ADDRESS

BASIL L. GILDERSLEEVE, PH. D., LL. D.

PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY

In the many tributes already paid to the revered and beloved first President of the Johns Hopkins University the old-fashioned functionary known to foreign universities now as the Public Orator, now as the Professor of Eloquence, would find ample material for a formal address on this memorable occasion. To the crowning achievement of his life, to the organization of this school, by which men date a new era in the history of American education, converged as to a centre all the lines of his earlier activities. It was for this in the Providence of God that he was imbued with the noble traditions of a great college, that he was brought into contact with the scientific and social life of Europe, that he made himself familiar with the work of the librarian, that he mastered the system of public education, that he discharged the active duties of a professorship, that he planned the machinery of a great scientific school, that he served as the head of a great university. The preparation for the supreme task of his life was as elaborate as his personal endowments were rare; and from the centre thus gained there went forth a radiation of beneficent influences that were felt in every part of the community and the country. It was the glory of the Johns Hopkins University that its President was foremost in every good word and work. It was no fountain sealed-it was a source of life and light. Such was the central sphere, such the ever enlarging cycles of his philanthropic endeavor; and so effective was his work that he seemed to be the one great champion of each cause that he espoused. Wherever he appeared there came light and hope and confidence. His wide vision was matched by his discernment of spirits which is the secret of power, his marvellous resourcefulness by his wonderful sense of order. There have been

many to tell of these things, of his untiring energy, of his unfailing courtesy, which was the effluence of a sympathy unfeigned, his large and gracious hospitality, his inexhaustible generosity, which not only responded to every appeal for help, but even divined the needs of those who hid their trouble as if it were a treasure. His native dignity had no touch of austerity. His presence was a bright presence and a pure presence. There are few who like him have not sinned with their lips under the temptation of the infectious mirth of the social circle. High qualities all these but they are marred in some men by a self-seeking spirit which regards all praise of others as an encroachment on vested rights. No man so utterly free as was he from envy and jealousy. He rejoiced in the successes of his followers more than in his own. He delighted to espy the first recognition of a member of his academic staff, to get the first appreciative newspaper clipping, to secure the first copy of a new book by one of his men in advance of the author himself. If recognition was slow in coming to one of his associates, its value was enhanced when it came by the eagerness with which he tried to make good the long arrears. Chief trait of all was his faith in his high calling-the faith that led him to triumph, that sustained him under trial. Optimism men call it. He was known as an optimist. And so he was in the best sense. He lived as looking forward to the best, as hoping for the best, as seeing Him who is invisible. All these things have been brought out with varying stress, now in unstudied interview, now in formal resolution, by those who have undertaken to speak his praise, to tell of their love and reverence. But to say again what others have said and said better than I could say it-that is not the office to which I have been called to-day. I have been asked to speak because to me the man, Daniel Coit Gilman, was not a mere synonym for an array of high achievements, an assemblage of high qualities, a treasury of noble thoughts, a source of happy

influences. He was much more to me than all that, and though others of his colleagues were nearer to him than I, still there are circumstances in our common history that would make it recreancy in me not to respond to the request that I should undertake to represent the thought, the judgment, the feelings of those who shared his work and followed his standard.

I am the oldest, if not the earliest of his Baltimore fellow-workers now living. For twenty-five years, a consid erable stretch in the longest life a period that suffices for the true mission of most men-for twenty-five years, for more than twenty-five years, we were friends in council, and he often playfully referred to the early days of the University when he and I constituted the faculty. Those days soon passed, but the memory of them is precious to the survivor, and at a time when each man is talking to his neighbor of the common loss and recalling this incident and that, to illustrate the character and the career of the departed master, I may be forgiven for bringing forth my treasured remembrance of the hour when we first met in my old academic home, and when, all unsuspected by me, he was taking my measure for the office I was destined to fill, my treasured remembrance of the long consultation in Washington when he invited me to share his work, and, contrary to his wont, for he kept early hours, pursued until the night waxed old, the high theme of the University that was to be. Together we journeyed in the cause of the University, in which the founder himself had made provision for my native South-to Staunton, to Richmond, to Raleigh. But time would fail me tell the story of that early fellowship, or even even to touch on the salient points of those far-off days. "The old favor sleeps" is the plaint of a Greek poet, but I am happy to think that with him the old favor never slept or slumbered, and in my last interview with him just thirty-three years-just a genera

to

tion-after he sought me out at the University of Virginia, we could look back on all that long period of unbroken friendship and unforfeited confidence, and when I go over in my mind the details of that last interview, I cannot help thinking that his never-failing benignity had in it something of the tenderness of a last farewell. No wonder that I have dreaded for years lest this hour should come to me, that I had hoped he should be the one to say the little that was to be said about his fellow. worker and his follower, and that I should not have to face the impossible task of summing up his achievements, of portraying his character. You see, my friends, I cannot even at this time dissociate my private loss from the public loss, nor can I suppress the personal note in this public tribute. My plea must be that my relations to him have their counterpart in the experience of all those who were privileged to work under the first Head of the University-and hateful as the first person always is-I find that I cannot better illustrate than by my own example the potent influence of the great administrator, or rather let me say the great Taskmaster. It is indeed

a homely word, but it is one he himself would not have disapproved, he who lived as ever in his great Taskmaster's eye. No Egyptian taskmaster was he with cruel criticism and meddlesome interference; no unwise taskmaster to burden himself with the assumption of duties which he had assigned to others.

There were two men of genius in the little band the first President first gathered about him. Now the wind of genius bloweth where it listeth and no one dreams of setting a task to men like Sylvester and Rowland, yet they, too, were ministers to his far-reaching plans; and momentous as the work of these men was in itself, its effectiveness was due in large measure to the infinite tact of the man who guided the fortunes of the University. Few men would have been large-minded enough to appre

ciate the value of those idealists-few men would have known how to make a plain path before them.

And now I go on to make my confession as to his dealings with another of his staff, with his only close contemporary in that first company. No man considers himself a problem, for every man fancies that he knows himself. But looking backward it seems to me that I. too, must have been a problem. With twenty years behind me of familiarity with university work, in which questions of administration as well as problems of instruction were always coming up, with all the spirit of independence bred by the conditions of my nativity, by the atmosphere of my only academic home, a man of his own age and so not overawed by the old experience of another I might have given trouble to a man less familiar with the stops of human will. And yet while I was free as air in the conduct of the special work I was appointed to do, I have been so swayed by what I once called his mild but fatal insistence that I have engaged in lines of effort that were foreign to my habits and my inclinations, and much that I have accomplished from my entrance upon the work of the Johns Hopkins University down to this day has been due to his initiative. He knew that we were children of the same creed, he knew that we had both been trained to respond to the call of the stern daughter of the voice of God-to obey the mandate "This is the way. Walk ye in it."

And so it came about that a man who was radically un-American in his aversion to public performance, who in twenty years had only four or five public discourses to his account--was called on over and over again in the early years of the University to represent by formal addresses and popular lectures the spirit of the new insti tution; and, if for many years I have seldom figured in that capacity, it has been because he found other work for me to do, work for which he deemed me better fitted, though it was work for which, I must confess, I had little