[Speech of James Russell Lowell at the Harvard Alumni dinner at Cambridge, Mass., June 30, 1875. Mr. Lowell was the presiding officer.] BRETHREN OF THE ALUMNI:--It is, I think, one of the greatest privileges conferred upon us by our degree that we can meet together once a year in this really majestic hall [Memorial Hall], commemorative of our proudest sorrows, suggestive only of our least sordid ambitions; that we can meet here to renew our pledge of fealty to the ancient mother who did so much for the generations that have gone before us, and who will be as benign to those who, by-and-by, shall look back and call us fathers. The tie that binds us to our college is one of the purest, since it is that which unites us also with our youth; it is one of the happiest, for it binds us to the days when we looked forward and not backward, for in hope there is nothing to regret, while in retrospect there is a touch of autumn and a premonition of winter. In this year of centennials, when none of us would be surprised if a century plant should blossom in our back yard [laughter], when I myself am matured, as I look to complete my second centennial on Saturday afternoon [laughter and applause], there is a kind of repose, as it seems to me, in coming back here to sit in the lap of this dear old nurse who is well on toward her three hundred, and who will certainly never ask any of us to celebrate her centennial either in prose or verse. To this college our Revolution which we are celebrating this year is modern. And I think also one of the great privileges which she confers upon us is that she gives us a claim of kindred still with the mother country--a claim purely intellectual and safe from the embitterment of war or the jealousies of trade. It was an offshoot of Cambridge and Oxford that was planted on the banks of the Charles, and by men from Cambridge and Oxford; and when I visited those renowned nurseries of piety, scholarship, and manliness of thought, my keenest pleasure in the kindness I received was the feeling that I owed the greater part of it to my connection with Harvard, whom they were pleased to acknowledge as a plant not unworthy of the parent stock. [Applause.]