TAKE THE SUNNY SIDE.

GENTLEMEN OF THE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION :

This is an occasion when the exhibition of scholarship or research or rhetoric is expected, but I will spare you that infliction. The routine duties of Commencement week, which cannot be escaped, furnish as much of regulation dryness as should be patiently accepted in the longest days of the year, and I will diverge from the beaten ways, and endeavor to entertain, if not instruct, by a disjointed ramble over the ever pleasant paths which bring us back to the sunny side of ourselves.

Of all animated creation that is capable of enjoyment, man is the only being that does not always take the sunny side of life, and man is the one, of all, that should shun the shadows most. He is endowed with intelligence and reason, which should make him best promote his own proper enjoyments; but the instinct of the lower creations gives them a philosophy that man's reason often denies to himself; and man has less happiness, with greater opportunities for its possession, than any of the other countless forms and grades of life. The hooting owl and the mousing bat and the savage beast shun the sunlight and make darkness hideous with their weird and discordant language; but there is not a sweet bird of song, a beautiful flower, a fragrant shrub, a fruitful tree or plant of earth, or warbler of the air, or sportive inhabitant of brook or sea, or other thing that responds to the kindness of man, that does not take the sunny side of life.

* Delivered before the Alumni Association of Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pa, June 22, 1881.

Most of all the many woes of men are created by themselves, and a vast preponderance of them are provoked by shunning the sunny side and perversely wading through the shadows and sloughs and brambles which could and should be avoided. The sturdy oak of the forest reaches out to the sun its stoutest branches and greenest verdure, and its sober lichen and scars point to the chilly north. The creeping vine that clings to the trunk and branches throws all its varied beauty to the sunny side. All of nature's grandeur, from the shrinking daisy to autumn's gorgeous panorama of gilded grove and mountain, are but pictures of the sunny side of life, and the dancing dimples of our babbling streams are the pretty playthings of wrestling light and shadow. Every rising sun is greeted with gratitude by all that makes the world brighter and better, but man; and he, the lord of all, to whom all created things are made subject, often passes the song of thanks from heaven's choristers in listlessness or clouded forgetfulness, and the flowers which gratefully perfume the air whence he draws his life, and which scatter a profusion of beauty along his pathway, awaken no praise from him to whom all the beatitude of earth pays tribute. It is not wholly poetic license that has given us that painful reflex of ourselves in the oft quoted but little heeded lines which tells us of nature, that "every prospect pleases, and only man is vile."

SUNNY SIDE OF THE PRESENT.

Take the sunny side of the present. We are all prone to belittle the greatness and cloud the grandeur of the times in which we live. We throw nothing but sunshine on the achievements of the past. We are forgetful that the infirmities of the heroes of past ages, which were visible to their people, have perished with them, and only their virtues and triumphs survive. The standard

by which men and events of the present are judged is wholly different from the standards of the past. This age of universal schools, and churches, and newspapers, and railways, and telegraphs, brings greatness face to face with its judges, while the past worshiped its heroes at enchanting distance and seldom came in personal contact with its idols. I regard the generation in which I have lived as the grandest of the world's history. It has created greater heroes and statesmen, given a mightier impetus to enlightened progress, done more for the elevation and happiness of mankind, than any generation of all the many which have gone before. Turn to the sunny side of the present people of the world, and where, in all the progress of our forefathers, or of Europe, have they been surpassed or even equaled? Alexander conquered the world, died in a debauch, and his achievements perished; Hannibal's Carthaginians shook the gates of Rome in the zenith of her power, but Carthage is effaced from the earth; Cæsar crossed the Rubicon, vanquished Pompey, mastered Rome and ripened for the dagger of Brutus; Napoleon's eagles swept from Spain to the Pyramids and to Moscow, and the end was a fretted death in captivity. He brought France glory, luxury and decay. Washington won liberty for the Colonies, and knew not what "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" was when he had gained it. It required a Jefferson to teach him that freedom was not a tempered form of kingly rule. In the generous sunlight we throw back upon the past, we declare Washington our exemplar as soldier, statesman, patriot; but if he lived to-day, and attempted to govern as he governed nearly a century ago, he would be execrated as an imperious despot. Do not shudder at the venture of criticising the immaculate Washington. I am simply throwing the same sunlight upon him that we throw upon the greatness of the present, and I find a stern patriot, a stern statesman,

a stern chieftain; a man who never laughed and seldom smiled; one who believed in religion, in severe devotion to duty, disbelieved in the equality of men, and deformed republican power with awkward shreds of royalty. Washington filled the great want of the oppressed Colonies a century ago, but we have greater warriors, abler statesmen, and as true patriots to-day, as the Revolution produced.

I crossed the Father of Waters a generation ago, and there was not a State west or north of Missouri. Now a great empire of States and peopled Territories extends to the golden States of the Pacific and north to the British possessions. The iron horse sings his rude song over thousands of miles of western lines where the buffalo and the savage reigned in undisputed possession within the memory of the present. Universal education, the greatest boon from man to man, is the creation of those who are yet among the living. The newspaper, the school, the railway, as blessings common to all, are among the achievements of our own generation. The greatest war of human history has its visible scars yet among us on every side, and Grecian and Roman story does not equal the actual heroism of the blue and the gray in our late civil conflict. The armies of Washington, Jackson and Scott, our idolized heroes of the past, never exceeded a full division in the armies of Grant, and their battles would have been recorded as affairs of outposts in Virginia or the Southwest. A Phil Sheridan or a Stonewall Jackson would have defeated Washington on equal terms, as a morning's diversion, and Scott bowed, brokenhearted, to the younger and greater warriors of to-day. We lisp the names of Clay, Webster and Calhoun with a reverence that is denied to the statesmen of our time ; but compare the achievements of statesmanship during the present generation with the achievements of the generation of Clay, Webster and Calhoun, and with all

the sunlight we kindly throw upon the past, the triumphs of its greatness pale before the triumphs of the last two decades. Where are the monuments of Clay, Webster and Calhoun's master statesmanship? They have perished, while the monuments of Lincoln as Emancipator, of Stevens as Commoner, of Chase as Minister of Finance, of Stanton as War Minister, of Grant as Chieftain in war and Reconstructor in peace, will endure until the Republic shall be no more. There are many sincere men who are ready to answer that Lincoln was a rude jester, that Stevens was a red-handed revolutionist, that Chase was an ambitious dreamer, that Stanton was a cruel despot, and that Grant aimed at imperialism, but when the passions which grapple with the infirmities of the present shall have run their course, and the generations of the future shall view the sunny side of the greatness of the past, as we view it now, these accusations will have perished. It was my fortune to come in personal contact with most of the great actors in the field and cabinet during the late war, and I wish now that I could look upon them as past generations looked upon their idols. They were only men, with all of men's infirmities, as were the men of the Revolution and all the great heroes and statesmen of every land and time; but the newspaper, the railway, the school, the telegraph, have brought hero and worshiper face to face, and greatness is dwarfed by: the nearness that exposes its blemishes to common inspection. You have read of the multitude that scoffed at the rude statue, chiseled to gain symmetry and beauty by distance, and how the scoffers cheered when the statue rose to its pinnacle. We saw our heroes and statesmen of to-day face to face, read of their daily achievements and failures, had their infirmities pictured before us as party or faction struggled in the conflicts of ambition, and we are slow to understand that our generation is single from all others of the world's history, in the