I

CHAPTER XXIII.

MEMORIES FROM OLD STUDENTS.

FROM COLONEL WESTON FLINT, LL.D., OF WASHINGTON, D. C.

TRUST you will not think me negligent in delaying to express my

great personal loss in the death of President Allen. I know how very little words can do to tell what the heart feels, and, more, how empty words are to those upon whom a great grief has fallen, as it has upon you. But I must express my own sorrow; I feel as if some great part of personal life were gone from my immediate grasp. It is not gone, but the first feeling is one of loneliness. But then again I think of what I have garnered up in the soul, what precious influences for good have been with me all my life, and will be to the end, that came from that noble heart, now stilled.

"To me President Allen resembled the grand philosophers of old. He was a man who looked to the bottom of things, hence his hatred of shams. He wanted what was noble in a man, and hence his pure democracy of giving everyone, whatever his place in life, rich or poor, his due reward. He saw through men. He was at times, as some of us thought, a little severe, yet he was as tender as a woman.

"I do not think that the students who received so much from him all these years appreciated the greatness of his character, but they will do so as the years go on. His toil of a lifetime in such a noble work leaves its impress on humanity. It goes down the ages. The outward expression of the wealth of the soul that has fallen upon human hearts is far more enduring than all else in this world.

"It was a disappointment that I could not be with you as the last words were spoken in his honor; but the words that were spoken by him are far more important to us all. I shall ever remember him as the lofty ideal of a true man.

"There is so much of grandeur in a character like President Allen's that, although I feel keenly the loss that has come to us in his death, yet, more than all, I rejoice that such a priceless inheritance has been left in his noble self-sacrifice of a life for the good of others."

FROM DR. DANIEL LEWIS, PRESIDENT OF THE NEW YORK STATE MEDICAL ASSOCIATION.

"Our lamented president of Alfred possessed so remarkable a combination of great and striking qualities that no brief paragraphs of mine can adequately enumerate them. After I left college (where it was my privilege to know him as intimately as any alumnus could), and compared his personality with many men of wide-extended reputation, the one feature which impressed me more than another in President Allen was the transcendent nobility of his ideals of life. I believe that my most abject failure in his estimation (and I remember many) was an effort made to meet his views in an anniversary oration upon a theme he wished

me to treat.

"While it was a grand experience for Alfred students to be under his tuition, yet I now see that his own powers were restricted in so limited a sphere of action. If his field had been the great world of the metropolis, for example, no man of the present generation could have achieved a more brilliant or lasting reputation in his chosen field of scientific work or upon the platform.

"His diversity of great talents were a marvel to me. He was a master in natural history, a leader in philosophy and theology, an expert in the classics, in rhetoric unapproachable, in the pulpit with few equals in this or any other country. In his intercourse with boys he misunderstood them often, as they failed to appreciate him, but in maturer years they became his warm advocates and most devoted adherents at all times and everywhere.

"Alfred College can never find another President Allen, but, if his influence still lives in the hearts of the alumni and friends, his successor will be enabled by other aid to take up and advance the work which he so nobly carried on, until the past history of the school shall become only as the dawn of a bright and prosperous day."

REMINISCENCES OF ALFRED, BY JUDGE STEPHEN G. NYE.

"My first introduction to the school at Alfred was in 1854. It was then known as 'Alfred Academy and Teachers' Seminary,' and, as its name indicated, its province was the education of public school-teachers, and the preparation of young men for college; but it was far more than that. To me it was the opening of a new world. It seemed as if we breathed the atmosphere of optimism. I went there intent on pursuing academic studies for a year or two, and then intended to take up the study of medicine; but the conception of a full college curriculum was

something that even imagination was not permitted to entertain. Like the great bulk of Alfred students, I earned the means for further education by teaching and by labor, that brought monetary return. After I had enlisted as a student, the most frequent question was, 'What college are you preparing for?' I found there a great army of young men without purse or fortune, as confident of college honors as if they were already attained. It seemed to me the sublimity of impudence; I grew to believe it the sublimity of faith. I had not been a student there thirty days until the current swept me along, and I was literally 'in the swim,' and saw my college parchment just ahead as distinctly and certainly as if it were already in my grasp. In due time it came.

"I had never seen any institution before, I have never seen one since, where the sentiment that all things are possible to him who strives seemed so completely to permeate and pervade and saturate and possess and energise student life as at Alfred.

"The social atmosphere was purely democratic. Sons of the rich were there; but nothing in the student intercourse could indicate who they were. In the winter of 1855 I left Alfred to replenish my purse by teaching. The warmest welcome I received on my return in the spring was from the son of a wealthy manufacturer of New York City, who somehow seemed to think that I was enjoying advantages he did not possess. Of course I looked at it in a different light. Such boyhood ought to develop into noble and useful manhood, and it did.

"The influence, or atmosphere, or sentiment, or ambition, or whatever you may term it, that surrounded Alfred, which developed high resolve and ardent effort, was, as I have said, peculiar to itself. Its cause, I think, was in its teachers. Professor Kenyon, the founder of the school, was the principal, or president. Earnest, energetic, tireless, zealous for the good of the students, with a mind fertile in expedients, a man whose early life was along narrow lines, where 'low living and high thinking' had built up a magnificent manhood, whose sympathies reached out with stout words and strong arms to the young who trod the rugged paths over which he had journeyed, he was the ideal teacher. His rare ability in that character was in nothing more strongly shown than in the selection of his associate teachers. Professor Jonathan Allen was one of these. He had completed his collegiate course at Oberlin, and we can readily understand that, under the guidance and influence of the profound Dr. Mahan, and the blunt, truthful, energetic, sham-hating, liberty-loving President Finney, a mind tempered like Professor Allen's suffered no detriment. When he returned to Alfred, in 1849, Professor Kenyon made no mistake in selecting him as associate teacher.

'When I first knew him I was a boy of twenty; he was a dozen years older. Whether because of a taste for studies wherein he had made deeper research, or whatever cause, to me he seemed head and shoulders above his fellows. Tall, erect, of commanding presence, he filled the Roman ideal, mens sana in corpore sano.

"In the field of mental and moral science he was particularly at home. In the class room, some of us, in a spirit of mischief, or, as we termed it, 'to try his gait,' sometimes raised a discussion on lines opposed to the books, and nothing pleased him more than the independent thought that led outside of the text. If we could rouse him to pace the floor, we knew that the feast was cooking, and that it would soon be spread. When the argument came, his favorite position was facing the class, the index finger of his right hand breast high; this seemed the conduit off which rolled syllogism, logic, and illustration, his gaze apparently going through and beyond us, as if thence he drew upon the depot of his intellectual supplies. Even the advent of a new class for the succeeding hour could hardly divert him from the line of thought until the argument was complete. And back of all there seemed depths that we had never sounded, and reserves of power never measured. As a Damascus blade, when point and hilt have met, resumes position when freed, so he seemed able to sustain any load, and to resume, fresh and vigorous, his native posture when the burden was removed.

"Twenty-nine years after leaving Alfred I visited the school for the first time, and then but for a single day. Of all the teachers that were there in the old days, Dr. Allen and his wife alone remained. Others had been promoted from the student ranks, and the doctor had been president for many years of the great Institution grown upon the foundation planted by Professor Kenyon so long ago. Changed he was, and yet the same. Hair and beard had whitened, but mind, and soul, and heart had grown broader, stronger, deeper, and so had the great Institution of which he was the head. It was plain that the old spirit pervaded the student ranks. He still inspired them with the faith that all things come to those who have faith to labor and to wait. Looking back over the struggles of the early history of Alfred, the enduring labor and patience of Professors Kenyon and Allen, the thousands in the generations of the young who came under the energizing and inspiring influence of their school, and their personal influence, and the Institution they have left us, certain, it seems to me, that

"They builded better than they knew.'"