ADDRESS 



OF 



HOK JAMES A. GARFIELD. 



IN the presence of these fathers of science who have honored this 

 occasion with their wisdom and eloquence, I can do but little more 

 than express my gratitude for the noble contribution they have 

 made to this national expression of love and reverence. So com- 

 pletely have they covered the ground, so fully have they sketched 

 the great life which we celebrate, that nothing is left but to linger a 

 moment over the tributes they have offered and select here and there 

 a special excellence to carry away as a lasting memorial. 



No page of human history is so instructive and significant as the 

 record of those early influences which develop the character and 

 direct the lives of eminent men. To every man of great original 

 power there comes, in early youth, a moment of sudden discovery 

 of self recognition when his own nature is revealed to himself, 

 when he catches, for the first time, a strain of that immortal song 

 to which his own spirit answers, and which becomes thenceforth 

 and forever the inspiration of his life 



"Like noble music unto noble words." 



More than a hundred years ago, in Strasburg on the Rhine, in 

 obedience to the commands of his father, a German lad was reluct- 

 antly studying the mysteries of the civil law, but feeding his spirit 

 as best he could upon the formal and artificial poetry of his native 

 land, when a page of WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE met his eye and 

 changed the whole current of his life. Abandoning the law, he 

 created and crowned with an immortal name the grandest epoch of 



German literature. 



(91) 



