And many other matters I remember fondly,--a certain lonely hill at
sunset, whence you looked over wide water to distant dream-enchanted
shores; the urbanity and humor of the wise directors of the Institution;
the manner of many young students who discerned an unadmitted sanctity
beneath the smiling conversations of those summer hours; my own last
lecture, on "The Importance of Enjoying Life"; the people who walked with
me to the station and whom I was sorry to leave; and the oddly-minded
student behind the desk of the hotel; and an old man from Kentucky who
cared about Walt Whitman after I had talked about his ministrations in the
army hospitals; and the trees, and the reverberating organ, and, beneath a
benison of midnight peace, the hushed moon-silvery surface of the lake. It
is, indeed, a memorable experience to have lectured at Chautauqua.
ACADEMIC LEADERSHIP
Any one who has traveled much about the country of recent years must have
been impressed by the growing uneasiness of mind among thoughtful men.
Whether in the smoking car, or the hotel corridor, or the college hall,
everywhere, if you meet them off their guard and stripped of the optimism
which we wear as a public convention, you will hear them saying in a kind
of sad amazement, "What is to be the end of it all?" They are alarmed at
the unsettlement of property and the difficulties that harass the man of
moderate means in making provision for the future; they are uneasy over
the breaking up of the old laws of decorum, if not of decency, and over
the unrestrained pursuit of excitement at any cost; they feel vaguely that
in the decay of religion the bases of society have been somehow weakened.
Now, much of this sort of talk is as old as history, and has no special
significance. We are prone to forget that civilization has always been a
_tour de force_, so to speak, a little hard-won area of order and
self-subordination amidst a vast wilderness of anarchy and barbarism that
are with difficulty held in check and are continually threatening to
overrun their bounds. But that is equally no reason for over-confidence.
Civilization is like a ship traversing an untamed sea. It is a more
complex machine in our day, with command of greater forces, and might seem
correspondingly safer than in the era of sails. But fresh catastrophes
have shown that the ancient perils of navigation still confront the
largest vessel, when the crew loses its discipline or the officers neglect
their duty; and the analogy is not without its warning.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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