inverted cup has no word, only a smile, for all our gesture and speech.' Yet 

 when I see the beauty of this border and fringe of the universe, the leaves 

 at this season turning to crimson, coral, and yellow gold ere they drop, let no 

 sceptic tell me it is superstition to believe that a Higher than we causes and 

 delights in these charms, and angels innumerable and unseen give us in our 

 transport a share of their ecstasy. 



You will understand it is the religious character of Benjamin Peirce, the 

 great professor, of whom I am to speak, that prompts such reflections for 

 the fit preface and tenor of any true history of his course. His merits in that 

 field of calculation so few are able to enter, among the stars, being unable to 

 measure, I must leave to a jury of his peers, among whom he stood in the 

 first rank, at Paris and Berlin as well as Washington and as well as Boston. 

 What in him fixes my thought, and concerns us all, is his moral example, 

 and his contribution in his convictions to Christian faith. 



" An uridevout astronomer is mad." 



But how few ministers and communicants in regular standing were as devout 

 as he ! He belonged to the same class of minds with Newton, Kepler, 

 Swedenborg, Plato, and all philosophers of supreme influence and repute, 

 in whom keen perception and worshipful feeling are combined. The students 

 of phenomena, of the symptoms in the creation or any of its parts, may be 

 atheistic, as physicians and physical observers have sometimes been ; but 

 Professor Peirce was one of those who take the spiritual into their view. He 

 was a second-sighted, double-sighted, or binocular man. His observation 

 never stuck in the material facts, or stopped short of the principle. If he 

 did not conceive of laws as given or made at any period of time, he beheld 

 them inhering in an Infinite One, eternal and alive, whom he could love and 

 adore. Therefore I single out and point to this dear and revered soul, 

 in the service of our Cambridge University and of our intellectual society 

 for so many years, as one that was never swamped in the "worse than 

 Serbonian bog " of the materialism that has in the last generation so 

 invaded some of the European and other schools, but rose ever into the 

 heaven of personal verities, of which the ethereal orbits he loved to contem- 

 plate were to him but types. He was a scientist, if any one deserves that 

 name, but a philosopher too, and rather of the ideal than utilitarian stamp ; 

 for although not blind to the benefits of science, more than was Francis 

 Bacon, or is the last machinist or engineer, understanding perfectly how 

 ships are guided by hints from the starry sweep through the firmament, 



