pact, which ye boums must do a grate deal of hirt & distress them in a grate degree Small mortars we have with which we fire in upon them. I have had my health since I landed.

My dear wife I expect to be longer gon from home then I did when I left it: but I desire not to think of returning Till Louisbourg is taken: & I hope God will inable you to submit quietly to his will whatever it may be; and inable you with courage & good conduct to go through ye grate business yt is now upon your hands & not think your time ill spent in teaching and governing your family according to ye word of God.

My company in general are well: Some few of them are Ill, But hope none dangerous.

The affairs at home I can order nothing But must wholly leave Hoping yt they will be well ordered & taken care of: My kind love to Mr Sweetland my duty to Mother Hunt & love to Brothers and sisters all

My Dear wife If it be the will of God I hope to see your pleasant face again : But if God in his Holy and Sovereign Providence has ordered it others wise, I hope to have a glorious meeting with you in ye Kingdom of heaven where there is no wars nor Fatiguing marches, no roaring cannon nor cracking Boum shells, nor long Campains; But an eternity to spend in Perfect harmony and undisturbed peace. This is ye hartty Desire & Prayer

of him yt is your loving

Husband SETH POMROY.

TO MRS MARY POMROY at Northampton in New-England.

47

ADDRESS

DELIVERED BEFORE THE PHI BETA KAPPA SOCIETY IN YALE COL

LEGE, NEW-HAVEN, AUGUST 20, 1833.

MR PRESIDENT, AND GENTLEMEN,

It has given me peculiar satisfaction to obey your call, and appear before you on this occasion. I take a sincere pleasure, as an affectionate and dutiful child of Harvard, and as an humble member of the branch of our fraternity there established, in presenting myself within the precincts of this ancient and distinguished seminary, for the discharge of the agreeable duty which you have assigned me. I rejoice in the confidence implied in your invitation, that I know neither sect nor party, in the republic of letters; and that I enter your halls with as much assurance of a kind reception, as I would enter those of my own revered and ever gracious Alma Mater. This confidence does me no more than justice. Ardently and gratefully attached to the institution in which I received my education, I could in no way so effectually prove myself its degenerate child, as by harboring the slightest feeling of jealousy at the great and growing reputation of this its distinguished rival. In no way could I so surely prove myself a tardy scholar of the school in which I have been brought up, as by refusing to rejoice in the prosperity and usefulness of every sister institution devoted to the same good cause; and especially of this the most eminent and efficient of her associates.

There are recollections of former times, well calculated to form a bond of good feeling between our universities. We cannot forget

that, in the early days of Harvard, when its existence almost depended on the precarious contributions of its friends,-contributions not of munificent affluence, but of pious poverty,-not poured into the academic coffers in splendid dotations, but spared from the scanty means of an infant and destitute country, and presented in their primitive form,-a bushel of wheat, a cord of wood, and a string of Indian beads, (this last not a little to the annoyance of good old President Dunster, who, as the records of the Commissioners. of the United Colonies tell us, was sorely perplexed, in sifting out from the mass of the genuine quahog and periwinkle, bits of blue glass and colored stones, feloniously intermixed, without the least respect for the purity of the Colony's wampum),* we cannot forget that, in that day of small things, the contributions of Connecticut and New-Haven,—as the two infant colonies were distinguished,— flowed as liberally to the support of Cambridge, as those of Plymouth and Massachusetts. Still less would I forget that, of the three first generations of the fathers of Connecticut, those who were educated in America received their education at Cambridge; that the four first Presidents of Yale were graduates of Harvard; and that of all your distinguished men in church and state, for nearly a hundred years, a goodly proportion were fitted for usefulness in life within her venerable walls. If the success of the child be the joy of the parent, and the honor of the pupil be the crown of the master, with what honest satisfaction may not our institutions reflect, that they stood to each other in this interesting relation, in this early and critical state of the country's growth, when the direction taken and the character impressed were decisive of interminable consequences. And while we claim the right of boasting of your character and institutions as in some degree the fruit of a good old Massachusetts' influence, we hope you will not have cause to feel ashamed of the auspices under which, to a certain extent, the foundation of those institutions was laid, and their early progress encouraged.

In choosing a topic on which to address you this morning, I should feel a greater embarrassment than I do, did I not suppose that your thoughts, like my own, would flow naturally into such a

*Hazard's State Papers, Vol. II, p. 124.

channel of reflection as may be presumed at all times to be habitual and familiar with men of liberal education or patriotic feeling. The great utility of occasions like this, and of the addresses they elicit, is not to impart stores of information laboriously collected,— not to broach new systems, requiring carefully weighed arguments for their defence, or a multitude of well-arranged facts for their illustration. We meet at these literary festivals, to promote kind feeling; to impart new strength to good purposes; to enkindle and animate the spirit of improvement in ourselves and others. We leave our closets, our offices, and our studies, to meet and salute each other in these pleasant paths; to prevent the diverging walks of life from wholly estranging those from each other, who were kind friends at its outset ; to pay our homage to the venerated fathers, who honor with their presence the return of these academic festivals; and those of us who are no longer young, to make acquaintance with the ardent and ingenuous, who are following after us. The preparation for an occasion like this, is in the heart, not in the head; it is in the attachments formed, and the feelings inspired, in the bright morning of life. Our preparation is in the classic atmosphere of the place, in the tranquillity of the academic grove, in the unoffending peace of the occasion, in the open countenance of long-parted associates joyous at meeting, and in the kind and indulgent smile of the favoring throng, which bestows its animating attendance on these our humble academic exercises.

When I look around upon the assembled audience, and reflect, from how many different places of abode throughout our country the professional part of it is gathered, and in what a variety of pursuits and duties it is there occupied; and when I consider that this our literary festival is also honored with the presence of many from every other class of the community, all of whom have yet a common interest in one subject at least, I feel as if the topic on which I am to ask your attention, were imperatively suggested to me. It is the nature and efficacy of education, as the great human instrument of improving the condition of man.

Education has been, at some former periods, exclusively, and more or less, at all former periods, the training of a learned class; the mode in which men of letters or the members of the professions acquired that lore, which enabled them to insulate themselves

from the community, and gave them the monopoly of rendering the services in church and state, which the wants or imaginations of men made necessary, and of the honors and rewards, which, by the political constitution of society, attached to their discharge.

I admit, that there was something generous and liberal in education; something popular, and, if I may so express it, republican, in the educated class, even at the darkest period. Learning, even in its most futile and scholastic forms, was still an affair of the mind. It was not like hereditary rank, mere physical accident: it was not, like military power, mere physical force. It gave an intellectual influence, derived from intellectual superiority; and it enabled some minds, even in the darkest ages of European history, to rise from obscurity and poverty, to be the lights and guides of mankind. Such was Beda, the great luminary of a dark period, a poor and studious monk, who, without birth or fortune, became the great teacher of science and letters to the age in which he lived. Such, still more eminently, was his illustrious pupil Alcuin, who, by the simple force of mental energy, employed in intellectual pursuits, raised himself from the cloister, to be the teacher, companion, and friend of Charlemagne; and to whom it has been said, that France is indebted, for all the polite literature of his own and the succeeding ages.* Such, at a later period, was another poor monk, Roger Bacon, the precursor, and for the state of the times in which he lived, scarcely the inferior of his namesake, the immortal Chancellor.

But a few brilliant exceptions do not affect the general character of the education of former ages. It was a thing apart from the condition, the calling, the service, and the participation of the great mass of men. It was the training of a privileged class; and was far too exclusively the instrument by which one of the favored orders of society was enabled to exercise a tyrannical and exclusive control over the millions which lay wrapt in ignorance and super

* Ei quicquid politioris literaturæ isto et sequentibus sæculis Gallia ostentat totum acceptum referri debet. Ei Academiæ Parisiensis, Turonensis, Fuldensis, Suessionensis, aliæque plures originem et incrementa debent, quibus, ille, si non præsens præfuit, aut fundamenta posuit, saltem doctrina præluxit, exemplo præivit, et beneficiis a Carolo impetratis adauxit.'-Cave, Hist. Lit. Sac. VII, An. 780, cited in the Life of Alcuin, in the Biographia Britannica.