JLidrary. 



ADDRESS. 



LADIES AND GENTLEMEN : 



Appearing before you to-night, at the request of my asno- 

 ciates, to close these Anniversary Exercises, I invite your 

 attention to some thoughts which have occurred to me as 

 suitable to the occasion, but which pertain rather to the prac- 

 tical and utilitarian side of life and learning than to the 

 aesthetic and imaginative. For this feature of them, however, 

 I deem it unnecessary to apologize, since nature herself teaches 

 us, by innumerable examples, that there is, in her domain at 

 least, no necessary antagonism between the Useful and the 

 Beautiful ; between those qualities of things by which they 

 minister to man's physical wants, and those by which they 

 gratify his tastes, and his intellectual and moral susceptibili- 

 ties On- the contrary, she more commonly exhibits the two 

 in closest harmony. Beautiful blossom and nutritious fruit 

 are borne by the same tree. The useful potato rejoices in a 

 delicate flower. The same substance that, as coal, drives our 

 engines and warms our dwellings, as diamond, adds luster to 

 the charms of beauty, and splendor to the coronets of kiiii> 

 The stream, that woos the poet to its shaded brink, and inspire* 

 him with the music of its flow, turns also the laboring mill- 

 wheel, and ministers assiduously to the success of industry. 

 The sun, that flushes the dawn with rosy light, and in his 

 glorious rising bathes the earth and the heavens with beaut} 

 and gladness, serves also, as an index on a dial, to divide out 

 for man the indispensable alternations of day and night, <t 



