[349] given mostly to the praise of military chieftains, and the honors of victory have been chanted even by the lips of woman. The mother, while rocking her infant on her knees, has stamped on his tender mind—at that age more impressible than wax—the images of war; she has nursed his slumbers with its melodies; she has pleased his waking hours with its stories, and selected for his playthings the plume and the sword. The child is father to the man; and who can weigh the influence of these early impressions on the opinions of later years? The mind which trains the child is like the hand which commands the end of a long lever: a gentle effort at that time suffices to heave the enormous weight of succeeding years. As the boy advances to youth he is fed, like Achilles, not only on honey and milk, but on bear's flesh and lion's marrow. He draws the nutriment of his soul from a literature whose beautiful fields have been moistened by human blood. Fain would I offer my tribute to the Father of Poetry, standing, with harp of immortal melody, on the misty mountain-top of distant antiquity; to all those stories of courage and sacrifice which emblazon the annals of Greece and Rome; to the fulminations of Demosthenes and the splendors of Tully; to the sweet verse of Virgil and the poetic prose of Livy. Fain would I offer my tribute to the new literature which shot up in modern times as a vigorous forest from the burned site of ancient woods; to the passionate song of the Troubadour of France, and the Minnesinger of Germany; to the thrilling ballads of Spain, and the delicate music of the Italian lyre. But from all these has breathed the breath of war, that has swept the heartstrings of innumerable generations of men! . . .
But are we aware that this monstrous and impious usage [the trial by battle], which our enlightened reason so justly condemns in the cases of individuals, is openly avowed by our own country, and by the other countries of the earth, as a proper mode of determining justice between them? Be upon our heads and upon our age the judgment of barbarism, which we pronounce upon those that have gone before! At this moment, in this period of light, when the noon-day sun of civilization seems, to the contented souls of many, to be standing still in the heavens, as upon Gibeon, the relations between nations are governed by the same rules of barbarous, brutal force which once prevailed between individuals. The dark ages have not passed away; Erebus and black Night, born of Chaos, still brood over the earth; nor shall we hail the clear day, until the mighty hearts of the nations shall be touched as those of children, and the whole earth, individuals and nations alike, shall acknowledge one and the same rule of Right. . . .
Within a short distance of this city stands an institution of learning, which was one of the earliest cares of the early forefathers of the country, the conscientious Puritans. Favored child of an age of trial and struggle, carefully nursed through a period of hardship and anxiety, endowed at that time by the oblations of men like Harvard, sustained from its first foundation by the paternal arm of the Commonwealth, by a constant succession of munificent bequests, and by the prayers of all good men, the University at Cambridge now invites our homage as the most ancient, the most interesting, and the most important seat of learning in the land,—possessing the oldest and
