FIRST ANNUAL BANQUET. 123 



our dreams of usefulness to fade, and we die with grand 

 purposes unfulfilled. I am a poor interpreter of our com- 

 mon nature if I am wrong in saying that some time, in bet- 

 ter hours, have come to each of us, those noble purposes of 

 beneficence, or larger usefulness and wider influence, quite 

 within our reach, which, if they had been permitted to take 

 shape in created work, would have brought to this city of 

 St. Louis a golden age, in all that ennobles and uplifts a 

 community. 



Mr. Shaw, however, made real his dream of usefulness, 

 in an executed scheme, — a scheme thoughtfully and wisely 

 worked out in all its details long years ago, and in no de- 

 gree dependent upon his own years of life. Death makes 

 no break in the continuity of a life so merged in a definite 

 and an accomplished purpose. 



Mr. Shaw's purpose, whilst largely to give pleasure to 

 the whole community by the maintenance of the garden, 

 was something more than that. His own enjoyment was 

 not simply from the aesthetic side. He had learned to 

 know that, beneath the transient sensuous beauty of leaf 

 and branch and flower, was a more occult, yet a more per- 

 manent and a diviner beauty of law, as yet but imperfectly 

 revealed ; and the establishment of the School of Botany, 

 where patient study of that law might be pursued by the 

 few, was a necessary supplement to the full enjoyment of 

 the garden by the many. There is no word left for the 

 critics to speak as to what more might have been done. 

 The whole is complete and rounded and perfect as Achilles' 

 shield. 



And not the least consideration, it seems to me, in hon- 

 orino- Mr. Shaw, and one which addresses itself peculiarly 

 to us, is the thought that his beneficence, whilst wide and 

 far-reaching, and comprehensive in its influence and in its 

 results, is essentially a local beneficence, — one springing 

 in a great degree out of his affection for the city of his 

 more than three-score years of residence. 



I cannot but think that the tendency of the age is to les- 



