heartfelt - we are now assembled to pay to the purpose that has hitherto swayed our spirits so royally and so well; and with a like tribute of affection to our fellows, and of grateful reverence to our superiors, and - for ourselves, with a grasp of the hand which 1s at once a memory of all that 1s bright est in the past, a consciousness of all that is truest in the present, and ahppe of unmeasured sympathy in the diverg ing future, to turn away from these and brace our minds for the revolution which this day effects in our lives.
Profound revolution! Stirring among the excited powers of the mind a hundred grave issues that rush to the citadel of the reason demanding instant solution. Fearful revolu lution. Fer out of this day's chaos of purposes, what one shall rise to the throne of our spirits and be henceforth the arbiter of our destinies? For myself, I confess I shrink from the responsibility of such a discussion. But when we are for the first time casting about the terrible arena of life the searching glance of actual combatants, shall I intrude upon the solemnity of such an hour any cold abstractions of my own? No, the obvious duty of a position which I dared neither seek nor decline, requires a recognition of some of those questions which I 'know are throbbing with the elo quence of importunity in the hundred hearts that demand my utterance.
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