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BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES 
 
 OF 
 
 J. HARRIS CHAPPELL, A.M., Ph.D. 
 
 DELIVERED BEFORE THE GRADUATING CLASSES 
 
 OF THE 
 
 GEORGIA NORMAL AND INDUSTRIAL COLLEGE 
 
 milledgeville, ga. 
 For the Years i 891-1904, inclusive. 
 
 PUBLISHED UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE ALUMNAE 
 
 ASSOCIATION OF THE GEORGIA NORMAL 
 
 AND INDUSTRIAL COLLEGE. 
 
 I9°5- 
 
 Atlanta, Ga. 
 
 Thb Franklin Printing and Publishing Company 
 
 Geo. W. Harrison, Manager 
 
 1905 
 
.lEiRARY of 0ONS8ESS 
 
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 ^Baccalaureate Jjlbbresses 
 
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 J. HARRIS CHAPPELL, A.M., Ph.D. 
 
 1905 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 The speeches included in this volume are the bac- 
 calaureate addresses of President J. Harris Chappell, 
 before the graduating classes of the Georgia Normal 
 and Industrial College, for the years 1891-1904, in- 
 clusive. 
 
 Probably no man has more deeply influenced the 
 character of the young womanhood of the State 
 than has Dr. Chappell. For thirty-one years a 
 teacher, he has touched hundreds of young lives, 
 and by his earnest, faithful labors, his sympathetic 
 interest, and his high ideal of womanhood, he has 
 exerted a mighty power for good. In addition to 
 his personal intercourse he has been, through his 
 lectures and addresses, a source of inspiration to 
 many who have never been brought into intimate 
 relation with him, for he possesses the rare and 
 beautiful gift of eloquence, and that grace and 
 charm of manner that carries his audience with him, 
 making it think as he thinks and feels as he feels. 
 And the thought and feeling are always noble. He 
 has held up before his pupils examples of right liv- 
 ing, not in the passionless outlines of maxim or 
 precept, but voiced in language so rich, so beautiful, 
 so persuasive, that the lessons he has taught have 
 sunk deep into the minds and hearts of his hearers 
 to ripen into a rich fruitage of aspiration and 
 achievement. 
 
4 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 It seems especially fitting that the task of collect- 
 ing these addresses and preserving them in more 
 durable shape should be undertaken by those whom 
 he so tenderly loved, and for whose encouragement 
 they were first spoken. This little volume will be to 
 many a cherished possession, recalling the sunny 
 days of youth, the dreams of girlhood, old friends, 
 and, above all, the beloved teacher who stood to 
 them in their college-days as the representative of 
 all that was strong, true and of good report. 
 
 May the messages he has delivered of aspiration 
 and hope, of earnestness and devotion to duty, be to 
 the many who shall read them as they have to those 
 who heard them, an incentive to noble endeavor. 
 
 JuivIA A. FlvISCH. 
 
 Georgia Normal and Industrial College, 
 February, 1905. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Address to Class of 1892 — "What Mors 
 Could Have Been Done Unto My 
 Vineyard That I Have Not Done 
 Unto It ?" 7 
 
 Address to Class of 1893 — "What Good 
 
 Thing Can You Show Us?" 17 
 
 Address to Class of 1894 — Music of The 
 
 Spheres 30 
 
 Address to Class of 1895 — Higher Educa- 
 tion 46 
 
 Address to Class of 1896 — "Freely Have Ye 
 
 Received, Freely Give" 59 
 
 Address to Class of 189/ — The TpireEEold 
 
 Education ' 69 
 
 Address to Class of 1898 — "DEEP Cauls 
 
 Unto Deep" 85 
 
 Address to Class of 1899 — "A Still Small 
 
 Voice" 102 
 
6 CONTENTS. 
 
 Address to Class of ipoi — "Sweet Influ- 
 ences oe the Pleiades" 115 
 
 Address to Class of 1902 — ■ "Thy Gentle- 
 ness Hath Made Me Great" 129 
 
 Address to Class of 1904 — "Haec Memi- 
 
 nisse Olim Juvabit" 139 
 
 NOTE. — In 1900 and again in 1903 the College was closed 
 without the usual Commencement exercises on account of the 
 prevalence of an infectious disease, hence there was no bacca- 
 laureate address in either of those years. 
 
" U/tyat (T)or<? Qould fteve B<?<?i? Doi?<? tlgto /T\y 
 l/i^yard Ji?at 1 ^aue jsfot Dope Ugto It?" 
 
 YOUNG Ladies oe the Graduating Class : I 
 wish to call your attention this morning to a 
 certain beautiful passage in the Bible, which 
 I read to you several weeks ago at our morning 
 exercises. I do not know that you paid any 
 particular attention to it then ; I do not know that it 
 then made any decided impression upon your minds, 
 but I do wish you to pay particular attention to it 
 this morning, I do wish it now to make a decided 
 impression upon your minds. It is an allegory, ut- 
 tered by that grand old prophet and poet Isaiah, in 
 the palm-groves of Syria three thousand years ago, 
 but I wish you to give it this morning a present and 
 a personal interpretation. Here it is: "I will sing 
 to my well beloved a song of my well beloved touch- 
 ing his vineyard. My well beloved hath a vineyard 
 in a very fruitful hill, and he fenced it and gathered 
 out the stones thereof, and planted it with th(e 
 choicest vine and built a tower in the midst of it, 
 and also made a wine-press therein; and he looked 
 for it to bring forth grapes and it brought forth wild 
 grapes. And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem and 
 men of Judah, judge I pray you betwixt me and my 
 vineyard. What more could have been done unto 
 my vineyard that I have not done unto it ? Where- 
 fore then, when I looked for it to bring forth grapes, 
 brought it forth wild grapes? And now go to, I 
 will tell you what I will do to my vineyard : I will 
 take away the hedge thereof and it shall be eaten 
 
 (V) 
 
8 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 up, and break down the wall thereof and it shall be 
 trodden down; and I will lay it waste; it shall not 
 be pruned nor digged, but there shall come up in it 
 briers and thorns; I will also command the clouds 
 that they rain no rain upon it." 
 
 Young ladies, less than one year ago, the State of 
 Georgia established a vineyard in a very fruitful 
 hill, and planted it with the choicest vine and ap- 
 pointed the best of vine-dressers to take care of it. 
 The whole people of Georgia rejoiced to see the 
 planting of that vineyard; rejoiced to see it strike 
 root and live instead of dying in the stock, as many 
 feared it would do; rejoiced when it put forth first 
 the tender bud, then the expanded leaf, and then 
 the clusters of inconspicuous blossoms. Men and 
 women from all parts of the commonwealth of Geor- 
 gia and from other States, men and women of cul- 
 ture and distinction, the best people in the land, 
 came hundreds of miles, with love in their hearts, 
 to see that vineyard; travelers going up and down 
 in the land turned aside from their journey to look 
 upon that vineyard ; the stranger and the wayfaring 
 man paused as they passed by to gaze upon it — and 
 each and all, visitors, travelers, strangers, pro- 
 nounced upon the vineyard a heartfelt benediction. 
 And now, after nine months of strong, vigorous 
 growth, in this genial summer season, under the 
 ripening influences of grateful showers and these 
 silver suns of June, that vineyard offers its first 
 fruits to the world. The State of Georgia, the peo- 
 ple of Georgia, look for it to bring forth grapes! 
 My young friends, shall they be disappointed ? Will 
 it bring forth wild grapes ? 
 
 Young ladies, your Alma Mater, the Georgia 
 Normal and Industrial College, has been more flat- 
 tered, more complimented, more praised, more no- 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 9 
 
 ticed, more tenderly cared for, more deeply and 
 truly beloved in the first year of its life than any 
 other educational institution that ever stood on 
 Georgia soil. How truly may the State exclaim: 
 "What more could have been done unto my vine- 
 yard that I have not done unto it?" And that is 
 very well. I do not know that too much care, too 
 much love can be bestowed upon an educational in- 
 stitution. But I must tell you that I have some- 
 times feared for the effect of the excessive praise, or 
 rather the premature praise, that has been bestowed 
 upon this school. Already everybody says that the 
 Georgia Normal and Industrial College is a success. 
 Our noble Governor here says that it is a success; 
 our State School Commissioner says that it is a suc- 
 cess; our Board of Directors and Board of Lady 
 Visitors say it is a success; and all the newspapers 
 in Georgia say that it is a success; the hundreds of 
 visitors from all parts of the State who have passed 
 through our classrooms during the session and 
 watched you at work say that it is a success ; every- 
 body says that it is a success, a great suc- 
 cess, a brilliant success, a grand success! And 
 yet, young ladies, when I was in Macon a 
 few weeks ago, and an acquaintance of mine 
 said to me very bluntly and rather ill-manner- 
 edly I thought: "Now, Chappell, honor bright, 
 is that Girls' Industrial School a success?" I re- 
 plied to him : "I do not know whether it is a success 
 or not, that remains to be seen." And, young ladies, 
 it does remain to be seen. So if any one asks me if 
 the Girls' Industrial School is a success, I say to 
 him : "Don't ask me; don't ask any one who has rea- 
 son to be either partial or prejudiced ; don't ask peo- 
 ple who judge from superficial appearances only; 
 don't ask people who speak from the lip outward; 
 
10 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 don't ask people who talk from hearsay; indeed, 
 don't ask any one yet, just wait awhile; just wait 
 six months or a year until our first class of grad- 
 uates has gone into the world, until they shall have 
 had time to come in vital contact with Georgia's 
 civilization, until they have become part and parcel 
 of Georgia's social system, and then go into any 
 community where one of our graduates lives, moves 
 and has her being, and ask your question there. 
 Don't ask it of fools and simpletons; ask it of the 
 very best people in the community and of those who 
 have had the best opportunities of judging. Ask it 
 of the business man who has employed one of our 
 graduates as a stenographer or a bookkeeper, ask it 
 of the lady whose dress she has made, ask it of the 
 first plain countryman or countrywoman whom you 
 meet whose little child she has taught. Go into her 
 own family circle and ask it of her father, her 
 mother, her sisters, her brothers ; ask it of the family 
 house-servant and the family cook — ask these peo- 
 ple, "Do you think the Georgia Normal and In- 
 dustrial College is a success?" 
 
 Last summer just before this school opened, I 
 received a letter from a lady whose daughter is now 
 a pupil in the school, a member of one of our lower 
 classes, and in that letter the lady said : "Since that 
 school was first spoken of several years ago I have 
 looked forward to sending my daughter to it. She 
 is now just old enough to go. I have read your 
 prospectus carefully, and I believe it is just the kind 
 of school to train a girl into a useful and noble 
 womanhood. I send her to you, Mr. President, with 
 my heart full of hope for what your institution may 
 do for her." Now just wait until we shall have sent 
 that daughter home to that mother's heart, and then 
 go ask that mother the question, "Is that Girls' In- 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 11 
 
 dustrial School a success?" Upon the verdict that 
 you get from these sources let the reputation of this 
 school be based. By the answers that you get from 
 these fountain-heads of truth let the Georgia Nor- 
 mal and Industrial College stand or fall. By its 
 fruits let this tree be judged. And, young ladies, 
 by its fruits it will be judged. 
 
 We send you out as the first fruits of this tree. 
 We send you out as the first exemplars of this pro- 
 gressive and aggressive experiment in female edu- 
 cation. As you go forth into the world you will be 
 encompassed by such a cloud of witnesses as never 
 before watched with critic's eye the graduates of 
 any school in Georgia. Just in proportion as extra- 
 ordinary love and extraordinary care have been be- 
 stowed upon this school, extraordinary results will 
 be expected. You are the servant upon whom ten 
 talents have been bestowed, and ten other talents 
 will be expected of you in return. God grant that 
 you may not disappoint these expectations. God 
 grant that on account of no shortcoming, no un- 
 faithfulness, no lack of earnestness on your part, the 
 State of Georgia shall ever have reason to strike our 
 hearts with the bitter cry : "What more could have 
 been done unto my vineyard that I have not done 
 unto it? Wherefore, then, when I looked for it to 
 bring forth grapes, brought it forth wild grapes?" 
 For grapes and not wild grapes are expected of this 
 vineyard. Educational wild grapes are not wanted. 
 There is a superabundance of them already. Count 
 the fashionable female colleges in the land and you 
 will get exactly the number of vines that are pro- 
 ducing them. The woods are full of them. Some- 
 thing better than these are expected of this vineyard, 
 and if this vineyard does not produce something 
 better the people of Georgia will, sooner or later, 
 
12 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 pronounce upon it the just but terrible sentence: 
 "And now go to; I will tell you what I will do to 
 my vineyard: I will take away the hedge thereof 
 and it shall be eaten up, and break down the wall 
 thereof, and it shall be trodden down, and I will 
 lay it waste; it shall not be pruned or digged; but 
 there shall come up in it briers and thorns; and I 
 will command the clouds to rain no rain upon it!" 
 God grant that such a sentence may never fall. God 
 grant that you, by your manners, by your culture, 
 by your work, by your character, by your whole 
 walk and conduct in life, may illustrate to' the peo- 
 ple a better kind of education than has ever before 
 been given by any female college in this State or in 
 any other State. God grant that as you and each 
 successive class of graduates gO' forth from these 
 walls to become a part and parcel of Georgia's com- 
 plex social system, the commonwealth may feel more 
 and more from year to year, through all the nerve- 
 centers of her being, the energizing, vitalizing, en- 
 nobling influence of this school, so that the people 
 shall rise up and call it blessed and the State shall 
 say to its founders, "You builded better than you 
 knew!" 
 
 So you see, young ladies, that as the first grad- 
 uates of this institution a grave responsibility rests 
 upon you; but it ought not to be a depressing re- 
 sponsibility; on the contrary it ought to be a deep 
 and noble inspiration to you. It ought to arouse 
 to action all of the best and highest powers of your 
 nature ; it ought to make you very earnest girls. And 
 I believe to a great extent it will. I believe you will 
 go forth from this institution with a far nobler, a 
 far more earnest purpose in life than usually char- 
 acterizes the graduates of female colleges. Now let 
 me beg you, do not, like weaklings, like cowards, 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 13 
 
 basely abandon this noble purpose just as soon as 
 you come in contact with the hard, trying actualities 
 of life. Do not allow the glitter and glare of world- 
 ly vanities to efface from your minds the beautiful 
 ideals which we hope this school has impressed upon 
 you, so that in a year or two they will fade away 
 from the horizon of your being as the crimson blush 
 fades from the morning sky. 
 
 You know that your education is not completed 
 with your graduation from this institution. Indeed 
 it is only fairly begun. All that we can hope for is 
 that this school, together with all the schools that 
 have gone before us, has laid well the foundation 
 upon which you must rear the superstructure. So 
 go on striving to educate yourselves, to develop 
 yourselves in the direction of the best and noblest 
 tendencies of your nature. Strive earnestly and con- 
 stantly to develop yourselves into a useful, a cultured 
 and a Christian womanhood. I say first into a use- 
 ful womanhood! You know the principal object of 
 this college is to so educate Georgia girls that they 
 will become useful women. That is what differen- 
 tiates this college from nearly all other colleges in 
 the world. The principal aim of nearly all other 
 female colleges is to make women ornamental, and 
 all other things are subordinated to that object; but 
 the principal aim of this college is to make women 
 useful, and all other things are subordinated to that 
 object. That is why in this institution girls are 
 taught how to teach school, how to write shorthand, 
 how to manipulate the typewriter, how to keep books, 
 how to make dresses, how to do industrial drawing, 
 how to cook, how to make up their own rooms, how 
 to wash dishes and set the table, how to be neat and 
 orderly and industrious in all things. That is what 
 is meant by practical education. All these things 
 
14 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 tend to make Georgia girls useful, and if they so 
 choose, independent women. This is a new idea in 
 female college education, and Georgia is one of the 
 first States to take hold of it with a strong, vigorous 
 hand, and God will bless Georgia for doing it. But 
 let us be thankful that in establishing this Girls' 
 Industrial School the State of Georgia did not 
 truckle to that narrow-minded utilitarianism that is 
 so prevalent in the spirit of the age. Not satisfied 
 with giving her beloved young daughters a purely 
 and exclusively practical education, she goes beyond 
 that and gives them something more, gives them 
 something if not better at least on a higher plane. 
 
 Referring to the vineyard of which we have been 
 speaking, did you observe one peculiar feature about 
 it? Did you notice that it says he made a wine- 
 press in the vineyard and also "built a tower in the 
 midst of it?" Now what does the tower in the vine- 
 yard mean ? Well, as far as our use of the metaphor 
 is concerned it means the higher education that this 
 school undertakes to give. It means all of those 
 studies that are pursued in this school for their pure, 
 ennobling culture value. It means some part of 
 your physics and your chemistry; it means a very 
 large part of your Latin ; it means nearly all of your 
 English and American poets; it means absolutely 
 all of your Shakespeare and your astronomy. These 
 are not practical studies, but they are none the less 
 valuable because they are not. Their main purpose 
 is not to furnish you with the means of making a 
 living for yourselves, their purpose is not to make 
 your animal life more comfortable, more pleasant, 
 more luxurious; their purpose is simply to broaden 
 your minds, to refine your hearts, to uplift, edify 
 and ennoble the immortal spirit which Almighty 
 God has placed in your material bodies. From of 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 15 
 
 old these studies have been the pabulum from which 
 the greatest minds of earth have gathered beauty 
 and strength and power; and there is not a school- 
 girl or a college-girl now in the world to whom 
 Almighty God has given brain power enough to as- 
 similate any part of these noble studies who will not 
 be a better woman, a happier woman, and in the 
 broad sense of the word, a more useful woman, for 
 having studied them. So, young ladies, in whatever 
 environment you may be placed in life, however 
 vehemently the apostles of materialism may preach 
 to you their narrow, repressing gospel of utilitarian- 
 ism, never for one moment, even in your innermost 
 hearts, allow yourselves to lose faith in the priceless 
 value of these noble culture studies. Never "like 
 the base Indian throw away this jewel, the most pre- 
 cious pearl of all its fellows." Be thankful that the 
 State of Georgia in establishing this great school 
 for her beloved young daughters was not content to 
 make of them mere workwomen, however proficient, 
 however useful, but goes beyond that and tries to 
 give them that broad and liberal education which 
 will develop them into a cultured womanhood, which 
 will make them indeed "like the corner-stones pol- 
 ished after the similitude of a temple." Be thankful 
 that the State of Georgia in planning this beautiful 
 vineyard did not forget to build a tower in the midst 
 of it ; and, young ladies, do you not forget to some- 
 times leave off "treading the wine-press" to climb 
 to the top of that tower, so that your minds may be 
 expanded by the sweep of a broader horizon, so 
 that your souls may be edified by a clearer view of 
 the ever-burning stars of God, so that your lives may 
 be attuned to their sublime and rhythmic move- 
 ments. 
 
 But, young ladies, in conclusion, let me say to you 
 
16 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 that higher than the vineyard, higher than the wine- 
 press in the vineyard, higher than the tower that 
 rises above the vineyard and the wine-press, higher 
 than the ever-burning stars that look so serenely 
 down upon the tower, there is a transcendent, su- 
 preme education towards which you should ever 
 strive, that education which will develop you into a 
 Christian womanhood! More important than any 
 truth your industrial education can give you, more 
 important than any truth your practical education 
 can give you, more important than any truth your 
 culture education can give you, is that oldest, sim- 
 plest, sublimest of all truths : God made man in his 
 own image and breathed into his nostrils the breath 
 of life and man became a living soul, and man's 
 whole duty is to love God, to serve him, to worship 
 him, and to enjoy him forever! That truth once 
 well forgotten, I know of nothing in the world that 
 is worth remembering; that truth once thoroughly 
 disbelieved in, I know of nothing in the universe 
 that is worth the faith of man ! Without that great, 
 central, guiding truth human life, even at its very 
 best, is at last "a thing of sound and fury, signifying 
 nothing." So, my dear young friends, as a very last 
 word to you to-day, with all the earnestness that my 
 heart can feel or my lips can utter, I would say to 
 you: Remember that truth, believe in that truth, 
 strive to walk by that truth in every step that you 
 shall take in your mysterious journey across this 
 earth "from eternity onward towards eternity," until 
 the Almighty in his own good time shall reveal this 
 mystery to you and what you now "see through a 
 glass darkly, you may then see face to face" in an- 
 other world where supernal beauty dwells and the 
 rainbow never fades ! 
 
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"U/l?at (Jood <5\)\qq <5ai? You 51?ou/ U5?" 
 
 YOUNG Ladies of the Graduating Class : I 
 have an indistinct recollection of having read 
 somewhere, years ago, in some old book, 
 possibly it may have been the Bible, but I am not 
 sure, a story about a king who was so renowned for 
 his wisdom that as he traveled through the country 
 throngs of people would gather around him, and 
 looking up into his face would cry out eagerly, "Oh, 
 mighty king and seer, what good thing can you show 
 us ?" My young friends, I believe I realize at this 
 moment the feelings of that king as that eager cry 
 greeted his ears, for as I look into your bright, ex- 
 pectant faces it seems to me I can see written upon 
 every lineament of your countenance the importu- 
 nate demand, "What good thing can you show us?" 
 and I feel as if I would be willing to coin my very 
 life's blood into words if I could thereby show you 
 something full worthy of this noble occasion, if I 
 could thereby give tongue to utterances that would 
 fall upon your hearts and souls a golden benediction 
 for time and for eternity; but, young ladies, let me 
 tell you that during the whole twenty years that I 
 have been teaching school, during the whole twenty 
 years that I have stood as teacher before boys and 
 girls, before youths and maidens, before young men 
 and young women, I have never yet been able to 
 answer, as I thought it should be answered, that 
 eager, importunate cry that ever flows from the 
 young human soul, "What good thing can you show 
 -us?" Much less am I able to give it an adequate 
 
 2 ba (17) 
 
18 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 answer on this impressive occasion, when I behold 
 you on this sweet June day, at this critical period of 
 your life, in your beautiful maidenhood, "standing 
 with reluctant feet where the brook and river meet." 
 But, young ladies, let me tell you furthermore that 
 it is not only kings and seers and teachers that must 
 answer that demand, "What good thing can you 
 show us?" Every human soul in this world must 
 answer it to every other human soul with which it 
 comes in contact. Two strangers meet on the high- 
 way of life, hand clasps hand, eye looks into eye, 
 soul searches soul, and each of the other asks, "Now, 
 what good thing can you show me?" Ten thousand 
 times every hour in the day that little drama of deep 
 significance is enacted in this world of ours. Not a 
 new girl entered that dormitory over yonder while 
 it was your home this session but from the secret 
 heart of every one of you there, there went out the 
 silent query, "We wonder what good thing she can 
 show us?" what beauty of person, what grace of 
 manner, what charm of intellect, what nobility of 
 character? Not a new teacher stepped into your 
 classrooms this session but he was confronted by a 
 hundred bright, watching eyes with the silent, elo- 
 quent appeal, "What good thing can you show us ?" 
 Not a stranger goes to make his home in any city 
 or in any community or any household but from all 
 the inhabitants thereof goes out the demand, "What 
 good thing can you show us?" And, young ladies, 
 as you go out into the world and into life that de- 
 mand will be made of you constantly, imperatively, 
 importunately. 
 
 You know that old story about the sphynx that 
 stood by the roadside and asked a riddle of every 
 passer-by; but by whatever route you go out from 
 this institution, whether by the north or the east, or 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 19 
 
 the west or the south, by your roadside there stands 
 a spirit ten thousand times more importunate than 
 the sphynx that will ask of you no riddle, but that 
 deep, solemn, serious question: "What good thing 
 can you show us?" Into whatever community, into 
 whatever neighborhood, into whatever household or 
 home you may enter, that spirit is there awaiting 
 you, ready to say: "You have been to the Georgia 
 Normal and Industrial College, that Georgia Nor- 
 mal and Industrial College about which we have 
 heard so much, upon which the State of Georgia has 
 lavished so much money, and that claims to be in the 
 very van and forefront of modern educational prog- 
 ress. You bear the sign manual of its approval in 
 your hand, now, what good thing can you show us ?" 
 Young ladies, whether you will or not, for better 
 or for worse, you must answer that demand, and 
 there are four ways in which you must answer it. 
 First, you must answer it by your handiwork; sec- 
 ond, you must answer it by your intellectual culture ; 
 third, you must answer it by your character; and 
 fourth, you must answer it by your religious faith. 
 First, I say, you must answer it by your handiwork. 
 What is woman's handiwork? Let us see. On the 
 very first page of the Bible we are told that God 
 gave man the earth to subdue it and have dominion 
 over it, and just a little further on we read that 
 "God put man in the garden of Eden to dress it and 
 to keep it," and that "God made woman to be a help- 
 meet unto man." Subsequently, by mutual agree- 
 ment between these partners, man and woman, a 
 division of labor was made, and now throughout the 
 civilized world it is universally understood that 
 man's distinctive share of the work is "to subdue 
 the earth and have dominion over it," and woman's 
 distinctive share of the work is "to dress the garden 
 
20 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 and to keep it." That, then, is woman's handiwork, 
 to dress and keep the garden in which Almighty 
 God has placed her; for every woman who has a 
 home or any semblance of a home, however bare and 
 meager — nay, though it be but the four walls of her 
 own bedchamber — has there a garden to dress and 
 to keep. In her own person she has a garden which 
 she is bound to dress, and to' keep always perfectly 
 sweet and pure and wholesome, and clothed in the 
 very best and most becoming garments, and beauti- 
 fied with the most appropriate adornments that her 
 taste can devise and her means can afford. In her 
 own bedroom she has a garden which she is bound 
 to keep always exquisitely clean and neat and order- 
 ly, and as far as in her lies, bright and sunny and 
 cheery. In the parlor, in the dining-room, in the 
 kitchen, in the flower-garden, in the nursery, in the 
 sick-room, she has a garden, demanding in a thou- 
 sand ways her constant care, and the forming, re- 
 forming, transforming touch of her woman's handi- 
 work. This dressing and keeping of the garden, 
 this housekeeping, this home-making, is woman's 
 first, most imperative, paramount duty in this world. 
 Some of you may know the story of Marie Bash- 
 kirtseff, that poor Russian girl, high-born, gifted 
 and beautiful, who died a few years ago in Italy, 
 literally consumed to death by her burning desire to 
 be a great artist, to paint beautiful pictures that 
 might make her famous in her own and in coming 
 generations; but a nobler ambition than that which 
 killed poor Marie Bashkirtseff is that which fills 
 the heart of a woman who tries to make her own 
 home a picture of perfect beauty and loveliness. 
 For every woman that is the noblest of all accom- 
 plishments, the very finest of the fine arts. Or, to 
 put the whole matter in one short, prosaic sentence, 
 
baccalaureate addresses. 21 
 
 woman's prime function in human society is do- 
 mestic utility; and in this school we have empha- 
 sized that function more perhaps than was ever done 
 in any Southern educational institution before. 
 
 The very first rule of your dormitory, as appears 
 on the printed card, is "Students must rise early, 
 dress neatly, and put their rooms in perfect order 
 before breakfast ;" that means domestic utility. The 
 most popular industrial taught in this institution, 
 and the only study taught in the entire college that 
 employs two teachers, is dressmaking; that means 
 domestic utility. 
 
 No girl is allowed to graduate from this institu- 
 tion until she has taken a thorough, full year's course 
 in cooking; that means domestic utility. And I 
 earnestly trust that, as the years go by, this domestic 
 utility feature of our work may be more and more 
 emphasized and rendered constantly more and more 
 thoroughly practical, so that hereafter, whenever a 
 graduate goes out from this institution and the 
 people of Georgia demand of her "What good thing 
 can you show us ?" she will be able to respond with 
 joyous alacrity by her skill in these plain but noble 
 household arts ; so that wherever she may go in this 
 broad commonwealth "the wilderness and the- soli- 
 tary place shall be glad for her, and the desert shall 
 rejoice and blossom as the rose;" so- that at the touch 
 of her woman's handiwork bare, bald, ugly places 
 in Georgia homes may gradually disappear, and "in 
 place of the brier shall come up the fir-tree, and in 
 place of the thorn shall come up the myrtle-tree." 
 
 It has not been a great many years, young ladies, 
 since even in the most highly civilized countries in 
 the world this domestic utility was regarded as 
 woman's only proper sphere; for her energies of 
 mind and heart there was absolutely nothing be- 
 
22 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 yond domestic utility, or as the hateful Iago, in 
 Shakespeare's Othello, sarcastically puts it, all that 
 woman was worth in the world was "to nurse young 
 fools and chronicle small beer." But, thank heaven, 
 that idea, with its stunting tendencies on the female 
 mind, has passed away. Modern civilization has 
 raised woman to a higher plane than that; modern 
 civilization is building woman up on a nobler plan 
 than that, and now beyond the narrow confines of 
 her domestic utility sweeps the broad horizon of her 
 intellectual culture. So when you go out from this 
 institution and the people of Georgia call to you, 
 "What good thing can you show us?" they will 
 expect in reply not only domestic utility, but the 
 strong, gentle, pervasive influence of your intel- 
 lectual culture. What is intellectual culture? In 
 the first place, let me tell you, young ladies, that 
 mere knowledge and learning and scholarship, how- 
 ever profound, however thorough, however accu- 
 rate, do not of themselves constitute culture. I have 
 known many, many men and women, who had all 
 of that and who were yet very far from being per- 
 sons of culture; but the fine, ennobling effect of 
 knowledge on mind, heart, character and conduct — 
 that is culture. 
 
 A knowledge of Latin or Greek, that is not cul- 
 ture, but through the matchless languages of Greece 
 and Rome to put yourself in touch with the master 
 minds of that olden time, and to feel the thrill of 
 their mighty thoughts through all the nerve-centers 
 of your being and to have your own language im- 
 proved thereby, and your own mind expanded there- 
 by, and your own sentiments liberalized thereby, 
 that is culture. A knowledge of poetry and litera- 
 ture, that is not culture, though you should read and 
 study a thousand volumes on the subject, but to 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 23 
 
 attune your own heart-strings to the sweetest and 
 noblest music of the poet's lyre, that is culture. To 
 look at human life and human nature as pictured 
 and ennobled by the profound and myriad-minded 
 Shakespeare, and to have your own humanity deep- 
 ened and broadened thereby, that is culture. A 
 knowledge of the Bible, that is not culture, though 
 you should be able to relate every story and tell every 
 incident and quote every text from Genesis to Reve- 
 lations; but to dwell in spirit with poor, patient 
 Job under the palm-trees of Arabia, and to listen 
 to him as he pours out his suffering soul in prayers 
 and hosannas to the ever-living God, and to feel 
 your own heart deeply touched thereby, and your 
 own soul uplifted, edified and rendered forever more 
 worshipful thereby, that is culture. A knowledge 
 of astronomy, that is not culture, but to go out on 
 these sweet June nights and stand beneath the blue, 
 bending skies and with a seer's loving eye to watch 
 the complex movements of the planets and the grand 
 procession of constellations in their everlasting 
 march athwart the firmament, to hearken to the 
 music of the spheres, to listen with rapt attention 
 to the songs sung by those silent stars, and to strive 
 to harmonize your own life with their perfect rhyth- 
 mic movements, that is culture. Knowledge merely 
 grasped by the intellect, knowledge merely compre- 
 hended by the understanding is not culture, but only 
 that knowledge that is assimilated by the immortal 
 spirit that dwells in your mortal bodies is true cul- 
 ture. Knowledge that ministers to personal vanity 
 and personal ambition, knowledge that is made sub- 
 servient to any purely personal and selfish end, is 
 not culture ; but only that knowledge that helps you 
 to understand your right relations to the universe 
 around you, that knowledge that is a revelation to 
 
24 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 you of your humblest as well as your highest duty 
 in human life, that knowledge that helps you to 
 overcome the downward tendencies of your poor 
 human nature, that helps you to keep your soul erect 
 and ever aspiring towards its God ; only such knowl- 
 edge is true culture. 
 
 So the only knowledge that is true culture for a 
 girl is that which beautifies and improves her char- 
 acter, that makes her language better, her conversa- 
 tion more intelligent, her manners more gentle and 
 refined, her heart more loving and charitable, her 
 aspirations higher and her whole nature nobler; in 
 a word, that knowledge that enters as a vital prin- 
 ciple into her daily life, influencing unconsciously 
 ly for good her every thought, her every word and 
 her every act. Young ladies, if your higher educa- 
 tion does not do that for you, your higher education 
 is a failure, though you should be able to stand the 
 most searching examination that every teacher in 
 the State of Georgia could give you. The people 
 of Georgia have a right to expect culture like that 
 from every graduate of this institution. The peo- 
 ple of Georgia have a right to expect that every one 
 of you, into whatever community you may go, of 
 whatever household you may become a member, 
 over whatever home you may preside, shall carry 
 with you there the strong, gentle, refining, ennobling, 
 pervasive though unobtrusive influence of this high 
 and noble culture. But it is needless for me to say 
 to you that no college on earth can, of itself, give 
 you completely such culture as this. All that the 
 best college in the world can do is to prepare the soil 
 and sow the seed; it is for you to determine what 
 the harvest shall be. All that the best college in the 
 world can do is to give you an arc of the circle of 
 an higher education; it is for you to bring that arc 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 25 
 
 full circle home ; and to do that will require on your 
 part constant, earnest, thoughtful effort at self-im- 
 provement. So only can culture have its perfect 
 work; so only when the people of Georgia call to 
 you, "What good thing can you show us ?" will you 
 be able to respond with that mighty factor in the 
 upbuilding of a higher civilization, a deeply, thor- 
 oughly, nobly cultured womanhood. But, young 
 ladies, culture like this presupposes a native nobility 
 of character. You can not build up a noble culture 
 on an ignoble character. The monster Caliban, in 
 Shakespeare's play of the Tempest, is an example 
 of an attempt to do so with its resulting failure ; and 
 in these days of education and overeducation we 
 frequently meet with persons whose moral nature 
 is unable to support or sustain the generous culture 
 that has been bestowed upon them. Culture is de- 
 pendent for its worth upon character, but character 
 possesses a value entirely independent of culture and 
 infinitely higher than culture, and, young ladies, you 
 may be sure that in whatever situation you may 
 be placed in life your character will count for more 
 than your culture, for more than your talents, for 
 more than your accomplishments, for more than 
 anything else that enters into the composition of 
 your individuality. Nearly every kind of human 
 ability is sometimes put in situations where it is so 
 "cabined, cribbed, confined" by circumstances, that 
 it has no chance to show itself, and goes unrecog- 
 nized and unfelt ; but such is not the case with char- 
 acter. Character is always recognized, character 
 is always felt, character always tells for all that it 
 is truly worth. For many years Stonewall Jackson 
 was a plodding professor in an obscure college, and 
 no one suspected the truth, that he was a man of 
 great and original genius, but every student in that 
 
26 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 college, during all those years, recognized and felt 
 the extraordinary purity and nobility of his char- 
 acter, just as clearly as it was afterwards realized 
 by General Lee and the great Confederate army. 
 For thirty years Oliver Cromwell was an obscure 
 fanner among the hills of Northern England, and 
 no one divined the wonderful resources of his intel- 
 lect, but his force of character was felt in that little 
 community in which he lived, moved and had his 
 being just as powerfully as it was afterwards felt 
 by the whole great English nation. 
 
 And so, young ladies, you may be put in situations 
 in life where your intellectual superiority, if you 
 have any, will not be worth much to you, where 
 your talent may avail you little, where your accom- 
 plishments will be absolutely useless, but you never 
 can be placed in any spot on God's inhabited earth, 
 in association with your fellow beings, where what- 
 ever purity, whatever force, whatever nobility of 
 character you may possess will not be recognized, 
 will not be felt, will not tell for all that it is truly 
 worth. So, after all, character is the main thing; 
 and when you go out into the world and the people 
 call to you, "What good thing can you show us?" 
 the best and highest that you can show is a thor- 
 oughly womanly character; a womanly character 
 with its four priceless jewels : modesty, purity, truth 
 and love. Modesty, purity, truth and love, the 
 emerald, pearl, ruby and diamond of a womanly 
 character, polished by the hand of a noble culture 
 and set in the gold of an earnest purpose — may such 
 be the diadem that shall crown your womanhood! 
 But in what light shall these jewels shine? Whence 
 comes the light that most glorifies womanly char- 
 acter, that most glorifies manly character, that most 
 glorifies human life, human nature and everything in 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 27 
 
 this world of ours? Does it not come from above? 
 Does it not come from that same heaven whence 
 beamed the light at creation's dawn, when the morn- 
 ing stars sang together and all the sons of God 
 shouted for joy? Does it not come from that same 
 heaven whence poured the light that fell upon Moses 
 on Sinai, upon the watching shepherds on the plains 
 of Judea, upon the Saviour of mankind on the mount 
 of transfiguration, and that played like a halo around 
 the Virgin's brow? Young ladies, human life never 
 has been, human life never can be, glorified and truly 
 ennobled by any other light than that. What is the 
 finest product of the human soul? I heard that 
 query asked in your Normal Reading Circle a few 
 weeks ago, but it went unanswered, I believe. Re- 
 ligious faith would be my answer to it, for I believe 
 more strongly and more deeply than I believe in any 
 other thing that has ever been submitted to the con- 
 sideration of my mind, that simple, childlike, sub- 
 lime belief in God, love of God, worship of God, is 
 the very highest thing to which any human being 
 ever has attained or ever can attain in this world. 
 This religious faith, this belief in something beyond 
 this life, better than this life, to which this life stands 
 vitally related, is an instinct. It is an instinct planted 
 by the hand of nature in the inmost core of our be- 
 ing. It is an intuition. It is the deepest, strongest, 
 holiest, sublimest of all human intuitions. It is the 
 motive of man's noblest living and the source of his 
 highest inspirations and aspirations. God grant 
 that it may never be displaced in your hearts by that 
 horrible nightmare of materialism that is now so 
 prevalent in the world; that horrible nightmare of 
 materialism with its gospel of dirt that is now being 
 preached from the housetops all over the world, and 
 that tells you that that old, simple, sublime religion 
 
28 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 is all a lie; that there is no God, that you have no 
 soul, that you came from frog spawn through a 
 monkey, and that when you die you must rot like the 
 vilest worm that crawls upon the face of the earth 
 and that is the end of all and the all of human life. 
 
 God grant that the greatest potential joys of your 
 hearts and the noblest powers of your souls may 
 never be paralyzed and deadened by this hideous 
 doctrine of Atheism. God grant that the old, sim- 
 ple, sublime worshipful belief in God, Heaven and 
 immortality may ever be the dominating influence 
 in your life, for so only can you attain to the highest 
 development of your nature; so only can you give 
 the noblest of answers when the world calls to you, 
 "What good thing can you show us?" In your 
 mysterious journey across this earth "from eternity 
 onward towards eternity," that demand will be 
 made of you at every step, and oh, how much de- 
 pends upon how you shall answer it. Your own 
 individual prosperity, the happiness of homes and 
 households, the peace and joy of communities, the 
 purity and righteousness of society, the upbuilding 
 of Georgia's civilization, the progress of the human 
 race, and the salvation of immortal, souls, all depend, 
 in a greater or less degree, upon how you shall an- 
 swer that demand ; and then perhaps in future years 
 little children, fresh from the hands of God, bone of 
 your bone and flesh of your flesh, may gather around 
 your knees, and with lovelit eyes and trustful hearts 
 may look up into your faces and cry "What good 
 thing can you show us?" Oh, then a greater re- 
 sponsibility than ever rested upon king or seer or 
 teacher will rest upon you to give a right and noble 
 answer. God help you to give it. 
 
 And now, young ladies, as a very last word to 
 you to-day, if I might do so without any appear- 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 29 
 
 ance of sacrilege or profanation, I would fain lay 
 my hands upon the head of each one of you with the 
 beautiful benediction of the Episcopal prayer-book: 
 "Defend, O Lord, this thy child, with thy heavenly 
 grace, that she may continue thine forever, and 
 daily increase in the Holy Spirit more and more 
 until she come to thine everlasting kinsrdom." 
 
"fllusfc of tl?e Spheres." 
 
 YOUNG Ladies oe the Graduating Ceass: I 
 am very glad that I shall begin my farewell 
 words to you this morning while your heart- 
 strings are yet vibrating with the music of that 
 sweet song which we have just heard and whose 
 echoes yet linger in the atmosphere around us. 
 There is nothing in the world about which I am 
 more ignorant than I am about music, and yet I 
 wish to talk to you about music this morning. A 
 number of years ago I saw the great violinist, Ole 
 Bull, stand before an audience of five thousand 
 people and play that simple little air, Lilly Dale, 
 and it seemed to me that the doors of heaven had 
 been thrown open, and the voices of angels and arch- 
 angels seemed to be coming down from the empy- 
 rean to breathe divine harmonies through the sway- 
 ing body of that white-haired old man as he stood 
 there before the footlights with his little instrument 
 and his flashing bow. A deathlike stillness such 
 as I have never seen equaled in any other large as- 
 sembly of men and women pervaded that vast audi- 
 ence. The people sat there literally spellbound, and 
 every face was lit up with that peculiar spirituelle 
 expression that never comes into the human coun- 
 tenance except when the deepest and holiest emo- 
 tions of the soul are aroused. I once heard the 
 great singer, Christine Nilsson, sing "Rock of Ages 
 Cleft for me," in a fashionable church at Saratoga 
 Springs, N. Y., in the very height of the gay season. 
 Perhaps a more worldly-minded, pleasure-seeking, 
 
 (30) 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 31 
 
 money-loving congregation than sat before her was 
 never assembled in any temple of the living God, 
 but the sweet singer's voice and that grand old hymn 
 struck the religious chord away down in those word- 
 ly hearts, and every face there fairly glowed with 
 spiritual beauty, and strong men bowed their heads 
 to conceal their emotion. The renowned scientist — 
 Charles Darwin — tells us somewhere in his auto- 
 biography that when he was a child and a youth he 
 was intensely sensitive to music, but as he grew older 
 and devoted his whole mind, heart and soul to the 
 study of the material world, that faculty of his na- 
 ture that loved music and religion became gradually 
 weakened and finally completely atrophied from long 
 disuse. He lost his love of music, he lost his belief 
 in religion, but he says that every now and then 
 when in pursuing some scientific investigation he 
 reached a point where the human understanding 
 could go no further and he was left standing, as it 
 were, upon the very brink of eternity gazing help- 
 lessly in the fathomless depths of infinitude, his 
 whole being would be thrilled by a profound emo- 
 tion precisely like that which certain strains of music 
 used to make him feel in his earlier years, and for 
 one brief moment his old, simple, child-like belief 
 in God, heaven and immortality would come back 
 to him. 
 
 So, young ladies, all deep things — all deep 
 thought, all deep feeling — is musical : all deep 
 thought, all deep feeling is religious. God's uni- 
 verse is one grand diapason of music ! That beauti- 
 ful fable of the old Greeks about the "music of the 
 spheres" is but a figurative expression of this truth. 
 God's universe is one grand, sublime diapason of 
 music, and man's whole duty is to attune his life 
 to that music. That, my young friends, is the text 
 
32 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 of the farewell words that I wish to speak to you 
 this morning. Keep your life attuned to the music 
 of the spheres, to the deep and everlasting harmonies 
 of God's eternal laws ! 
 
 That human body of yours, that human body of 
 flesh and blood, made of the dust of the earth by 
 God himself, — what a musical instrument it is ! 
 How beautifully, wonderfully, harmoniously made! 
 Every fiber of it was wrought by the Almighty, and 
 every nerve-chord in it was stretched by his hand 
 and attuned by him to the music of the spheres. 
 Keep it in tune ! Take care of your bodily health ! 
 Commonplace as that injunction may seem, there is 
 nothing more important that I can say to you in 
 this farewell address. There is no sin that young 
 women are more prone to commit, there is no sin 
 that you will be more apt to commit than violating 
 the laws of physical health. I say sin, because it is 
 just as much a sin to violate the laws of health as 
 it is to break the commandments, for the laws of 
 health are just as much God's laws as the ten com- 
 mandments are God's laws. 
 
 Temperance lecturers and moralists are constantly 
 railing at men for injuring their health and weaken- 
 ing their manhood by dissipation and debauchery, 
 but how is it with the women of the generation? 
 Only a few weeks ago an association of eminent 
 physicians at the North, after a long, painstaking 
 and conscientious investigation, published this ter- 
 rible fact to the world, that nervous diseases among 
 women had increased twentyfold within the last 
 forty years, and that this was owing entirely to the 
 bad habits of living among women of these days. 
 Young ladies, as graduates of this college you are 
 bound to give serious thought to this subject. The 
 greatest value of all education is to make people 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 33 
 
 thoughtful about the practical conduct of life, and 
 if the general education and culture you have re- 
 ceived at this College does not make you thoughtful 
 about this matter, then either this is a mighty sorry 
 sort of school, or else you are a mighty sorry sort of 
 a girl. Besides the indirect effect of the general 
 education and culture you have received here, you 
 know that we have in several very direct ways tried 
 to impress this matter strongly upon your minds. Our 
 school of cooking, our school of physical culture, the 
 instructions and suggestions that we have given you, 
 and the appeals that we have made to you in regard 
 to dress reform are all direct practical lessons in the 
 art of preserving health. Take these lessons home 
 with you, improve upon them by your own thought- 
 fulness, carry them out in your own practical life, 
 and, as far as you can without officiousness, dissemi- 
 nate them among the girls and women with whom 
 you associate. So will you do a great and lasting 
 good for the State of Georgia. As graduates of this 
 institution you are bound to do this reform work. 
 
 If every girl who leaves this College should carry 
 away with her from this school absolutely nothing 
 but the ideas of dress reform that we have tried so 
 hard to impress upon your mind and inculcate into 
 your habits, and should persuade others to adopt 
 them, that alone would do enough good to repay 
 the State of Georgia ten times over for all the money 
 that it has ever expended on this institution. Not 
 long ago a little girl, who had been to the World's 
 Fair in Chicago, said to me : "Mr. Chappell, on the 
 Midway Plaisance I saw an African woman with 
 her face all scarred up with ugly scratches running 
 up and down and across her face. She did it herself 
 when she was a girl and she thought it was pretty. 
 Mr. Chappell, don't you think she was a fool?" 
 
 3ba 
 
34 BACCAIvAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 But, young ladies, let me say to you this morning, 
 that the civilized American woman that pinches and 
 cramps and deforms her waist in that damnable 
 abomination of modern dress called a corset is a 
 thousand times bigger fool than the African woman 
 that scarifies her face. For the civilized American 
 woman by this miserable corset not only utterly 
 destroys the beauty and symmetry of her figure and 
 makes it a thing ugly to look upon, but she vitally 
 injures the most important organs in her body. And 
 the worst of it is she knows perfectly well that this 
 is true, and yet at the behests of a depraved fashion 
 she continues the sinful practice. I mention this 
 only as one instance of how health is injured and 
 untold suffering is brought into' the world and trans- 
 mitted from generation to generation by the con- 
 summate folly of women in fashionable life. My 
 dear young friends, I earnestly trust that you will 
 never commit these follies, that you will never be 
 guilty of these sins. Remember that bad health, a 
 weakened organ, a diseased function, not only makes 
 you uncomfortable, not only makes you miserable, 
 but in a great measure unfits you for doing rightly 
 the work that the Almighty sent you into the world 
 to' do. Remember that the sins of mothers are 
 visited upon the children unto the third and fourth 
 and tenth and twentieth generation of them that 
 break God's laws of health. Remember that every 
 weakened organ, every diseased function, every mor- 
 bid tendency, every unstrung nerve in a woman's 
 body makes a false note in the harmony of the 
 universe, a false note that does not end with her 
 existence, but goes on down the ages a jarring dis- 
 cord, like sweet bells all jangled, harsh and out of 
 tune. No more important duty, no more impera- 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. OO 
 
 tive obligation can rest upon you in this human life 
 than to take care of your bodily health. 
 
 Undoubtedly the strongest and highest reason 
 why you should take care of your bodily health is 
 because upon that depends in great measure the 
 healthful action of your mind. The finest part of 
 the human body is the brain, that exquisite organ 
 upon which mind plays the various tunes of thought. 
 Brain is the instrument, mind is the musician, edu- 
 cation is the musician's training, and thought is the 
 music. As graduates of this college you are sup- 
 posed to have what is called "a higher education," 
 but are your thoughts really high and classic and 
 noble? If not, your higher education is a failure. 
 And will your life keep time and tune to high and 
 noble thoughts, to the music of the spheres? If not, 
 your higher education is a failure. 
 
 There are two distinct kinds of education, practi- 
 cal education and higher education. Some superfine 
 sentimentalists try to make us believe that there is 
 really no difference between the two ; that they merge 
 into each other, and all that sort of nonsense, but 
 that is not true. The difference between practical 
 education and higher education is just as clearly 
 marked as the line where the blue sky comes down 
 to the green earth. Let me illustrate the difference. 
 When I was in Boston on my educational pilgrimage 
 a little over a year ago I went one morning to the 
 Boston Cooking School, the oldest and most famous 
 institution of this sort in America, and I sat there 
 for three mortal hours, and saw the teacher teach a 
 class of young women how to make pie-crust ; merely 
 that and nothing more, how to make pie-crust. It 
 was an absolutely perfect lesson; it was one of the 
 most successful exercises I have ever seen in any 
 schoolroom. It was not edifying, it was not up- 
 
36 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 lifting, it did not fill the immortal soul with tran- 
 scendental thoughts and all that sort of thing, be- 
 cause there is nothing edifying or uplifting or 
 transcendental about pie-crust. Nevertheless it was 
 exceedingly interesting, and it filled me with ad- 
 miration, and to my dying day I shall never forget 
 that superb lesson on how to make pie-crust. It 
 was a splendid illustration of that cant phrase that 
 you hear used so frequently in educational circles 
 in these days about "putting the brain into the 
 hands," for that teacher made those young women 
 put their brains into their hands before she allowed 
 them to put their hands into that pie-crust dough. 
 In other words it was a splendid illustration of 
 practical education. The very next morning after, 
 my visit to this cooking school I went to the famous 
 Emerson School of Oratory and saw the principal 
 of the school give his senior class a special exercise. 
 The lesson of the day was the exposition and rendi- 
 tion of that matchless gem of Shakespeare's incom- 
 parable genius, the third act of Othello, the same 
 that you heard so beautifuly read from this plat- 
 form a few weeks ago. It was a glorious lesson! 
 There was nothing practical about it, there was 
 nothing utilitarian about it, it did not undertake 
 "to put the brain into the hand" as that pie-crust 
 lesson did ; nevertheless it was a glorious lesson ; it 
 delighted the intellect, it touched the heart, it thrill- 
 ed the soul, it vivified the imagination, it edified and 
 uplifted the spirit of every pupil and every visitor 
 present. In other words it was a splendid illustra- 
 tion of what is called higher education. Now, 
 young ladies, in every human mind there is a Shakes- 
 peare side as well as a pie-crust side, and in every 
 right education each of these sides should have a 
 due share of attention, instruction, training and dis- 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 37 
 
 cipline; and that is what we are trying so hard to 
 give in this school. We sweep the whole gamut of 
 education from pie-crust to^ Shakespeare, and we are 
 constantly endeavoring to preserve a just balance 
 between pie-crust and Shakespeare. The practical 
 side of education is very much emphasized in these 
 days. I sometimes fear that it is too much empha- 
 sized, and that we are in danger of forgetting the 
 inestimable value of higher education. 
 
 Never in the history of this country was there 
 such crying need as now for the uplifting and purify- 
 ing power of a truly high and noble education. For 
 with all our boasted progress the terrible fact stares 
 us in the face that the tendency of American civili- 
 zation to-day is towards a lower standard of morals 
 and a lower ideal of life than was ever known be- 
 fore in this country. Men are fast losing their be- 
 lief in religion, men are fast losing their faith in 
 God, their belief in all truly noble and exalted senti- 
 ment and are fast coming to' believe in absolutely 
 nothing but the almighty dollar and what the al- 
 mighty dollar can buy. 
 
 Good men and good women all through this coun- 
 try are earnestly hoping and earnestly praying that 
 the rising generation of young men and young wo- 
 men will check this baleful tendency, but not much 
 can be expected from the young men, for in most 
 cases as soon as a young man comes down from the 
 Sinai of college or university he throws away the 
 higher law he is supposed to have received there, and 
 joins the rabble in the base worship of the golden 
 calf. It is therefore to the young women, to the 
 educated, cultured young women of the rising gen- 
 eration, that we must chiefly look to bring about 
 regeneration and reform, not by making speeches, 
 not by delivering lectures, not by running over the 
 
38 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 country shrieking for the ballot, not by writing ar- 
 ticles for the newspapers, not by voting, but by puri- 
 fying the spring at its very source, in the school- 
 room, in the family, in the home. The woman's 
 moral influence in the family is ten times greater 
 than the man's. The family gets its intellectual 
 tone much more from the women of the household 
 than from the men, much more from wife, mother, 
 sister than from husband, father, brother. Upon 
 women much more than upon men falls the duty of 
 dealing with mind, heart and character, while these 
 are yet in the formative state — wax to receive and 
 marble to retain impressions. The more thoroughly 
 educated, the more highly cultured a woman is, the 
 better she is fitted for discharging this most respon- 
 sible duty in human life; and one of the most im- 
 portant missions that lies before the Georgia Nor- 
 mal and Industrial College is to supply Georgia 
 schools, Georgia families with just such educated, 
 cultured women. So go forth, my friends, into 
 this field where the harvest is indeed plenteous, but 
 the laborers are few. Go forth, and in Georgia 
 schoolrooms, Georgia families, Georgia homes, let 
 the light of your higher education so shine that men 
 may see your good works and glorify your Father 
 which is in heaven. 
 
 But, young ladies, as strongly as I believe in the 
 intellectual culture of women, as strongly as I be- 
 lieve in brain power, let me say to you that in every 
 true woman there is a power greater than brain 
 power. In every true woman, feeling counts for 
 more than thought. In every true woman's uni- 
 verse, beyond the horizon of the intellect sweeps the 
 horizon of the emotions. In every true woman's 
 life, sweeter far than the music of the mind is the 
 music of the heart. Show me the woman of whom 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 39 
 
 this is not true, and I will show you one who is 
 either a very ill-fashioned sort of a woman, or else 
 one in whom the womanly nature has been warped 
 and perverted. When I was a boy I came across 
 this verse from the Koran, or Mohammedan Bible, 
 
 "He was the angel, Israfael, 
 And his heart-strings were a lute." 
 
 And I thought it was a beautiful passage, but I 
 thought it would have been much more appropriate 
 if it had been, 
 
 "She was the angel, Israfael, 
 And her heart-strings were a lute." 
 
 A number of years afterwards, I happened to be 
 wandering one day in an old colonial graveyard in 
 a certain city at the North, and I came across a gran- 
 ite shaft erected by some bereaved husband to the 
 memory of his dead wife, and on it was engraved 
 as an epitaph that very verse from the Koran with 
 precisely the change that I had fancied, 
 
 "She was the angel, Israfael, 
 And her heart-strings were a lute." 
 
 The friend that was with me thought it was ab- 
 surd, and I admit it was somewhat ridiculous, the 
 man's taking the liberty of changing the sex of the 
 angel, nevertheless I thought it was just the most 
 beautiful epitaph that I had ever seen upon a wo- 
 man's grave. What sweeter tribute could any wo- 
 man ask of the loved ones that she leaves behind her 
 when she takes her flight to the spirit land, than they 
 should always think of her in that way, 
 
40 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 "She was the angel, Israfael, 
 And her heart-strings were a lute." 
 
 Just the most precious thing that ever falls to the 
 lot of any man in this world is a woman's love ; from 
 the time when she sings his cradle-song to the day 
 when she wipes the death-sweat from his brow, just 
 the most powerful influence for good that can ever 
 come into a man's life is a woman's love! And, 
 young ladies, however brilliant and cultured an in- 
 tellect you may possess, and however energetically 
 you may use that intellect for the betterment of 
 human kind, you may be sure that the best influence 
 that you will ever exert in this world over men, over 
 women, over society in general, must come more 
 from the heart than from the head. 
 
 A few weeks ago' in your Normal Reading Circle 
 I heard one of you quote a fine passage from Emer- 
 son, like this, "A beautiful face is a good thing, a 
 beautiful form is better than a beautiful face, but a 
 beautiful behavior is better than a beautiful form — 
 it is the finest of the fine arts." This beautiful be- 
 havior, of which Emerson speaks, comes directly 
 from the heart. When that poor African woman in 
 the jungles of New Guinea found the English trav- 
 eler, Mungo Park, lying under a tree burning with 
 fever and half dead, and with the aid of her daugh- 
 ters took him up and carried him to her hut and 
 nursed him back to life and health, that was beau- 
 tiful behavior; it came directly from the heart. 
 When Chevalier Bayard, lying wounded upon the 
 battlefield, put the cup of cold water from his own 
 famished lips and gave it to a dying soldier by his 
 side, that was beautiful behavior; it came directly 
 from the heart ! When the most perfect gentleman 
 that this world ever saw, he whom man call Savior, 
 
BACCAIvAUREATE addresses. 41 
 
 said to the rebuking disciples, "Suffer little children 
 to come unto me and forbid them not, for of such 
 is the kingdom of heaven," and took them in his 
 arms and blessed them, that was beautiful behavior ; 
 it came directly from the heart ; and so all beautiful 
 behavior comes directly from the heart; it is the 
 spontaneous outpouring of the milk of human kind- 
 ness. Intellect has little to do with it, education still 
 less. Indeed we find the finest instances of it among 
 simple, unsophisticated people. See how gloriously 
 it shines forth in some of Shakespeare's humblest 
 characters : in Adam in As You Like It ; in the 
 Fool in King Lear; in the nurse in Romeo and 
 Juliet, for instance. Some of the most touching 
 and pathetic instances of it that I have ever seen in 
 my life occurred among the negro slaves in ante- 
 bellum days in the South. But, young ladies, I heard 
 not long ago the story of the beautiful behavior of a 
 certain poor Georgia girl which I wish to tell you 
 this morning, for it would be well for every Georgia 
 girl to emulate her noble spirit. This girl lived away 
 up there in Northwest Georgia among the foothills 
 of the Blue Ridge mountains. Her father was an 
 old Confederate soldier, and he had a little farm 
 there among the mountains. One year soon after 
 he had planted his crop he was stricken down with 
 inflammatory rheumatism and was bedridden for 
 the rest of the year. There was no man, no boy, to 
 take his place upon the farm, so his daughter, this 
 seventeen-year-old Georgia girl, who had never done 
 anything but a woman's work around the house, took 
 the plough-handles in her own precious hands and in 
 sunshine and storm, through heat and cold, from 
 daylight to dark, she toiled like a bond-slave in the 
 field. A loving God blessed the labor of her hands 
 and the conscious earth laughed an abundant harvest 
 
42 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 into her lap. From the profit of her crop she not 
 only provided her invalid father with comforts, but 
 by rigid economy managed to save enough to pay 
 her expenses the next year at a good school in a 
 neighboring town. When commencement time came 
 she had won a high honor, and was appointed one of 
 the readers of the occasion. From every valley, glen, 
 cove, gorge in that mountain country the good people 
 poured forth to that commencement. There was 
 such an enormous crowd that they could not get 
 into the schoolhouse, so the exercises were held un- 
 der a bush-arbor out of doors ; and when that girl 
 arose to read her essay she was received with such a 
 cheer, with such a shout, with such a yell, as no cam- 
 paign politician running over the country begging 
 for votes ever heard from the throats of those moun- 
 taineers ; with such a cheer, with such a shout as no 
 female lecturer running over the country trying to 
 reform people ever heard, or ever deserved to hear, 
 from any crowd; for let cynics say what they will 
 the world does know its true heroes. The next year 
 that girl taught school; more children came to her 
 than could be crowded into the schoolhouse. From 
 her earnings she not only administered to the last 
 days of her dying father, but in a great measure fed, 
 clothed and educated her younger brothers and sis- 
 ters. 
 
 Young ladies, we of the South are constantly beg- 
 ging rich men from the North to come down here 
 with their money to develop the natural resources of 
 our country and to build up our towns and cities with 
 mills and factories ; and that is very well ; God 
 knows poor, poverty-stricken Georgia needs help of 
 that kind badly enough ; but let me tell you one 
 thing, one native Georgia girl like that is worth 
 more to the State than a million dollars of Yankee 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 43 
 
 money! One noble woman's life like that, with its 
 boundless influence for good, is worth more to the 
 true civilization of the commonwealth than a hun- 
 dred cotton factories with a million buzzing spin- 
 dles! I point this mountain girl as an example to 
 you not because you will be expected to repeat her 
 deeds ; possibly you may never be called upon even 
 to do deeds like hers ; but in whatever position you 
 may be placed, by whatever circumstances you may 
 be surrounded, however and wherever your lines of 
 life may fall, you can emulate her unselfish, loving, 
 energetic, earnest, noble, aspiring spirit. And the 
 very reason that I maintain so stoutly that this Geor- 
 gia Normal and Industrial College is the greatest 
 educational institution that ever stood on Georgia 
 soil, is because so many girls do- come here in exactly 
 that spirit, because so many girls do come here under 
 circumstances so similar to those that first darkened 
 but afterwards glorified the life of that mountain 
 girl! With the deepest heart-felt pride I point our 
 visitors this morning to this assembly, and I say to 
 them, "These are Georgia girls ; there are three hun- 
 dred of them ; they come from one hundred differ- 
 ent counties in Georgia; they do not come from 
 homes of wealth and pomp and material grandeur; 
 nay, many of them come from homes of poverty; 
 many of them have paid every cent of their expenses 
 here this year with money earned by themselves as 
 teachers in the country schools or by other means; 
 many others have been sent here by poor widowed 
 mothers, or older brothers and sisters, who have to 
 toil hard for their daily bread, and who out of their 
 scanty earnings manage by heroic self-denial to save 
 enough to give their loved ones the advantages of 
 this school ! These girls do not come with the rustle 
 of silken skirts or flash of diamonds or other shows 
 
44 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 of wealth, but they come with a noble spirit and with 
 hearts of gold ! They do not come here to be pre- 
 pared to adorn society or to talk nonsense to spider- 
 leg dudes at carnivals of folly, but they come to fit 
 themselves for a woman's noble duties wherever 
 their lines of life may fall. Travel the world over, 
 and in no school or college or university can you find 
 a nobler student-body than these three hundred 
 Georgia girls ! O Georgia men and Georgia wo- 
 men, from whatever section of the State you may 
 come, if you can look upon this assembly and know 
 its true story without a thrill of pride, without a tear 
 of j°y> y° u are no true Georgian! O Georgia 
 legislator, that goes up yonder to Atlanta to take 
 care of the commonwealth, if you can know the facts 
 about this assembly and yet with niggardly mean- 
 ness refuse to cherish and to foster this institution, 
 stint the bread of life to these Georgia girls, you are 
 unworthy of the State that has honored you, un- 
 worthy of the mother who bore you. 
 
 "Living you shall forfeit fair renown, 
 And doubly dying shall go down 
 To the vile earth from which you sprung, 
 Unwept, unhonored and unsung." 
 
 Young ladies, it is a great privilege and a great 
 responsibility to go out into the world a graduated 
 representative of such a student-body. An important 
 epoch in your life closes this morning, and you step 
 across the border-line into a world of new expe- 
 riences. You came to us some of you two years ago, 
 some of you three years ago. With a father's part- 
 ing blessing yet fresh upon your head, with your 
 cheek still wet with a mother's farewell tears, with 
 mind bewildered by a strange, new world, and heart- 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 45 
 
 sick for home, you sat here on that first morning! 
 The intervening days and months and years you have 
 spent most worthily in diligent, earnest pursuit of 
 the noble purpose that brought you here. Every 
 teacher in the faculty will join with me in testifying 
 to that. And now we send you back to father, moth- 
 er, home; we earnestly trust that you will carry 
 with you from this school some things that will be 
 good for you and for others for time and for eter- 
 nity. And now you sit here for the last time, the 
 lights and shadows of your college-life all behind 
 you, your eyes bedewed with tears of sadness, your 
 heart throbbing with mingled feelings of grief and 
 joy. "Oh, death in life, the days that are no more!" 
 I hope you will carry with you always some sweet 
 and precious memories of the days you have spent 
 with us, some sweet and precious memories of the 
 halls and classrooms of this building, of your teach- 
 ers, of your schoolmates, of your life at the dormi- 
 tory and in the private boarding-houses, of the good 
 people and red hills and elm-shaded streets of dear 
 old Milledgeville ! May the blessings of the Al- 
 mighty rest upon you, and when your immortal soul 
 shall have taken its flight back to the God that gave 
 it, may those who have known you best be able to 
 say of you that "her life was an anthem to the ever- 
 living God," in all her walk and conduct she kept 
 time and tune to the music of the spheres ! 
 
^i§J?<?r Education 
 
 'OUNG Ladies of the Graduating Ceass: 
 For several years past you have been diligently 
 and earnestly engaged in getting what is com- 
 monly called an higher education. It has been 
 a long and laborious task, but to you, I believe, not 
 an unpleasant one. This morning you are supposed 
 to bring that task to a well-rounded completion; 
 you are now supposed to have an higher education. 
 And what is an higher education? When a young 
 man goes to a medical college, or a law school, or 
 a school of technology, he has a perfectly clear, 
 definite idea of the real meaning of that education, 
 and of its aim, its purpose and its value; but have 
 you a perfectly clear, definite idea of the real mean- 
 ing of an higher education, such as you are supposed 
 to have gotten at this college, and of its aim, its pur- 
 pose and its value? What is the real meaning of an 
 higher education ? 
 
 Let me give you my idea of it by a very simple 
 illustration : Many years ago, in looking through an 
 old library, I chanced to come across a volume of 
 essays by William Hazlitt, a very gifted and bril- 
 liant writer, who flourished in England about sev- 
 enty-five years ago, In one of these essays Hazlitt 
 relates a personal experience like this : Hazlitt's 
 father was a Unitarian preacher. He lived out in 
 the country, and he was himself a man of great cul- 
 ture and scholarship, and right frequently distin- 
 guished men and scholars used to come from Lon- 
 don and other places to spend the night, or a day or 
 
 (46) 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 47 
 
 two, at his hospitable country home. On these occa- 
 sions, as the company gathered around the family 
 hearthstone at night for the purpose of talking, 
 young Hazlitt, who was then a youth seventeen 
 or eighteen years of age, used to sit in a corner by 
 himself listening silently and delightedly to the con- 
 versation of these distinguished men; but one day 
 a slab-sided, awkward-moving man, with a big, 
 beautifully shaped, classic head set upon his rounded 
 shoulders, came to this Hazlitt home. 
 
 It was the poet Coleridge, undoubtedly one of the 
 most gifted brilliant intellects ever born into the 
 world, and especially noted for the almost preter- 
 natural splendor of his conversational powers. As 
 the elder Hazlitt and Coleridge sat before the fire 
 that night conversing, young Hazlitt sitting silently 
 in his corner recognized in Coleridge's conversation 
 something finer, something superior to anything he 
 had ever heard from mortal lips, and he listened en- 
 tranced and infatuated. That night, just as they 
 were going to bed, old man Hazlitt said, "Son, to- 
 morrow morning you will have to walk to the sta- 
 tion with Mr. Coleridge to carry his luggage for 
 him." Nearly all night long that boy lay awake 
 anticipating with delight the walk with Coleridge 
 next morning. Morning came. "It was a bright, 
 beautiful, perfect spring day," says Hazlitt. "The 
 station was four miles distant; all the way there 
 Coleridge talked incessantly and I listened raptur- 
 ously. He talked of nothing except the things im- 
 mediately around us, of the trees and the grass and 
 the flowers and the birds and the white cumulus 
 clouds floating across the deep blue sky; but, oh, 
 what glorious talk it was! What luminous power 
 it had ! It seemed to send a light away down into 
 the deepest depths of my mind. It floated the uni- 
 
48 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 verse for me in an atmosphere of thought and of 
 poetry. As I trod that same road on my way back 
 from the station, the world seemed transformed to 
 me, and trees and grass and flowers and floating 
 clouds and the blue sky had acquired for me a higher 
 beauty and a deeper meaning. That walk with Cole- 
 ridge was the great intellectual quickening of my 
 life ; but for that walk with Coleridge, I should never 
 have persisted in the study of metaphysics and the 
 higher literature ; but for that walk with Coleridge, 
 I believe, I should never have written a line for pub- 
 lication." 
 
 Young ladies, that was higher education. The 
 effect that Coleridge's talk had upon that boy's mind 
 was higher education; and if some such effect has 
 not been produced upon your mind during your 
 four-miles walk, or your three-miles walk, or your 
 two-miles walk, taking the years for miles, that you 
 have had with the teachers of this Faculty, then you 
 have received from this institution no higher educa- 
 tion. If by reason of your sojourn at this college, 
 God's universe has not acquired for you a higher 
 beauty, God's eternal laws a deeper and a grander 
 meaning; if during your sojourn at this college your 
 mind has not been illuminated in its deepest depths ; 
 if the higher powers of your intellect have not been 
 quickened into a life that will last; if the activities 
 of your nature have not been aroused to put forth 
 your utmost efforts to develop yourselves in the di- 
 rection of the best and highest tendencies of your 
 nature, then however much learning and scholarship 
 you may have acquired, however perfect your reci- 
 tations and your examinations and your reports 
 may have been, you have received from this college 
 no higher education ! 
 
 Higher education is the assimilation by mind, 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 49 
 
 heart and soul of those perennial truths of God that 
 edify and inspire the immortal spirit that dwells in 
 man's mortal body. There are many different kinds 
 and sorts and degrees and uses and functions of 
 education, but only that education whose principal 
 purpose is to edify and inspire the soul of man is, 
 properly speaking, higher education, and it is this 
 particular phase of education that I have chosen to 
 dwell upon in this my last talk to you. 
 
 Far be it from me to undervalue that practical, 
 utilitarian education that serves to guide us aright 
 along the pathway of the ordinary, every-day duties 
 of life. 
 
 Over in that cooking-school yonder you got a 
 receipt how to make biscuit. If you learned that 
 receipt well and thoroughly both theoretically and 
 practically, you have had from this institution no 
 more important, no more precious lesson. There 
 is no department or branch of this college that I 
 value more highly than I do our cooking and our 
 dressmaking school; and I should be delighted if 
 we could teach well and thoroughly more of these 
 home-making studies in our college, for after all is 
 said and done, they are just the most important part 
 of a woman's education, and I have little respect for 
 any woman who despises or who disparages them, 
 or who fails to make herself proficient in them, and 
 from the bottom of my heart I am sorry for the poor 
 woman who never has any need for them, for the 
 poor woman who in all her life has no call to use 
 them. But it is needless for me to dwell upon the 
 importance that the founders and trustees of this 
 college attach to these home-making studies, and 
 to those other industrial or bread-winning studies, 
 such as your teacher-training, your stenography 
 and typewriting, your dressmaking and such like. 
 
 4ba 
 
50 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 A thorough teaching of such things as these con- 
 stitutes as everybody knows the characteristic fea- 
 tures of this college. This stone which the educa- 
 tional builders of former days rejected has become 
 the chief corner-stone of the Georgia Normal and 
 Industrial College. 
 
 Neither do I mean to disparage that enlighten- 
 ing education whose purpose is to impart general 
 information, worldly knowledge, worldly wisdom, 
 by which the student is brought into sympathy 
 with the progress of the times and put in touch with 
 the spirit of the age. This is an exceedingly im- 
 portant kind or phase of education, and, as you well 
 know, the aim of a large proportion of the studies 
 that you have pursued in this college has been to 
 give you that kind of education. 
 
 But what I wish to do especially this morning is 
 to impress upon your minds this truth : That after 
 all practical, utilitarian knowledge is acquired, after 
 all wordly wisdom and social accomplishments are 
 acquired, after all of that superficial intellectual 
 polish that the world calls culture is acquired, there 
 is still something beyond, and that something be- 
 yond is the true higher education, or the assimila- 
 tion by mind, heart and soul of those perennial 
 truths that edify and inspire the immortal spirit of 
 man. By edify, I mean that gives you a grand and 
 lofty conception of God's universe of matter and 
 universe of mind. By inspire, I mean that stirs the 
 divinity that dwells within you, that gives you a 
 high ideal of human life, and moves you to put 
 forth your utmost efforts to develop yourself in the 
 direction of the noblest tendencies of your nature. 
 
 Broadly speaking, the higher education is de- 
 rived from three principal sources, namely, from 
 the assimilation of scientific truth, from the assimi- 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 51 
 
 lation of literary truth, from the assimilation of re- 
 ligious truth. I wish to say a few words to> you in 
 regard to each of these ; and first, as to the assimila- 
 tion of scientific truth. 
 
 Young ladies, the educational value of any scien- 
 tific truth is enhanced an hundredfold when it is 
 gotten directly from God's inspired book of nature 
 instead of being taken merely and solely from the 
 books of men. Out yonder in the western skies on 
 these evenings and in the early night you see the 
 planet Venus shining in her matchless beauty. Now 
 any good teacher with the aid of an ugly diagram 
 drawn on a blackboard can, in an hour's lesson, 
 teach you all about that beautiful planet and its 
 complex movements so that you will understand it 
 perfectly; and that is the way, and the only way, 
 in which it is usually taught in schools and colleges 
 — an. hour's lesson on the blackboard, you under- 
 stand it perfectly, and you dismiss it from your 
 mind forever. By such a lesson you have gained 
 some knowledge, have had some mental discipline, 
 perhaps, but you have not really assimilated any 
 truth of God's. But it would take you eighteen 
 months just to read the lesson through in that book 
 out yonder — in God's inspired book of nature; nine 
 months watching the queenly planet in her royal 
 journey up and down among the constellations in 
 the western skies as evening star, and then see her 
 flash up in the eastern horizon, and nine months up 
 and down there as morning star! Once read the 
 lesson through that way and you will have assimi- 
 lated, mind, heart and soul, one of the sublimest 
 truths of God's material universe, and you will have 
 added a priceless jewel to the treasures of your mind. 
 By such a study of science your whole intellectual 
 being is edified and ennobled. You know perfectly 
 
52 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 well, young ladies, that in this college — down there 
 in our Model and in our regular Science Depart- 
 ment — you have been carefully taught how to read 
 science directly from God's inspired book of nature. 
 That book lies out there before you; to you it is an 
 open book. You can do nothing better for your own 
 higher education than to read from its glowing 
 pages. As teachers you can do nothing better for 
 the true higher education of the young human souls 
 committed to your charge than to lead them forth 
 and teach them, while they are yet in the spring- 
 time of life, to read truth directly from God's in- 
 spired book of nature ! 
 
 But it is very probable, almost certain in fact, that 
 much the largest part of your future higher educa- 
 tion will be derived from another source than from 
 the study of natural science, and that is from the 
 study of literature. It is perfectly natural and en- 
 tirely right that you should love literature more 
 than you love science. That is as it should be. But 
 I want to warn you that literature is a very dan- 
 gerous thing. There is entirely too much literature 
 in the world in our day. There is an enormous, 
 oppressive, distracting superabundance and excess 
 of literature in the world this nineteenth century. 
 
 A literary plethora pervades our country like a 
 disease and it is seriously damaging, I believe, to 
 the best powers of the human mind and to the 
 strongest and finest qualities of human character. 
 "Of the making of many books there is no end," 
 said the preacher in disgust five thousand years ago, 
 and the saying applies with tenfold force in this 
 close of our nineteenth century. Sixty thousand 
 books claiming to be new and original were pub- 
 lished in the world in the year 1894. I believe the 
 world would be better off intellectually, morally and 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 53 
 
 spiritually, if fifty-five thousand of those books had 
 never seen the light. Most books are either posi- 
 tively bad or perfectly worthless, comparatively few 
 are good, and the smallest possible number are real- 
 ly great. Young ladies, I have time this morning 
 to give you only one piece of advice about your read- 
 ing, but I give that very earnestly and very serious- 
 ly, and that is: Try to read at least a few of the 
 really great books. Read them, study them, absorb 
 them, assimilate them, love them, believe in them, 
 open your mind, heart and soul freely to their in- 
 fluence. If you will only do that you will have noth- 
 ing to fear from the pernicious literature that so 
 abounds in our day. One of the most fortunate 
 things that can happen to a young human soul in 
 the process of getting an education is to come strong- 
 ly under the influence of a really great, good book. 
 And there is no mistaking a really great book. By 
 this sign shall you know it, by its power to edify 
 and inspire you. It makes no difference what a 
 book is about, it makes no difference for what par- 
 ticular purpose it is written, it makes no difference 
 what literary form it may assume ; the infallible test 
 of the real greatness of any book is its edifying and 
 its inspiring power. No book is really great that 
 does not edify and inspire. 
 
 Of the hundreds of books that I have read in my 
 life there are just five that have had a more power- 
 ful influence over me, intellectually, morally and 
 spiritually, than all the others put together ; they are 
 Emerson, Carlyle, Ruskin, Shakespeare, and the 
 Bible. I count these as infinitely the greatest books 
 that I ever read not because they entertained me so 
 mightily, not because they gave me so great instruc- 
 tion and knowledge, but because, far beyond all 
 others, they edified and inspired me; and if I were 
 
54 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 going to make out a course of reading for you girls 
 this morning I should say, read Ruskin's Sesame 
 and Lilies, Ethics of the Dust, Crown of Wild Ol- 
 ives. Read Emerson's essays on Character, on Con- 
 duct, on Manners, on Self-Reliance, on Transcen- 
 dentalism, on Representative Men. Read Carlyle's 
 Heroes and Hero Worship, his Sartor Resartus, his 
 essays on Burns, Samuel Johnson, Voltaire and 
 Characteristics, his biographical sketches of his own 
 father, John Carlyle, and his own wife, Jane Welsh 
 Carlyle; read Shakespeare's Hamlet, Othello, Lear, 
 Macbeth, As You Like It, Midsummer Night's 
 Dream. Read in the Bible nearly all that is contain- 
 ed in the four gospels and certain selected chapters 
 from the Epistles, the Psalms, and from Job, Jere- 
 miah and Isaiah. Read these things, and you will 
 have read the sublimest truths, the most edifying 
 and inspiring truths ever uttered in human 
 language; and expressed in a form of per- 
 fect beauty absolutely matchless in the whole 
 range of the literature of the world. These 
 are, in my opinion, just the greatest books 
 that have ever been written. In them the human 
 mind reached the high-water mark of literary 
 achievement. It will never rise so high again. 
 
 All these productions put together would not oc- 
 cupy more than three ordinary-sized volumes; but 
 don't try to read them in a month or in several 
 months. Read them through years; read them 
 through all the years of your life; read them as your 
 mind and character develop to receive them; read 
 them over and over again, read them with all the 
 aid you can get to help you understand and appre- 
 ciate them. All these productions together would 
 perhaps constitute not more than a one-thousandth 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 55 
 
 part of your entire reading, but if you read them 
 aright they will have a more powerful and more 
 salutary influence over you intellectually, morally 
 and spiritually, than all the rest of your reading put 
 together. Read these books and such books as these, 
 read them, study them, absorb them, assimilate 
 them, love them, believe in them, and you will have 
 nothing to fear from the inferior, worthless and bad 
 books that so abound in our times. All the imps 
 and devils, the filth-mongers, babbling fools, puling 
 sentimentalists, hysterical women, and perverted 
 men, that so infest the world of letters in our day 
 will be powerless to harm you. You bear a charmed 
 life. You carry in your very blood an antidote to 
 the worst poison the vilest book contains. Young 
 ladies, in this college you have been taught how to 
 read good books, and one of the principal purposes 
 of all your studies here has been to prepare your 
 minds for high thinking, your hearts for fine feeling. 
 A sacred obligation rests upon you to try to bring 
 this culture to perfection. A sacred obligation rests 
 upon you to beware lest the wicked one sow tares 
 among the wheat and when the master of the field 
 shall come he will find the harvest ruined. 
 
 Finally, the assimilation of religious truth is a 
 part of our higher education. I hesitate to touch 
 upon this most profound and most important of all 
 subjects. I will advance just this one thought con- 
 cerning it : 
 
 There are two classes of truths that Almighty God 
 reveals to the mind of man in this human life, name- 
 ly, those truths that can be comprehended by the 
 understanding and those truths that can not be com- 
 prehended by the understanding, but which address 
 themselves to that faculty of the mind called intui- 
 
56 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 tion. Intuition is a finer and higher power than the 
 understanding. Understanding bears the same re- 
 lation to intuition that the earth's atmosphere bears 
 to that finer and more subtle fluid that scientists call 
 ether. The atmosphere is wholly "of the earth, 
 earthy;" it can be handled and weighed and analyz- 
 ed ; it clings close to the earth ; it rises only a little 
 above the earth ; but that fine and subtle ether, which 
 exists just as certainly as the atmosphere does, is 
 an intangible and impalpable substance, and it not 
 only permeates all terrestrial things far more subtly 
 than the atmosphere, but it rises infinitely higher 
 than the atmosphere and brings down to us on its 
 ethereal waves the light of sun, moon, and stars and 
 all heavenly bodies. Just so> understanding is whol- 
 ly "of the earth, earthy," it reveals to the mind of 
 man those truths by which he is related to the earth 
 and to things of the earth; but there is an intuition 
 that transcends the understanding and brings down 
 to the longing soul of man those divine truths by 
 which he is related to the ever-living God, the arche- 
 type of his being; simple, unquestioning, abiding 
 belief in those transcendent divine truths and the 
 harmonizing of one's life to their promptings, con- 
 stitutes the crowning glory of all human existence. 
 
 Young ladies, you have all read that tender story 
 how nearly two thousand years ago, just as the beau- 
 tiful day was breaking on a sweet spring morning, 
 Mary Magdelene went to the tomb of the Saviour 
 bearing spices and ointments, but when she got there 
 she found the sepulchre empty, the body of the Lord 
 was gone, and as she sat there weeping bitterly a 
 man approached softly and standing over her asked : 
 "Woman, why weepest thou?" Without raising her 
 head, and thinking it was the gardener that spoke, 
 she cried : "They have taken my Lord away and I 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 57 
 
 know not where they have laid him!" "Mary!" he 
 said, and in that tender, loving tone she recognized 
 the voice of the Savior himself, and raising her head 
 she looked up into his face and falling upon her 
 knees at his feet she cried, "Master!" Young ladies, 
 the very highest education that any woman ever has 
 received or ever can receive in this world is that 
 which brought that worshipful "Master!" from 
 Mary's lips as she knelt at the Savior's feet. In 
 this world of ours, with its sunshine and shadow, 
 with its joys and its sorrows, that divine voice still 
 speaks to worshipful souls just as tenderly and lov- 
 ingly as it spoke to Mary in the Arimathean's gar- 
 den two thousand years ago. Oh, may you hearken 
 to that voice and may your heart too, like Mary's, 
 go out in glad response to it — '"Master!" 
 
 And now, young ladies, in behalf of the faculty 
 of the Georgia Normal and Industrial College, I 
 must say farewell to you. Many of you have been 
 here with us since the very first day that this school 
 was opened on that golden October morning, nearly 
 four years ago. In the meantime, hundreds of girls 
 have come and gone, but "ye have been with us from 
 the beginning;" and now you must go too, but like 
 Napoleon's "Old Guard," you leave us wearing the 
 "crosses of the legion of honor" upon your breast 
 and carrying with you the esteem and warm affec- 
 tion of these teacher generals under whom you have 
 fought so well and nobly the quiet, earnest battles 
 of the schoolroom ! 
 
 You have been here with us almost ever since you 
 were little girls, and with a tenderer love than you 
 can ever know we have watched your growth and 
 development in body, in mind, in heart, and in char- 
 acter. 
 
 We send you forth believing that you are the 
 
58 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 "chosen vessels of the Lord," appointed under provi- 
 dence to bear in blessings to the people the fruit of 
 this tree planted by the rivers of waters. We send 
 you forth believing that in your daily lives you will 
 demonstrate that every touch of a noble culture be- 
 stowed upon a woman's mind is a jewel in the na- 
 tion's crown; that every seed of right education 
 planted in a woman's heart will bring forth an 
 abundant harvest in priceless benefits to the common- 
 wealth. We send you forth feeling assured that 
 your higher education will redound to the good, to 
 the honor, and to the glory of dear old Georgia for 
 generations and generations to come, forever and 
 forevermore ! 
 
freely Y<? ftev<? F^ived, yreely (Jiv<?." 
 
 YOUNG Ladies of the Graduating Class: 
 As I stand before you this morning I am 
 strongly reminded of that beautiful tenth chap- 
 ter of St. Matthew, in which Jesus Christ sends forth 
 his twelve disciples to the work to which he had ap- 
 pointed them and for which they had been specially 
 educated under his divine teaching. That brief dis- 
 course is the most powerful missionary sermon that 
 was ever preached. It contains the very essence and 
 quintessence of the missionary spirit. Its truths 
 will never die and its injunctions are of perennial 
 application. Many of them apply to you this morn- 
 ing just as forcefully as they applied to the twelve 
 disciples nineteen hundred years ago, for in the sight 
 of God you are missionaries just as much as those 
 disciples were missionaries. I love to think of the 
 graduates of this college as missionaries. Several 
 weeks ago I read an account of the sailing of a ship 
 from California for China bearing on board a num- 
 ber of women missionaries, among them a noble 
 Georgia woman, and as I read I thought to myself, 
 "Very well, God speed them, but the girls that go 
 out every year from the Georgia Normal and In- 
 dustrial College are just as much missionaries as 
 those good women are, and these Georgia girls go 
 forth into fields of labor more important and where 
 the possibilities of doing good are greater than can 
 be found in any heathen or in any pagan land." 
 Missionary work, like charity, should begin at home. 
 Mark you, Jesus Christ in this chapter of St. Mat- 
 
 (59) 
 
60 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 thew doesn't send his twelve disciples beyond the 
 seas or across the deserts or even over the border 
 into any far-away or foreign land. He sends them 
 out into his own and their own little country of 
 Palestine where there was the greatest abundance 
 of work for them to do, and so we send you out into 
 your own native State of Georgia where there is the 
 greatest abundance of work for you to do, where the 
 fields are white with the ripening grain, where the 
 harvest indeed is plenteous but the laborers are few. 
 
 When on his last visit to us our distinguished and 
 beloved State School Commissioner said to me with 
 kindling enthusiasm, "Almost wherever I go in the 
 State of Georgia I find your girls at work teaching 
 in country and in village schools, and wherever I 
 find them they are a shining light in the community 
 in which they dwell, a veritable blessing to the peo- 
 ple among whom they are working. All through 
 this commonwealth they are making the desert places 
 in Georgia's educational fields to bloom and blossom 
 as a rose." I thought to myself, "Thank God for 
 this glorious news from the Georgia Normal and 
 Industrial College missionaries." 
 
 When from time to time during the past session I 
 have received numerous letters and oral communi- 
 cations telling me of the splendid work our girls are 
 doing in homes and households, in business offices, 
 in dressmaking establishments, in schoolrooms, I 
 have exclaimed to myself, "Hurrah for the Georgia 
 Normal and Industrial College missionaries !" These 
 glorious messages that come to me from the four 
 quarters of the State are the greatest joy and satis- 
 faction of my life. Now when you go out I earnestly 
 hope that tidings like these may come back about 
 you to be a joy, a satisfaction, an inspiration to the 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 61 
 
 President, to the faculty and the noble founder and 
 the faithful trustees of this institution. 
 
 I want you to read that tenth chapter of St. Mat- 
 thew and notice how forcefully many of its injunc- 
 tions apply to you, either literally or figuratively. 
 There is one of them that I want you to consider 
 very specially with me this morning ; it seems to me 
 so wonderfully apt in its application to you and to 
 all graduates of this college. Says Jesus, as a last 
 injunction to his departing disciples, "Freely have 
 ye received, now freely give!" What a profound 
 significance the passage has, or ought to have, for 
 every graduate of this college ! Take the first clause 
 of it, "Freely have ye received," and consider its 
 fine, noble application. This Georgia Normal and 
 Industrial College, your Alma Mater, is the free- 
 hearted, gracious gift of Georgia's manhood to Geor- 
 gia's womanhood. It was given to the women of 
 Georgia not at the behest of a. lot of strong-minded 
 females, insolently demanding it as woman's right. 
 Nay, it came to you at the simple asking of Georgia's 
 gentlewomen ; and from the day that the Legislature 
 passed the act establishing it six years ago down to 
 this sweet June morning it has been more favored 
 and blessed and honored and cherished and beloved 
 than any other educational institution that ever stood 
 on Georgia soil. Everything that the State of Geor- 
 gia, poor and impecunious as she is, could afford to 
 do she has freely done for this school. The Legis- 
 lature has been more partial to it and more liberal to 
 it than to any other school in the State. At the last 
 session of that body, for instance, when every State 
 educational institution was there begging for special 
 appropriations for various purposes, all were turned 
 away empty-handed, or nearly so, except this col- 
 lege; but when it came the State, through her legis- 
 
62 BACCAIvAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 lators, gave all that was asked, because this was her 
 woman's school. 
 
 The Peabody Educational Fund, through our own 
 beloved Dr. Curry, has extended to this institution a 
 generous helping hand and a tender, fostering care, 
 increasing its appropriation to it more and more 
 every year. Last summer, when the fund set aside 
 by the State for the purpose of making an educa- 
 tional exhibit at the Atlanta Exposition came to be 
 divided out among the various schools, the directors 
 having the matter in charge, by unanimous vote, 
 gave the largest share to this school. At that great 
 Exposition, the committee of awards, composed of 
 some of the most prominent educators in America, 
 gave to this school the highest prize and the highest 
 praise, although there were nearly one hundred com- 
 petitors from all parts of the Union. The whole 
 people of Georgia feel, and have always felt, a very 
 special, unequaled pride and interest in this school. 
 They have compassed it with glory and honor; they 
 have crowned it with loving kindness ! I have never 
 heard a Georgia man speak of this school that his 
 voice did not assume a tender tone, and that the light 
 of affection did not kindle in his eye. 
 
 With a liberal hand and a liberal mind and a 
 liberal heart the school was established and has been 
 maintained; and what a truly liberal education it 
 bestows upon its students ! Do you not see, then, in 
 what a fine and beautiful and noble sense it is true 
 that "freely have ye received ?" Now go forth and 
 in the same magnanimous spirit "freely give!" 
 
 I earnestly trust that the education you have re- 
 ceived at this college has increased your power to 
 give thirtyfold, sixtyfold, an hundredfold. I can 
 not conceive how it is possible for any girl to have 
 spent from two to four years as you have spent 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 63 
 
 them here in diligent, earnest, zealous application in 
 such studies as you have pursued, under such in- 
 struction as you have had, without having been en- 
 riched in mind and heart and character with treas- 
 ures more precious than the gold of Ormus or of 
 Ind. Freely have you received these treasures, now 
 freely give! When Juliet, Shakespeare's beautiful 
 Juliet, pours forth the first outburst of her virgin 
 love to Romeo, she exclaims : "My bounty is as 
 boundless as the sea, my love as deep; the more I 
 give the more I have to give." So it is with these 
 treasures of mind and heart and character — the 
 more you give the more you will have to give. The 
 more freely you exercise any faculty of your nature 
 in unselfish, generous deeds, the stronger that faculty 
 will become; nay, the stronger and more powerful 
 and more beautiful and more noble your whole na- 
 ture will become. Since God created the human 
 race by no other means than that has the character 
 of man or woman ever grown in strength and beauty 
 and nobility. 
 
 Whatever power to do good you may have ac- 
 quired by virtue of the education you have had at 
 this college let it not lie idle until it becomes atro- 
 phied by disuse; use it earnestly, vigorously, freely, 
 for the good of humanity, for the uplifting of Geor- 
 gia's civilization, and for the glory of the ever-living 
 God. Whatever streams of knowledge and intelli- 
 gence may have been poured into your receptive 
 minds during all the years that you have spent at 
 school and at college, let it not stagnate there, "to 
 cream and mantle like a standing pond." All 
 through Georgia there are desert spots and arid 
 places and children thirsting for these living waters ; 
 let them flow, freely let them flow. "Freely have 
 ye received, freely give." 
 
64 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 If you will only make a right use of the education 
 you have received at this college there is not one 
 of you but will be a priceless blessing to the com- 
 monwealth of Georgia. If you will only make an 
 earnest, generous, right use of the education you 
 have received at this college there is not a young 
 man who will graduate this summer at the Uni- 
 versity at Athens or at the School of Technology, 
 or at Emory or at Mercer, who will have it in his 
 power to do greater service for his people or his 
 State than each of you will have in the manifold 
 function of your noble woman's sphere. 
 
 Those of you especially who expect to be school- 
 teachers, what an opportunity lies before you ! The 
 thing of paramount importance in Georgia to-day is 
 the better education of the masses of her children. 
 The greatest defect in Georgia's civilization to-day, 
 a menace to her future prosperity and advancement, 
 is the utter insufficiency and inefficiency of her com- 
 mon schools, and every girl that goes out from this 
 college and carries the light of the new education 
 into the rural districts and teaches a good school 
 where hitherto there has been either no school at all 
 or only a very poor school is doing, in the sight of 
 God and all his holy angels, more real good for her 
 people and her State than any so-called statesman 
 up yonder in Washington City making typewritten 
 speeches on the silver question in the halls of Con- 
 gress. 
 
 Every morning in the year as the years go by, as 
 I stand here and look into the faces of our assem- 
 bled students, I am more and more profoundly im- 
 pressed with the great possibilities for good to Geor- 
 gia that lie in this her woman's college. A year or 
 two ago a person said to me, speaking of one of the 
 teachers of our faculty, "Isn't it a pity that a woman 
 
baccalaureate addresses. 65 
 
 of such ability and such lofty ambition shouldn't 
 have a broader sphere of action?" I tell you that 
 speech made me hot under the collar, and I replied 
 with righteous indignation, "Madam, I can't con- 
 ceive how it is possible for any woman on God's 
 earth to have a broader sphere, a grander, nobler, 
 better work in life than to be a teacher in the Geor- 
 gia Normal and Industrial College" ; and I meant 
 precisely what I said. I might have said more than 
 that. I might have said, "In the name of God what 
 do you mean by a broader sphere? Do you think 
 that Mary Ellen Lease, cavorting over the country 
 making stump speeches to mobs of howling fools, 
 has a broader sphere? Do you think that Susan B. 
 Anthony and her stripe, running around the land 
 hysterically shrieking in a C sharp voice for wo- 
 man's rights, has a broader sphere? Do you think 
 that Amelie Rives, contaminating the stream of cur- 
 rent literature with rot novels, has a broader sphere ? 
 Do you think that if this good teacher of ours should 
 have a column of fulsome flattery written about her 
 in the daily papers, or should get her picture put in 
 the Atlanta Constitution as a Georgia beauty, that it 
 would be a 'broader sphere ?' " 
 
 What do the women mean by this "broader 
 sphere" business any how? Isn't woman's sphere 
 already broad enough? Why it is "as broad and 
 general as the casing air!" It's as deep as the hu- 
 man heart; it's as high as the throne of God! In 
 the sweep of its horizon is contained all things that 
 mankind holds dearest and most precious and that 
 most deeply concern human existence in this 
 world. It includes everything that is essentially 
 feminine; it excludes, as it should exclude, only 
 those things that are essentially masculine. It in- 
 cludes music, art, literature, all womanly industrial 
 
 5 ba 
 
66 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 pursuits, society, religion, schoolroom, college hall, 
 home, wifehood, motherhood ! It embraces those 
 occupations upon which the welfare and happiness 
 of the human race, the progress of civilization, and 
 the salvation of man's immortal soul chiefly depend, 
 and the right discharge of which requires the exer- 
 cise of the highest and best and finest powers of 
 mind, heart and character. What do you want with 
 a "broader sphere" than that? Not to make wo- 
 man's sphere any broader or deeper or higher than 
 it already is, but to fit her better for the sphere which 
 time out of mind has been open to her, which 
 Almighty God intended for her, and which she needs 
 must fill with her deeds, good or bad, is the supreme 
 duty that modern civilization owes to womanhood, 
 and it is precisely for the purpose of discharging that 
 duty to the young women of Georgia that this col- 
 lege was established. And if the graduates of this 
 college disappoint us not, the time is about to come, 
 nay, is already at hand, when Georgia will clearly 
 see and gladly proclaim that the very best invest- 
 ment she ever made was the money that she put into 
 the establishment and maintenance of this her wo- 
 man's college. 
 
 The time is not far distant when Georgia, in 
 every fiber of her complex social system and through- 
 out the length and breadth of her civilization, will 
 realize the refining, the beautifying, the uplifting 
 and ennobling power of this her woman's college. 
 Already she is beginning to feel through all the 
 nerve-centers of her being its energizing, vitaliz- 
 ing, inspiring influence. Already the people 
 rise up and call the institution blessed, and are say- 
 ing to its noble founder, "you builded better than 
 you knew." 
 
 Some months ago one of your number came to 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 67 
 
 me and asked me to suggest a suitable motto for the 
 Senior class. I didn't do it because I couldn't think 
 of anything appropriate. But I do wish now, as a 
 last word to' you, to call your attention to a motto 
 which you can not adopt as yours, but the essential 
 spirit of which I hope will always animate you. It 
 is that grand old French expression that comes down 
 to us from the days of chivalry, "Noblesse 
 Oblige!" Its literal translation is, "The nobility 
 are under obligations!" and it means that persons 
 belonging to the nobility having been specially fa- 
 vored by birth and by fortune, having had the very 
 best advantages in every way, being deferred to and 
 looked up to by the great masses of the people, 
 ought to feel under obligations to show themselves, 
 in all the relations and duties and conduct of life, 
 superior to ordinary people; ought to be more re- 
 fined in manners, more cultured in conversation, 
 more gracious in deportment, more generous of 
 heart, more magnanimous of soul, more patriotic, 
 more self-sacrificing, more heroic, gentler in peace 
 and braver in war! Now it seems to me that a 
 spirit like that ought to animate the graduates of 
 this college. The circumstances under which this 
 school was established; the almost sacred purpose 
 to which it is devoted ; the pure ideals of scholarship 
 and of conduct which, through thick and thin, 
 through evil report and good report, it has striven 
 to maintain ; the favors and blessings that have been 
 showered upon it ; the love and affection with which 
 it has been cherished; the deep pride and interest 
 that the whole State feels in it; the great hopes and 
 expectations that a people's heart has garnered in 
 it, ought, it seems to me, to give to this institution 
 a wonderful moral power — ought, it seems to me, 
 to have a very inspiring and ennobling influence on 
 
68 BACCM,AUR£AT£ ADDRESSES. 
 
 the mind and the heart and the character of its stu- 
 dents, and every graduate that goes forth from its 
 doors ought to feel under a glad, joyous obligation 
 to illustrate, as far as in her lies, by her whole walk 
 and conduct in life, the best and truest and noblest 
 type of Georgia womanhood! My dear young 
 friends, I earnestly trust that a spirit like that may 
 animate you through all your lives and that to each 
 one of you it may ever be an inspiring thought, "I 
 am a graduate of the Georgia Normal and Indus- 
 trial College, noblesse oblige." 
 
51?<? Styreefold Edueatior;. 
 
 YOUNG Ladies oe the Graduating Class: 
 The subject of my address to you to-day will 
 be the Threefold Education. The human mind 
 is a trinity. It is composed of three powers — the 
 power to think, the power to feel, and the power to 
 do. Thinking power, feeling power, doing power 
 — these three in all their manifold forms and mani- 
 festations, in all their complex and intricate rela- 
 tions constitute that wonderful organism which we 
 call mind. The special organ of the thinking power 
 is the intellect; the special organ of the feeling 
 power are the affections; the special organ of the 
 doing power is the will. The object of education 
 is to develop, strengthen, discipline, train, and direct 
 these three powers of the mind — the intellect, or 
 thinking power; the affections, or feeling power; 
 and the will, or doing power. So there are three 
 kinds of education — education of the intellect, edu- 
 cation of the affections, education of the will. 
 
 The main purpose of schools and colleges is to 
 educate the intellect or thinking power of the mind. 
 I believe, of course, that every good school and every 
 good college does also much incidentally and indi- 
 rectly towards the education of the affections and 
 the will, but that is not their express purpose, that 
 is not their reason for being, that is not the work for 
 which they are organized. I repeat that the main 
 purpose of schools and colleges is to educate the 
 intellect, or thinking power of the mind. The ob- 
 ject of all thinking is to see truth. So the main pur- 
 
 (69) 
 
70 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 pose of schools and colleges is to educate the human 
 intellect to see truth. In every school and in the 
 college that you have attended the main purpose has 
 been, or at least should have been, to educate your 
 intellect to see truth — mathematical truth, scientific 
 truth, historic truth, poetic truth, moral truth, spirit- 
 ual truth. You have received, or are supposed to 
 have received, what is called an higher education. 
 What does that mean? It means that your intellect 
 has been developed, expanded, disciplined, trained 
 and directed to see truth in its higher and finer forms 
 and manifestations, in its broader relations, in its 
 more comprehensive applications. 
 
 There is something very grand about the genesis 
 of an higher education. Now I want you to follow 
 me closely for a little while to see if we can not get 
 a clear idea of what is the genesis of an higher edu- 
 cation. This, it seems to me, is a fair presentation 
 of it: Intellect is that power by which the human 
 mind sees truth. The more intellect a person has, 
 the greater his power of seeing truth. A man's 
 ability to see truth is the measure of his intellect. 
 Every now and then a great intellect, a truly great 
 intellect, is born into this world of ours. It looks 
 out on the universe, on that same universe on which 
 all intellects have gazed for ages, but this great in- 
 tellect, looking in this direction or that direction, 
 sees more profoundly, more clearly, more finely into 
 this thing or that thing than any intellect ever saw 
 before, and so discovers some truth of God, hitherto 
 unseen by the mind of man. The discoverer, this 
 great seer, turns in rapture and points his discovery 
 out to his fellow beings, and those of them who have 
 enough intellect, see it clearly; they clap their 
 hands in joy and cry, "Lo, it is true!" And so an- 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 71 
 
 other note in the divine harmony of the universe 
 bursts upon the listening ears of men. 
 
 For instance, about four hundred years ago there 
 was born in Prussia a man by the name of Coper- 
 nicus ; he was one of these great intellects ; he looked 
 out on the universe in the direction of the starlit 
 skies, those same starlit skies on which all men had 
 gazed for ages, but the great intellect of Copernicus 
 saw more profoundly, more clearly, more finely into 
 those star depths than any intellect had ever seen 
 before, and so he discovered there that great cen- 
 tral truth that governs and controls all those starry- 
 hosts of the heavens. Coming after him and stand- 
 ing on the vantage-ground of his discovery other 
 intellects looking at the heavens in this direction and 
 that direction made discovery after discovery, added 
 truth unto truth, law unto law, until the whole sub- 
 lime science of astronomy stood revealed to 1 the mind 
 of man. Sir Isaac Newton was another one of these 
 great seers. Sitting in his orchard one summer 
 afternoon, he saw an apple fall from a tree. With 
 his great, penetrating intellect he gazed at that most 
 familiar fact, until he discovered in it the laws of 
 gravitation, that great truth which is the keystone 
 to the arch of the material universe. In like man- 
 ner all of the natural sciences have had their origin 
 and development. Then altogether another class 
 or kind of great seers, like Homer and Dante and 
 Browning and Shakespeare with their keen, incisive 
 intellects looked into the mighty drama of human 
 life and into the mysteries of the human heart, and 
 so have given us the finest and highest truths of 
 poetry. And still another class of great seers like 
 Plato and Aristotle and Francis Bacon and Herbert 
 Spencer have given us the most comprehensive 
 
72 baccalaureate addresses. 
 
 truths of philosophy. And so on through the whole 
 mighty range of learning and knowledge and wis- 
 dom and truth. 
 
 Now, young ladies, as unappreciative and sordid 
 and frivolous as people seem to us to be when we 
 are in our pessimistic moods, yet this great comfort- 
 ing fact remains, that after all there is really noth- 
 ing in this world that mankind values so highly as 
 they do these revelations of truth made by the great 
 seers of the universe. They guard them as precious 
 treasures; they hand them down from generation 
 to generation ; they preserve them in blessed books ; 
 they establish colleges and universities to teach them 
 to the youth of the land ; and when children gather 
 around their parents with that eager cry that ever 
 flows from the young human soul, "What good thing 
 can you show us?" the parents answer, "The best 
 things to show you are the revelations made by the 
 great seers of the universe," and so they send their 
 sons and their daughters to colleges and universi- 
 ties to have their intellects developed, disciplined, 
 ennobled, to have their souls edified, to have their 
 spirits refined and inspired by the study and assimi- 
 lation of the high and beautiful truths that the great 
 seers of the universe have revealed. That is higher 
 education. It is a blessed privilege to have an higher 
 education. That privilege to some extent at least, 
 you have enjoyed at this college. And I know that 
 every one of these fine and high truths that your 
 mind has really assimilated will be a blessing to 
 your life and to every other life with which your life 
 shall come in contact. I believe your whole nature 
 has been enriched and your power for doing good 
 has been greatly increased by reason of the higher 
 education you have received at this college. A sa- 
 cred obligation rests upon you to use that power 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 73 
 
 earnestly and conscientiously. A sacred obligation 
 rests upon you not to allow the seed of high think- 
 ing that has been planted in your mind to be over- 
 grown and choked to death by the rank weeds of 
 worldliness and frivolity. You have been taught to 
 read and understand and enjoy the productions of 
 the greatest minds of earth ; now just as soon as you 
 leave college don't abandon these entirely to waste 
 your time and stultify your intellect with every 
 fashionable novel that comes from the press "wet 
 with the latest spray of folly." Don't turn from the 
 Pierian springs to slake your thirst with ditch-water. 
 You have studied the lives of some of the greatest 
 heroes that ever breathed the breath of life; then 
 surely you ought never to be little-souled and mean- 
 spirited. You have watched the ever-burning stars 
 of God in their sublime courses through the heavens ; 
 then surely you ought never to be narrow minded 
 about anything under the sun. 
 
 Man is the noblest thing in the universe; mind 
 is the noblest thing in man; intellect is the noblest 
 thing in mind; and the noblest function of intellect 
 is not to pry into things with narrow cunning, not 
 to regard things with foxy shrewdness, not to 
 handle things for your own little, mean, selfish pur- 
 poses, but to see things in their large relations, to 
 trace them to everlasting verities, and to recognize 
 in them that unity in diversity "whose voice is the 
 harmony of the universe and whose seat is the 
 bosom of God!" The aim of higher education is 
 to bring the human intellect up to the performance 
 of this, its highest function. 
 
 It is a very abrupt transition to pass from the 
 education of the intellect to the education of the 
 affections. Necessarily so, because there is no close 
 connection between the intellect and the affections. 
 
74 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 The possession of a great intellect indicates nothing, 
 either one way or the other, as to the qualities of the 
 heart and a purely intellectual education has no 
 tendency to make people practically better hearted 
 or kinder hearted. The heart must have its own 
 education, quite distinct from the education of the 
 head ; and there are few things in a woman's life of 
 greater concern than this education of the heart. I 
 say emphatically in a woman's life, because I believe 
 the affections play a more important part in the 
 lives of women than they do in the lives of men. 
 "Love is of man's life a thing apart, 'tis woman's 
 whole existence," says the poet Byron. That is not 
 altogether so, but there is a great deal of truth in it. 
 In woman's nature beyond the horizon of the intel- 
 lect sweeps the horizon of the affections. Deeper 
 than her desire for knowledge or wealth or fame or 
 power is her desire to love and to be loved. 
 
 However strong her intellect may be, however 
 mighty her will may be, the affections are still the 
 dominant power of her being. In the exercise of 
 the affections she finds the greatest satisfaction of 
 her life. The affections are the crowning glory of 
 her womanhood. Through the affections she con- 
 trols, far more than she knows, the destinies of the 
 human race. How important it is then that her 
 affections should be educated! That education is 
 not to be had from schools or colleges or from books. 
 It is not to be had by reading sentimental novels 
 and crying over them. It is not to be had by going 
 to the theatre and being deeply stirred by these 
 pathetic, emotional plays. It is not to be had by 
 listening to grandiloquent sermons on the "father- 
 hood of God and the brotherhood of man." Litera- 
 ture and discourses like these create in the human 
 heart a strong sentimental, subjective emotion that 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 75 
 
 is very pleasant, very self-satisfying; but they do 
 not really educate the affections, they do not make 
 people practically better hearted or kinder hearted. 
 The greatest preacher of the gospel of Love that the 
 world ever saw was Jesus Christ; but if you will 
 notice whenever Jesus Christ uses that word "love" 
 he never means by it merely the sentimental, sub- 
 jective emotion; he always means by it the feeling 
 that shows itself in some unselfish, objective deed 
 of human kindness. Take for instance that beauti- 
 ful tenth chapter of St. Luke where with so much 
 unction he announces the doctrine, "Love thy neigh- 
 bor as thyself," and when the smart young man in the 
 crowd, thinking to entrap him, calls out, "And who 
 is my neighbor?" Jesus replies by simply narrat- 
 ing the story of the good Samaritan, closing with 
 the injunction, "Go thou and do likewise!" So I 
 say to you, young ladies — "Go- thou and do> like- 
 wise !" I once heard of a poor emigrant, who, with 
 his wife and little children and all of his possessions, 
 was traveling through the country in a two-horse 
 wagon. While they were passing through a little 
 town on their journey the horses became frightened 
 and ran away, tearing the wagon all to pieces and 
 breaking and ruining much of the furniture. A 
 crowd of curious spectators gathered around the 
 wreck and around the poor woe-begone man and 
 the weeping woman, with expressions of pity, "Oh, 
 how sorry I am!" but without offering any help. 
 At last a big, rough-looking man in the crowd, hold- 
 ing a bank-bill up overhead in his hand, called out, 
 "How much are you sorry? I am sorry ten dollars' 
 worth!" and handed the money to the distressed 
 family to help repair the damage. That illustrates 
 the difference between the subjective emotion and 
 objective deed of kindness. Not by thinking chari- 
 
76 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 table thoughts, not by feeling tender hearted but 
 only by habitually doing unselfish deeds of human 
 kindness can the affections be educated. 
 
 I hope you girls will never forget the fine talk that 
 Dr. Payne gave us on this very line, over yonder in 
 the Mansion Study Hall, when he was here two 
 years ago. I hope you will never forget those two 
 impressive illustrations that he narrated to us : that 
 incident which he himself witnessed, of the Epis- 
 copal preacher, who, after reading the burial service 
 over the grave of the dead child, turned his back 
 upon the heart-broken, weeping young father and 
 mother without one word of comfort or even of rec- 
 ognition ; and that other still more deeply impressive 
 illustration of grand old Thomas Carlyle, who, 
 twenty years after the death of his beloved wife, 
 uttered from a remorseful heart those eloquent words 
 of warning, "Dost thou intend a kindness to thy be- 
 loved ones? Do it straightway, while the baleful 
 future is not here!" 
 
 My young friends, there are very few persons in 
 this world who have reached their majority who 
 have not reason to feel the reproach contained in 
 these two illustrations. God grant that you may 
 never have reason to feel so keenly as many of us 
 ought to feel those words of Carlyle, "Dost thou in- 
 tend a kindness to thy beloved one ? Do it straight- 
 way while the baleful future is not here!" Speak 
 the kind word, do the kind deed habitually, thought- 
 fully, unselfishly, to every human being with whose 
 life your life shall come in contact whenever oppor- 
 tunity offers and occasion calls, that is the way to 
 educate the affections. 
 
 We come lastly to the education of the will. That 
 is the most important part of every person's educa- 
 tion, because the ultimate aim of education is the 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 77 
 
 formation of character, but character is determined 
 by the quality and condition of the will. In the be- 
 ginning of this part of my subject let me say that in 
 my opinion there is a tendency in the popular mind 
 to overaggrandize what is called will power, or 
 strength of will. Most people talk as if they thought 
 strength of will was the most admirable attribute of 
 man's nature. But that is a great mistake. Strength 
 of will per se, or in itself, is not a virtue; its merit 
 depends entirely upon its relation to the intellect, the 
 affections, and the conscience. A great intellect and 
 a warm heart are in themselves always admirable, 
 and more or less ennoble every person that possesses 
 them, or either of them, whatever his faults or his 
 shortcomings in other directions may be; but such 
 is not the case with strength of will. Some of the 
 meanest, most despicable, most utterly detestable hu- 
 man beings that I have ever known in my life have 
 possessed great strength of will. Some of the dull- 
 est, stupidest, most mutton-headed, most narrow- 
 minded people that I have known in my life pos- 
 sessed wonderfully strong wills. Some of the mean- 
 est girls that I have ever known in my life have pos- 
 sessed remarkable will power. In fact, as a general 
 rule, when will power sticks out so prominently in a 
 person's character that it forms the most conspicuous 
 feature in his character, it is a bad sign. The most 
 disagreeable people in the world are frequently con- 
 stituted that way. These selfish, tyrannical, over- 
 bearing, domineering people are generally consti- 
 tuted that way. Whenever will power greatly out- 
 weighs the intellect and the affections, it indicates a 
 bad nature. The hatefulest and most pernicious peo- 
 ple in this world are constituted that way. No, as I 
 have said, a strong will per se, or in itself, is not a 
 virtue. Strength of will is admirable only when it is 
 
78 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 lighted by the intellect, inspired by the affections, 
 and controlled by the conscience. That is the idea 
 that rough old David Crockett had in mind when he 
 uttered that immortal epigram, "Be sure you are 
 right, and then go ahead!" 
 
 Now, young ladies, even at the risk of being tedi- 
 ous and tiresome, I do wish, as the closing part of 
 my address to 1 you to-day, to give you three or four 
 practical rules for the education of the will. I do 
 this because I sincerely believe if you will heed and 
 practice these rules it will be of real value in the up- 
 building and perfecting of your characters. 
 
 The first rule that I would give you for the edu- 
 cation of your will is this : Learn, when duty calls, 
 to do what you don't feel like doing. Do what you 
 don't feel like doing! 
 
 I once knew a man who when in the prime of life 
 was stricken with a severe attack of inflammatory 
 rheumatism which settled in his knee-joints. He 
 said to his physician one day, "Doctor, can I ever 
 be cured of this terrible malady?" "Yes," replied 
 the doctor, "you are already getting well, and in the 
 course of a month or two- you will be entirely cured 
 as far as the disease itself is concerned, but I am 
 sorry to tell you that it is going to leave you with 
 stiff knee-joints and all the rest of your life you will 
 have to hobble with a stick." "Doctor," said the 
 man, "is there no way to avoid that calamity?" 
 "Yes," answered the doctor, "if you would stand 
 erect for an hour every day, a half hour in the morn- 
 ing and a half hour in the afternoon, and work your 
 knee-joints up and down vigorously, like a soldier 
 marking double-quick time, the stiffness- would be 
 entirely prevented; but you couldn't do that, the 
 pain would be so great that no human being could 
 stand it." "Doctor," said the man, "if what you say 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 79 
 
 is true, I shall never have stiff knee-joints!" And so 
 every day for a month after that for a half hour in 
 the morning and for a half hour in the afternoon 
 that man stood erect and worked his knee-joints up 
 and down vigorously like a soldier marking double- 
 quick time. Every movement caused him the most 
 excruciating, agonizing pain, so much SO' that his 
 family and friends begged him to desist, but he per- 
 sisted in doing it, consequently the suppleness of his 
 knee-joints was perfectly restored, and he preserved 
 to extreme old age wonderful physical strength and 
 activity. Now you may be sure that that man didn't 
 feel like working his knee-joints up and down, but 
 he had strength of will to do' what he didn't feel like 
 doing, and great was his reward. Thousands and 
 thousands of people, nay nearly all of us in fact, go 
 through life more or less stiff- jointed and hobbling 
 in body, intellect, and in character because we have 
 not sufficiently disciplined ourselves to do what we 
 don't feel like doing. All through your life, young 
 ladies, duty, duty to yourself, duty to your family, 
 duty to your neighbor, duty to your God will call on 
 you to do things that you don't feel like doing; from 
 such a small thing as getting up from your comfort- 
 able bed when the rising-bell rings in the morning to 
 some supreme duty which some day may confront 
 you, the performance of which will test the highest 
 heroism of your nature and wring your heart-strings 
 with agony. 
 
 There is no better education for the will than this : 
 Always to do promptly and uncomplainingly in small 
 things and great things what you ought to do, with- 
 out the least consideration as to whether you feel 
 like doing it or not. Bear that injunction in mind. 
 Now while you are young accustom yourselves to do 
 what you don't feel like doing. 
 
80 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 The second rule that I would give you for the edu- 
 cation of the will is the converse of the one that I 
 have just given. It is this : Accustom yourself not 
 to do what you feel like doing. Don't do what you 
 feel like doing ! I once knew a man who had been 
 an habitual drunkard for twenty years. During the 
 whole of that time scarcely a day had passed that he 
 hadn't drunk from a pint to a quart of whisky and 
 scarcely a week had passed that he hadn't gone home 
 at least once staggering drunk. One day as he en- 
 tered his house in that condition he held out his arms 
 in maudlin affection to his little three-year-old baby 
 girl, his youngest child, his only daughter, the dar- 
 ling of his heart. The child perceiving his condition 
 shrank from him in repulsion and disgust. It cut 
 him to the heart as nothing had ever done before. 
 He raised his hands towards heaven and said, "So 
 help me God, I will never drink another drop!" and 
 he never did. I have myself heard that man tell in 
 vivid and touching language of the terrible suffer- 
 ings he endured in his fight against the evil habit. 
 Dives in the torments of hell, calling to Father Abra- 
 ham for a drop of water to cool his burning tongue, 
 felt no more torturing thirst than that poor man felt 
 for his accustomed drink of liquor, but he touched 
 it not. After a few months of struggle he conquered 
 not only the habit but the taste itself. Consequently, 
 instead of going down to a premature drunkard's 
 grave, leaving his family a heritage of shame, he 
 lived to old age, healthy, happy, honorable and hon- 
 ored. It is impossible to imagine how any human 
 being could feel more like doing anything than that 
 man felt like taking his accustomed drink of liquor, 
 but he had strength of will not to do what he felt 
 like doing, and great was his reward. There is no 
 finer discipline for the will than this: To accustom 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 81 
 
 yourself when duty demands, not to do what you feel 
 like doing. 
 
 The third rule that I would give you for the edu- 
 cation of the will is this : Don't be wilful ! Do- you 
 know what that word wilful means? You know 
 what is meant by a wilful child. It means the most 
 disagreeable kind of a child. It means a child that 
 always insists on having his way, and is utterly heed- 
 less of all appeals either to his reason or his affec- 
 tions. Well, there are wilful grown people as well 
 as wilful children. And pardon me for saying it, 
 but I believe women are more prone to that fault 
 than men are. I have seen good women, women of 
 culture and refinement, cause serious trouble in im- 
 portant affairs of life just because they would not 
 give up their way, not from any deep convic- 
 tions that their way was the only right way, 
 but simply because it happened to be their way, 
 originated with them, suited their convenience. 
 I say I have often seen women show great will 
 power in that way; but that is a very mean way. 
 That is sheer egotism of the will, and egotism of the 
 will is the worst kind of egotism. Beware of that 
 fault. Don't try to have your way just for the sake 
 of having your way. Especially if you should ever 
 be actively connected with any affair of public or 
 general or social interest, try to rid yourself of all 
 egotism, of all personalism, be objective and not sub- 
 jective. Avoid egotism of will, cultivate imperson- 
 alism of will — that is the third rule that I would 
 give you for the education of the will. 
 
 The fourth and last rule that I would give you for 
 the education of the will is this : Don't allow your 
 individuality to be dominated by the will of another. 
 You frequently hear it said that such and such a 
 person is completely under the influence of such an- 
 
 6 ba 
 
82 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 other person. For instance, "J ane Smith is com- 
 pletely under the influence of Sarah Brown ; Sarah 
 can just twist her about her fingers" — that is what 
 I mean by domination. I am always sorry for a 
 person that falls under that kind of domination of 
 another person. It is bad for you to fall under that 
 kind of domination of another person even if that 
 person is greatly superior to yourself. But unfortu- 
 nately it frequently happens that the dominor is in- 
 ferior to the dominee. In other words, it frequently 
 happens that a superior nature falls under the moral 
 dominance of an inferior nature. I have seen many 
 instances of that sort myself. I have seen in- 
 stances of that sort right here among the students 
 of this college. I have seen right here among the 
 students of this college instances where one girl 
 would fall more or less completely under the influ- 
 ence of another girl who was inferior to her in in- 
 tellect, inferior to her in heart, inferior to her in con- 
 science, inferior to her in every way except in will 
 power or force of character ; that was the weak point 
 in the dominated one and that is how she came to be 
 dominated. So, I say, it frequently happens that a 
 superior nature falls under the moral dominance of 
 an inferior nature. Shakespeare in his great trage- 
 dies gives us some striking illustrations of this. The 
 wily Cassius dominated the far nobler Brutus. The 
 hateful Iago dominated the great-hearted, magnani- 
 mous Othello. The utterly wicked Lady Macbeth 
 dominated the partially wicked Macbeth. She com- 
 pletely paralyzed his better inclinations, which but 
 for her would undoubtedly have prevailed. That 
 animated dialogue between the husband and wife 
 just before the murder of Duncan is a regular wrest- 
 ling-match between a strong bad will and a weak 
 good will. 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 83 
 
 It also frequently happens that one person allows 
 his intellect to be completely dominated by the in- 
 tellect of another person. Here is a very notable 
 illustration of that : George Eliot, one of the great- 
 est women writers that the world ever saw, had her 
 beautiful, glorious, feminine genius literally ruined 
 because she allowed her intellect to be dominated by 
 the intellect of George Henry Lewes and Herbert 
 Spencer and other masculine, hard-thinking, dry 
 thinking philosophers. When she was a girl, a coun- 
 try girl, from the pure depths of her own inspiration 
 and intuitions she wrote Adam Bede, one of the 
 finest productions that ever came from a woman's 
 brain. Then she went to London where she became 
 acquainted with those masculine, hard-thinking, dry- 
 thinking philosophers. They made a great pet of 
 her. They undertook to educate and develop her. 
 She gladly put herself under their tutelage. She 
 allowed her intellect to be completely dominated by 
 their intellect, and from that very moment her works 
 began to deteriorate, and she ended at last by writ- 
 ing that wretched philosophical production, Theo- 
 phrastus Such; and it is said that that brilliant, 
 gifted woman, that poor deluded wretch believed to 
 the last day of her life that that miserable, philo- 
 sophic rot, Theophrastus Such, was the best thing 
 she ever wrote. Her mind had lost its spring and 
 spontaneity, her soul had lost its intuitions and in- 
 spirations; the splendid God-given powers of her 
 individual genius had collapsed and gone to ruin 
 because she allowed her intellect to be dominated by 
 the intellect of others. Young ladies, I have seen 
 instances like that among ordinary people. I have 
 seen teachers dominate the minds of their pupils 
 until they could not think an independent thought. 
 I have seen parents dominate the whole nature of 
 their children until they could not call their souls 
 
84 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 their own. I have seen sons who were but weak 
 echoes of their fathers; I have seen daughters who 
 were but weak echoes of their mothers. I have seen 
 many persons, and especially school-teachers, who 
 had been so long and so completely dominated by 
 ideas that they got from books that they had well 
 nigh lost the power of seeing anything with their 
 own individual eyes or observing anything with their 
 own individual minds. That sort of dominance is 
 always pernicious. It means an arrested develop- 
 ment, a stunted growth, an artificial character, the 
 weakening or nullifying of the spontaneous and best 
 powers of one's nature. Young ladies, if you should 
 ever feel that kind of dominance, from whatever 
 source it may come, tightening down upon your 
 faculties of mind or heart or character, summon all 
 the will power with which the Almighty has en- 
 dowed you, and shake yourself free from the bond- 
 age; preserve your individuality! That is the end 
 of my speech to you to-day. I thank you for your 
 patient hearing. Pardon me for having detained 
 you so long. 
 
 I am glad that the Almighty has vouchsafed so 
 beautiful a morning as this for your graduating day. 
 All nature seems to sympathize with this occasion! 
 This good earth of ours seems as fresh and fair to- 
 day as it was six thousand years ago when in the 
 Garden of Eden the first roses bloomed! She is 
 garlanded with her noblest verdure, her breath is 
 redolent with the fagrance of her sweetest flowers, 
 and across her heavenly brow these nights she wears 
 a diadem of her most glorious stars. May these 
 aspects of nature, so lovely, so inspiring, be typical, 
 symbolic of your future lives. 
 
 God bless you, and sanctify your being to His 
 honor and glory in this world and in the world to 
 come forever and forevermore! 
 
" Deep Calls Upto Deep." 
 
 YOUNG Ladies oe the Graduating Class : I 
 have often thought that it would be best for 
 me to abandon the practice of making this 
 annual farewell speech to the graduating class, be- 
 cause any words that I can utter always seem to me 
 so totally inadequate to express the feelings of my 
 heart or to do justice to< the beauty, the tenderness, 
 the deep significance of this occasion. I believe that 
 every person in this large audience feels with me at 
 this moment that it is one of those occasions when, 
 to use the beautiful words of the Psalmist, "deep 
 calls unto deep." And I shall take that little sen- 
 tence as the theme of my discourse to you this morn- 
 ing — "Deep Calls Unto Deep." That is what I want 
 to talk to you about to-day — "deep calls unto deep." 
 
 The human soul has its shallows and the human 
 soul has its deeps, and the universe that environs the 
 human soul has its shallows and has its deeps, and 
 the shallow things of the universe are continually 
 calling upon the shallows in the human soul and the 
 deep things of the universe are continually calling 
 unto the deeps in the human soul : Shallow calls 
 unto shallow, deep calls unto deep. 
 
 Several years ago during that great exposition in 
 Atlanta, I sat one night with a crowd of ten thousand 
 people on the sloping terraces overlooking the exposi- 
 tion grounds, and I saw the most magnificent display 
 of fireworks that I had ever witnessed. It was gor- 
 geous, brilliant, dazzling beyond description, and 
 that whole crowd of ten thousand human beings went 
 
 (85) 
 
86 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 into ecstasies of delight over the spectacle, and the 
 biggest fool in that crowd enjoyed that show as 
 much as the finest intellect there. It was shallow 
 calling unto shallow. It flashed up and went out, 
 and was as if it had never been. In less than one 
 hour it was all over and darkness settled upon the 
 earth again; and then I just happened to look up 
 and I saw all the stars of God, those ineffable, be- 
 guiling stars which, through all the ages, have sung 
 their silent songs to the hearts of men, which through 
 all the ages have been the object of profoundest 
 study to the finest minds of earth, which through all 
 the ages have been an inspiration to poets and to de- 
 vout and worshipful souls — I saw those quiet, eter- 
 nal stars looking serenely down from the high heav- 
 ens on that foolish crowd that had gone wild over 
 the bursting of sky-rockets, and somehow the stars 
 never seemed so beautiful and sublime to> me as they 
 did that night after that fanfaronade of fireworks; 
 and I thought to myself : Here are two symbols of 
 human life; thai was shallow calling unto shallow; 
 there is deep calling unto deep. 
 
 All through your life, young ladies, you will meet 
 with experiences like that. All through your life 
 from the universe without there will come to your 
 soul within calls, shallow calls and deep calls — shal- 
 low calling unto- shallow, and deep calling unto deep. 
 In the books that you read, in the persons that you 
 meet, in the events of your own life, in the work that 
 you do, there will be shallows and there will be 
 deeps, shallow calling unto shallow, and deep calling 
 unto deep; and your soul, your spirit, your whole 
 nature will get its education by responding to these 
 calls — shallow responding unto shallow, and deep 
 responding unto deep. 
 
 In the first place, in the books that you read, you 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 87 
 
 will find shallow-calling books, and you will find 
 deep-calling books. Several years ago, as you doubt- 
 less remember, a book by the name of "Trilby" was 
 published, and all the fools in the world, and nearly 
 all the wise people, too, went wild over "Trilby" ; 
 and certainly it was a very charming book, written 
 by a bright and gifted man, and the biggest fool that 
 read it could appreciate it for all that it was worth 
 about as much as the wisest man that read it — it 
 was shallow calling unto shallow. More than three 
 centuries ago William Shakespeare wrote "Hamlet," 
 and for all these three hundred years the study of 
 that play has been a perpetual delight and joy to the 
 finest intellects of earth, and for all the ages to come 
 it will continue to be to profoundest minds deep call- 
 ing unto deep. So there are shallow-calling books 
 and there are deep-calling books ; and there are also 
 shallow-calling speakers and deep-calling speakers. 
 There is living in this country at this time a very 
 brilliant man who goes around delivering lectures. 
 His name is Robert Ingersoll, or Bob Ingersoll, as he 
 is familiarly called. Last winter this Bob Ingersoll 
 delivered one of his fascinating lectures up here in 
 Atlanta, and by the universal agreement of all who 
 heard it, the finest part of that lecture was what he 
 had to say about the preciousness of children; the 
 passage was so beautiful that it was copied in many 
 of our daily newspapers and was read by thousands 
 of people. I read it myself and it certainly was a 
 masterpiece of exquisite word-painting. But nearly 
 two thousand years ago another lecturer in a little 
 impromptu speech of less than a dozen words dis- 
 cussed precisely that same subject, the preciousness 
 of children. It happened this way: "And they 
 brought young children unto him that he might lay 
 his hands upon them, and the disciples rebuked those 
 
88 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 that brought them; but when Jesus saw it he was 
 much displeased, and said unto them : Suffer little 
 children to come unto me and forbid them not, for 
 of such is the kingdom of God. Verily, I say unto 
 you, whosoever does not receive the kingdom of 
 heaven as a little child, shall in nowise enter therein. 
 And he took them up in his arms and laid his hands 
 upon them and blessed them." As long as the hu- 
 man race endures, and for centuries after the pretty 
 conceits of Mr. Bob Ingersoll shall have fallen into 
 oblivion, that little speech of Jesus Christ's will con- 
 tinue to appeal to mother-hearts, deep calling unto 
 deep. My dear young friends, in our day and time 
 there is an abundance and a very excessive super- 
 abundance of books of the "Trilby" kind, and speak- 
 ers of the Bob Ingersoll kind, bright, smart, clever, 
 witty, brilliant books and speakers, but most of them, 
 or quite all of them, are but shallow calling unto 
 shallow. 
 
 Some of these books are undoubtedly good, strong 
 books well worth reading, books that all young peo- 
 ple like yourselves ought to read, because the shal- 
 lows of man's nature must be educated as well as the 
 deeps. It is just as important to educate the shal- 
 lows as it is to educate the deeps; and as a matter 
 of fact much the larger portion of the education of 
 most people necessarily consists in the education of 
 the shallows. So I do not mean by what I have said 
 to make a wholesale condemnation of all present-day 
 literature. But what I do wish to say to* you in all 
 seriousness is this : If you confine your reading ex- 
 clusively even to the very best books now being pro- 
 duced, the great deeps of your spirit will never be 
 touched; if you confine your thinking to what is 
 called the modern progressive trend of thought, the 
 greatest and noblest powers with which the Almighty 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 89 
 
 has endowed your mind will become atrophied from 
 sheer disuse. Not one book in ten thousand reaches 
 or is capable of reaching the great deeps of the hu- 
 man spirit. If I should speak entirely from my own 
 individual experience I would say that only two 
 writers of the English language in this nineteenth 
 century have reached the very deeps, and they are 
 the American Emerson and the English Carlyle. Of 
 course there are others, but with them I am not per- 
 sonally acquainted, and in this last talk that I shall 
 make to you I am determined to speak exclusively 
 from my own experience and observation, and from 
 the deepest convictions of my own individual mind 
 and heart. After you leave school I want to beg you 
 to try Emerson and Carlyle, Carlyle especially, for 
 not only in my own humble opinion, but in the judg- 
 ment of the finest intellects of this time, his is the 
 most powerful, deepest-calling voice that has spoken 
 to the spirit of man in this nineteenth century. I 
 want you to read Carlyle' s lectures on Heroes and 
 Hero Worship; his essays on Robert Burns, Samuel 
 Johnson, Voltaire, Rousseau, and that remarkable 
 essay on Characteristics, and also those matchless 
 little gems of biography, his sketch of his own father, 
 John Carlyle, and his own wife, Jane Welch Car- 
 lyle; and I want you to read from Emerson his es- 
 says on Nature, Self-Reliance, Behavior, Manners, 
 Spiritual Laws and so on. I sincerely believe if you 
 will read, absorb, and assimilate these things you 
 will have harkened to the very deepest-calling voices 
 that have spoken to the human spirit in this nine- 
 teenth century. But, young ladies, you must go> much 
 further back than the nineteenth century to find the 
 very deepest calling of all books, that oldest of all 
 books, the Hebrew Bible ; Holy Bible, we call it. It 
 is a sacred book to us because it teaches the religion 
 
90 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 in which we believe, but leaving entirely out of con- 
 sideration its sacred or religious character and re- 
 garding it as mere human literature, the Bible is still 
 the grandest book that ever has been written. If I 
 were an atheist like Voltaire and believed the Bible 
 to be the exponent of a baleful superstition, if I were 
 a materialist like Herbert Spencer and believed the 
 religion of the Bible to be a delusion and a dream, 
 if I were a blatant agnostic like Bob Ingersoll and 
 believed the doctrines of the Bible to be a lie, I 
 should still say that as mere human literature the 
 Bible is the grandest book that ever has been written 
 and a priceless treasure to< mankind. In clearness 
 and depth of insight into human nature and human 
 life, in the vivid portraiture of actual men and wo- 
 men, in grand presentation of sublime human trage- 
 dies, in beauty and in power of expression, in every- 
 thing that constitutes the finest and noblest qualities 
 of what we call literature, the Bible is the supreme 
 masterpiece of all the ages, surpassing even Shake- 
 speare, which comes next to it. After you leave 
 school I presume, as a matter of course, that you will 
 continue to study the Bible as religion, but I want to 
 ask you to study it also as literature. I want you to 
 read over and over again the Psalms, Isaiah, Jere- 
 miah, Job, and Revelations, because they contain not 
 in their entirety but in frequent passages and chap- 
 ters, the sublimest poetry that ever burst from the 
 human soul. I want you to read the two> books of 
 Kings, the two books of Samuel, Ruth, Esther, and 
 Daniel, because every one of these great life stories 
 is better told and more interesting than the greatest 
 novel in the world ; I want you to read the four gos- 
 pels over and over again, because they present in a 
 manner that is simply perfect the profoundest, and 
 most pathetic tragedy that was ever enacted on this 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 91 
 
 earth and tell in language of matchless eloquence 
 the most beautiful and deepest-reaching truths that 
 ever stirred the human heart or edified the human 
 soul. Now, in conclusion on this part of my sub- 
 ject, upon which I have already dwelt too long (I 
 promise you I will not dwell so long on the other 
 parts), let me give you a few hints or suggestions 
 as to how to read great books. In the first place, 
 read them, as far as practicable, only when your 
 mind is in its highest and best moods. In the sec- 
 ond place, read them over and over again. In the 
 third place, read them by yourselves — read them 
 alone. Above all things, don't make the mistake of 
 taking your great book and running with it to one 
 of these literary societies or clubs with any hope that 
 the smart, nicely-dressed ladies and gentlemen as- 
 sembled there can in anywise interpret to your soul 
 the message that the great book has for you. These 
 literary societies and clubs which are so extremely 
 popular in our day are most commendable institu- 
 tions. Far be it from me to say a disparaging word 
 about them, because I believe in them sincerely and 
 strongly; but after all, they are only splendid de- 
 vices for cultivating the shallows of the human in- 
 tellect, and in that they are doing a great work, for, 
 as I have said, the shallows must be educated as well 
 as the deeps. But no literary society or club or co- 
 terie in this world ever has or ever can help the hu- 
 man soul into the real understanding or the real en- 
 joyment of any truly great book. Take your Brown- 
 ing to the literary club if you wish to, but not your 
 Carlyle, not your Shakespeare, not your Bible ! Read 
 your great book as you say your prayers — in your 
 closet with the door shut. In solitude only can your 
 soul truly respond to that still, small voice in which 
 deep calls unto deep. 
 
92 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 In the second place, young ladies, in the persons 
 that you meet, in the acquaintances that you form, 
 in the friends that you make, you will get from some 
 1 — and they will be the large majority — shallow call- 
 ing unto shallow ; you will get from others, and they 
 will be the few rare and choice spirits — deep calling 
 unto deep. Sir Richard Steele, the brilliant English 
 essayist, once said about Lady Flora Temple, "To 
 know Lady Flora is a liberal education." That is 
 considered one of the finest compliments that was 
 ever paid to any human being, but now I want to tell 
 you about a compliment that I once heard that was 
 much greater and finer than that. In my youth I 
 once read a private personal letter written to an old 
 man by one of the most distinguished statesmen that 
 the South has produced in these latter years, a na- 
 tive Georgian but the adopted son of another State. 
 The letter was written at a time when this statesman 
 was passing through the stormiest and most trying 
 period of his long public career, under circumstances 
 that were putting him to a crucial test. In the letter 
 he said to the old man : "During the whole of this 
 terrible ordeal my soul has turned towards you. You 
 are the Gamaliel at whose feet I learned the noblest 
 lessons of my life. The impression that your char- 
 acter, the purest and loftiest that I have ever known, 
 made upon me in my young manhood has been to 
 me in every trying hour a great inspiration, and more 
 than anything else has helped me through all the 
 temptations and corruptions of political life to pre- 
 serve mine integrity and to keep my soul erect. Par- 
 don me, my dear sir, for this plain speaking, but my 
 heart knows to whom it owes its debt of deepest 
 gratitude and loves to* acknowledge it." Now, my 
 dear young friends, to know a person like that is 
 better than a liberal education. One of the most 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 93 
 
 fortunate things that can happen to a boy or a girl 
 or a young man or a young woman is to be brought 
 into close and intimate relations with a good and 
 lofty spirit like that whose influence will be to them 
 all through life, as it was to that distinguished 
 statesman, deep calling unto deep. It is often said 
 that young people are very fine judges of human 
 character, and I suppose in a certain sense that may 
 be true, but in another sense it is very far from being 
 true. Young people, and especially fine-grained, im- 
 pressionable young people, are very apt to' pay too 
 great hero worship to persons who are merely bright 
 and clever and charming in manner and conversa- 
 tion, and who possess what is called personal mag- 
 netism but who are lacking in integrity and sincerity 
 and nobility of character. Young people of natu- 
 rally noble instincts and impulses often suffer irre- 
 parable and lasting harm from falling under the 
 influence of a person like that. Robert Burns, the 
 great Scotch poet and a most noble-natured man, 
 suffered a lifelong damage to his moral habits and 
 had his instinctively fine ideals of conduct debased 
 and degraded just because when he was a youth he 
 happened to be thrown for six months into intimate 
 friendship with a person like that — that is, of bril- 
 liant intellect, charming manners, personal magnet- 
 ism, but of low character. 
 
 Young ladies, several months ago I read a 
 very interesting description of a famous picture 
 painted by some celebrated artist. It was called 
 "The Heart of the Andes," and it represented 
 a landscape scene in the midst of the great 
 Andes mountains in South America. In the back- 
 ground of the picture was a lofty mountain-peak 
 covered with eternal snows and lit up by the golden 
 beams of the setting sun. In the foreground were 
 trees and beautiful tropical flowers and birds of gor- 
 
94 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 geous plumage and crags and cliffs and lights and 
 shades and mountain streams and foaming cataracts 
 wildly leaping. Thousands of people came to see 
 that picture, and all were deeply impressed not only 
 with its beauty but with its grandeur and nobility; 
 and as they stood in front of it many were the enthu- 
 siastic comments on those beautiful features in the 
 foreground ; the trees, the beautiful tropical flowers, 
 the birds of gorgeous plumage, the crags and the 
 cliffs, the lights and shades, the mountain streams, 
 the foaming cataract wildly leaping, all came in for 
 their share of enthusiastic admiration, but scarcely 
 one person in a hundred seemed to notice that moun- 
 tain-peak snow-covered and sunlit in the background ; 
 but now you just step to that picture and with your 
 hand or some larger screen cover up and conceal 
 from view that mountain-peak, and lo, what a 
 change! From the picture the grandeur and the 
 glory have departed! And even to the casual ob- 
 server all of those pretty details in the foreground 
 had lost much of their charm and soon became 
 wearisome and unsatisfying. My young friends, 
 what the background is to the picture, character is 
 to men and women. There are men and women who 
 are like a picture with beautiful, elaborately wrought 
 details in the foreground, but with only a mean, in- 
 significant, ignoble background. I have in my life 
 known men and women who were intellectual, highly 
 cultured, bright, smart, clever, charming, fascinat- 
 ing, and yet who, with it all, were but shallow calling 
 unto shallow, because you felt that behind all their 
 brilliant parts and splendid accomplishments there 
 was no great earnestness, no true sincerity, no depth 
 of conviction, no> sublime faith, no loftiness of soul ; 
 and on the other hand, I have known men and wo- 
 men whose simplest words and simplest acts were 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 95 
 
 enhanced in beauty and in power because you knew 
 that they were projected on a background of a great 
 and noble character — shallow calls unto shallow, 
 deep calls unto deep! Youth is the time to put in 
 the background of the picture. It is the morning 
 sky that gets the crimson blush. I believe if lofty 
 conceptions of duty, pure and noble sentiments, high 
 ideals of life, are not fixed in the mind and incorpor- 
 ated into the character long before the age of thirty, 
 they can never be acquired ; and that is why I want 
 you now in the days of your youth to read and as- 
 similate at least three or four of the very few su- 
 premely great books, and why I wish that you may 
 be brought into close association with strong and 
 noble men and women, because I believe that such 
 influences as these will have a mighty power towards 
 bringing out and developing what is best and high- 
 est in your own natures, so that, when in your ma- 
 turer years your life stands out as a picture painted, 
 those who look upon it may see beyond the beautiful 
 skills or accomplishments in the foreground, the 
 lofty mountain-peak snow-covered and sunlit stand- 
 ing in the background, deep calling unto deep. 
 
 In the third place, young ladies, in the events of 
 your own life you will find shallows and you will 
 find deeps ; that is to say, in your life you will have 
 shallow-calling experiences, and you will have deep- 
 calling experiences. Those events of your life which 
 concern chiefly your pleasures and enjoyments, which 
 administer chiefly to your appetites and tastes, which 
 gratify chiefly your personal pride, ambition and 
 vanity, which promote chiefly your self-interest and 
 your self-aggrandizement, may appear to you just 
 the most important events in your life, they so appear 
 to most people; but such events are only shallow 
 calling unto shallow. They appeal to no great 
 
96 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 depths in your nature, they summon into action no 
 noble or heroic power with which the Almighty has 
 endowed you. A dance, a ball, a party, the theatre, 
 the opera, a new dress, a devoted admirer, a summer 
 at one of these fashionable resorts, a trip to' Europe, 
 a literary distinction, a social triumph, such things as 
 these naturally seem to a young woman important 
 events in her life and I would wish that a moderate 
 measure of such events might come into the life of 
 every woman; but when a woman's soul hungers 
 and thirsts after events like these and after nothing 
 higher and nobler, when her existence, her thinking 
 existence, her feeling existence, her active existence, 
 is absorbed and consumed by events like these, when 
 her ideal of a happy life is that it shall be crowded 
 with experiences like these, then she is in a sad con- 
 dition. Then she has become a thoroughly worldly- 
 minded woman; and a wordly-minded woman or a 
 worldly-minded man is a pitiful creature. I should 
 say that a thoroughly worldly-minded person is one 
 who responds with eager alacrity to the shallow calls 
 of human life but who turns a deaf ear and a stony 
 heart to its deep calls. My young friends, there are 
 thousands of people who have gained what is gen- 
 erally considered success in life; that is, have attained 
 wealth, influence, power, social distinction, political 
 promotion and so on, by virtue of being thoroughly 
 and entirely worldly-minded ; but God pity the man 
 or the woman who has gained that kind of success. 
 At what a cost it has been purchased! At the cost 
 always of a dwarfed and stunted soul; and even in 
 a temporal sense "what profiteth it a man if he gain 
 the whole world and lose his own soul," or, what 
 amounts to the same thing, gets his own soul dwarf- 
 ed and stunted. People are constantly seeking for 
 and striving after the shallow-calling experiences 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 97 
 
 :and events of human life; but the deep-calling events 
 are not to be sought after. They come of them- 
 selves, and into every human life they are sure to 
 •come. They come generally, not always but most 
 frequently, in some disagreeable or repulsive or 
 hateful form ; in the form of a bitter disappointment, 
 a great adversity, a humiliating defeat, a discourag- 
 ing failure, a serious error or mistake unwarily com- 
 mitted, a terrible grief, a profound sorrow — heart- 
 breaking sorrow, we call it, but if properly responded 
 to, heart-purifying, spirit-ennobling sorrow it gen- 
 erally proves. I once heard this story told about a 
 young woman : She was beautiful and brilliant and 
 accomplished, and was universally recognized as the 
 leader of the fashionable life in the large city in 
 which she lived, and at every brilliant social gather- 
 ing she was the bright, particular star, the cynosure 
 of all eyes. Her utterly frivolous and wordly life 
 was rapidly causing a serious estrangement between 
 her husband and herself. One night she had ar- 
 ranged to go to a specially distinguished and splendid 
 social function, as they call it, but after she had 
 dressed and was about to' start her little three-year- 
 old girl, a beautiful and charming child, to whom she 
 was very deeply devoted, lying asleep in its bed, 
 showed symptoms of an attack of croup, and her 
 husband tried to dissuade her from going, uttered a 
 mild protest against her going and leaving the child 
 — a mild protest, because he had learned from sad 
 experience not to oppose her strongly in anything — 
 but making some plausible excuse for herself she 
 sent for the doctor and before he arrived she left 
 the sick child with the nurse and went to the ball. 
 About one o'clock that night when the festivities 
 were at their height and she as usual was surrounded 
 with an admiring crowd, there came to her from that 
 
 7at> 
 
98 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 home of hers a message that made all the color fly 
 from her cheeks and caused a look of terror to drive 
 the sparkle and the laughter from her eyes. She 
 hurried down stairs as quickly as possible, got into 
 her carriage and was driven rapidly home, getting 
 there just in time to clasp that baby girl to her 
 bosom and to see the unrecognizing glaze come over 
 its eyes and to feel its last breath on her own cold, 
 pallid cheek, and then with one wild scream of agony 
 she fell upon the floor in all her ballroom finery in a 
 dead faint. When she recovered from that stupor 
 she was a completely changed woman. In the twink- 
 ling of an eye she had been converted from a butter- 
 fly of fashion into one of the noblest, most earnest- 
 minded, most consecrated of women. That awful 
 event had been to her indeed deep calling unto deep. 
 Parents are prone tO' wish for their sons that they 
 may have a life of uninterrupted prosperity and for 
 their daughters that their pathway from the cradle 
 to the grave may be flower-strewn; but I do not 
 know that it is a wise wish. God pity the man that 
 has never had an adversity, God pity the woman 
 that has never had a sorrow. It is from experiences, 
 like these that the human spirit gets its finest and 
 noblest education ; it is in events like these that deep 
 calls unto deep. 
 
 In the fourth place and lastly, young ladies, in the 
 work that you will do there will be shallows and 
 there will be deeps. In considering this proposition, 
 let us confine ourselves to a single illustration or to 
 a single kind of work. Most of you expect to enter 
 very soon upon the work of teaching, and as a mat- 
 ter of fact all of you, whether you expect it or not, 
 will almost certainly become teachers. Women are 
 the heaven-ordained teachers of the human race; 
 that is her great specialty ; that is the high calling to 
 which God and Nature have appointed her. 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 99 
 
 The ideal teacher must have two principal qualifi- 
 cations. In the first place, she must have the technical 
 or shallow-calling qualification. In the second place, 
 she must have the spiritual or deep-calling qualifica- 
 tion. This normal school or college, which you 
 have been attending several years, has provided you 
 in a large measure with the teacher's technical quali- 
 fication; that is, it has given you scholarship in the 
 principal branches of education; it has given you 
 knowledge of pedagogy, psychology, methods of 
 instruction, and so on. You will find these things, 
 these technicalities of the profession, to be of inesti- 
 mable value to you in the work of teaching. But 
 from a far higher source than any normal school in 
 this world must come that deep call that will give 
 you the teacher's spiritual qualification — the earnest 
 mind, the loving heart, the consecrated soul. One 
 of the greatest teachers that ever lived in this 
 world, that teacher whom men call Divine, but 
 for our present purpose let us leave His di- 
 vinity entirely out of consideration, let us forget 
 the miracles that he is said to have performed, let 
 us put aside for our present purpose the religion 
 that he established, and let us regard him as a purely 
 human man doing only those things that it is entirely 
 possible for a purely human man to do, and let us 
 judge his teaching work by the rigid criterion of 
 our science of pedagogy — even regarding him in 
 this purely human aspect, I say still that one of the 
 greatest teachers that ever lived in this world 
 was he who taught two thousand years ago in 
 the far East in a little country called Pales- 
 tine, by the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. 
 He never went to a normal school, he never studied 
 psychology or pedagogy, he never attended a teach- 
 ers' institute, he never read an educational journal, 
 
 LotC. 
 
100 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 and yet he taught the multitudes that thronged 
 around him in temples, in synagogues, in city streets, 
 among the mountains, by the seashore, on the green, 
 grassy plains, he taught them, I say, with a power 
 that has never been equaled in the whole history of 
 educational institutions; he taught them in parables 
 and in living object-lessons, which for beauty, di- 
 rectness and aptness are absolutely matchless in the 
 whole range of your fine art of pedagogy. 
 
 Now, if you analyze the secret of that great 
 teacher's power you will find that it consists of three 
 things : First, in his vivid conception of the truths 
 that he had to teach ; second, in his entire consecra- 
 tion of purpose to teach that truth ; third, in his sin- 
 cere, deep love and sympathy for the human hearts 
 and human lives around him. And, my dear young 
 friends, after all is said and done, from like sources 
 must come your real power as a teacher — from your 
 clear, vivid conception of the truths that you have 
 to teach, your perfect consecration of purpose to 
 teach that truth, and your deep, sincere love for the 
 young human souls that gather around you to re- 
 ceive that teaching. Without these great fundament- 
 al underlying qualities of mind, and heart and spirit, 
 all that normal schools and pedagogy and psychology 
 can do i for you will avail you little. Those of you 
 who have read George Eliot's great novel, "Adam 
 Bede," doubtless remember that beautiful character 
 Dinah, Dinah the poor, pious woman preacher; and 
 you probably remember how at the great revival 
 meetings that were going on in her neighborhood 
 she astonished and thrilled the people with her beau- 
 tiful and powerful prayers, and you remember how 
 the highly cultured and gifted young parson went 
 to her one day and said : "Dinah, where did you 
 learn to pray so well? With all my education and 
 years of experience I can not pray such beautiful 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 101 
 
 and powerful prayers as you do. How did you learn 
 to pray so, Dinah?" "Nay, master," she said, "I 
 did not learn to pray; I love the great God and I 
 love his people, and when I kneel among them at our 
 meetings the prayers just come, but I know not 
 how they come. Nay, master, I did not learn to 
 pray." And so, my young friends, if you have any 
 of the born teacher in you, the very best thing that 
 you will ever do in the schoolroom will not be the 
 things that you have learned to do from this normal 
 school or that you can learn to do from pedagogy or 
 psychology, but they will be the things that will just 
 come to' you in rare and luminous moments of your 
 life when the spirit most informs you, when deep 
 calls unto deep, just as the parables came to the 
 blessed Jesus, just as the beautiful prayers came to 
 the lips of poor, pious Dinah. After all is said and 
 done, after normal schools, pedagogy, psychology, 
 teachers' institutes and educational journals have 
 done their best, your real power as a teacher must 
 come from an earnest mind and loving heart and 
 consecrated spirit; shallow calls unto shallow and 
 deep calls unto deep! 
 
 From the classic halls and quiet academic groves 
 of this Georgia Normal and Industrial College you 
 are about to pass out into the world, carrying with 
 you the official testimonial of the good and faithful 
 work that you have done in this institution; but 
 deeper than that, and I hope to you far more precious 
 than that, you will carry with you the sincere, warm 
 affection of the president and of every teacher in 
 this institution. You will carry with you the deep, 
 abiding love and the earnest blessing of your Alma 
 Mater. Out of reach of her immediate presence you 
 are about to pass, but may her voice, her tender, 
 loving voice, still always be heard by you, "deep 
 calling unto deep!" 
 
"pi Still Small l/oiee. 
 
 YOUNG Ladies of the Graduating Class : I 
 shall take a certain sublime passage from the 
 Bible as a sort of text for what I have to say 
 to you this morning. The passage is found in the 
 Old Testament, in the nineteenth chapter of the first 
 Book of Kings. That chapter tells how the prophet 
 Elijah, broken by calamities, bowed down with sor- 
 row and despair, withdrew from his people and 
 went far out into the forest, where, falling up- 
 on his knees, he prayed in agony of spirit to 
 Almighty God to send death to him. But death 
 came not. Then wandering further on he hid 
 himself in a cave and prayed to God to' come 
 and speak to him, and God did come and did 
 speak to him inspiring words that revived his 
 spirits, rekindled his courage, and reformed and 
 transformed his life! The sublime passage that de- 
 scribes the manner in which God came and the man- 
 ner in which God spake to Elijah those inspiring 
 words shall be the text of my discourse to you this 
 morning. Here is that passage, listen to it: "And 
 behold the Lord passed by, and a mighty and great 
 wind rent the mountains and brake in pieces the 
 rocks before the Lord ; but the Lord was not in the 
 wind; and after the wind an earthquake; but the 
 Lord was not in the earthquake ; and after the earth- 
 quake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire; and 
 after the fire a still small voice! and when Elijah 
 heard that, he wrapped his face in his mantle and 
 went out and stood in the entering of the cave" — to 
 hear the words of the Lord. Then that "still small 
 
 (102) 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 103 
 
 •-voice" spake to Elijah those inspiring words that 
 revived his spirits, rekindled his courage, and re- 
 formed and transformed his life! 
 
 Young ladies, the experience of Elijah has been 
 the experience of well-nigh all good men, of well- 
 nigh all strong, brave, noble men that have ever 
 lived in this world. The words that have most 
 helped to make them good, to make them brave and 
 strong and noble, have come to them in a "still small 
 voice!" In woman's "still small voice," in woman's 
 voice soft and low! — oh, my dear young friends, 
 that is the greatest moral power in this world of 
 ours ! 
 
 Young ladies, several years ago there came down 
 to the State of Georgia from certain Northern States, 
 from Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, Pennsyl- 
 vania, Ohio, New York, and so on, a company of 
 very smart, very intellectual, very earnest women. 
 They came down to the State of Georgia on a mis- 
 sion. They came down to the State of Georgia to 
 say to the women of Georgia : "O Georgia women, 
 through all the years you have been deeply and 
 grossly wronged ! Through all the years the men 
 of your State have allowed you to speak only in a 
 'still small voice!' But we have come to tell you 
 that you have a right to speak in far other voices 
 than that. You have a right to howl in the great 
 and mighty wind of political strife; you have a right 
 to roar and shriek and screech in the earthquake of 
 social revolutions; you have a right to lick out a 
 tongue of fire from the pulpit, from the rostrum, 
 from the court-house, from legislative halls, from the 
 politician's stump ! O women of Georgia, you owe it 
 to yourselves, you owe it to your sex, to assert and 
 practice these rights ! You owe it to your sex not to 
 ihumiliate yourselves any longer by speaking only 
 
104 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 in the 'still small voice!' ' Those good women (for 
 I believe they were good women) — those good wo- 
 men, with their heads full of that perverted idea, 
 were most courteously received by the people of 
 Georgia. They were allowed to say their say and 
 speak their speech from the rostrum of the largest 
 hall in the city of Atlanta, and hundreds and thou- 
 sands of Georgia women went to hear them say their 
 say and speak their speech; they listened to them 
 politely, they hearkened to them attentively, they 
 even applauded their eloquence ! But no sooner had 
 those good missionaries gone back to their home in 
 the North than the perverted doctrine that they had 
 preached "passed like a summer's cloud" from the 
 minds of Georgia women, and from the universal 
 heart of Georgia's womanhood went out the re- 
 sponse: "That doctrine that you have preached may 
 be a good thing for your people and your State, but 
 not for Georgia, not for Georgia!" s 
 
 Oh, may Georgia women never forget that great 
 unchangeable truth : that woman's true power lies, 
 and must ever lie, in the "still small voice!" It is 
 not the voice of weakness; it is not the voice of 
 meekness; it is not the voice of humility; it is not 
 the voice of abjection; it is not the voice of sub- 
 jection. Nay, it is just the most commanding and 
 authoritative voice that speaks in all this world, that 
 "still small voice" of woman, woman's voice soft 
 and low! There is no other influence on earth to- 
 which all that is best in man's nature responds so 
 freely and so gladly as to the "still small voice" of 
 woman, woman's voice soft and low. But, of course, 
 in order to be thus powerfully effective for good 
 that voice must be the expression of all that is best 
 in womanhood. It must be the expression of a na- 
 ture that is pure and chaste and modest and refined ;:; 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 105 
 
 it must be the expression of a disposition that is ten- 
 der and affectionate and loving and devoted ; it must 
 be the expression of a being that instinctively speaks 
 more from the heart than from the brain, more from 
 intuition than from logic, more from impulse than 
 from reasoning, more from faith than from under- 
 standing; it must be the expression of a character- 
 that, though gentle, is firm and true and earnest and 
 forceful, and last, but not least, it must speak with 
 intelligence, it must speak from a well-informed 
 mind and an educated intellect. That is the ideal of 
 womanhood. That is the womanhood to which 
 every knee bows and to which all hearts respond t 
 The more nearly any woman approaches to' that ideal 
 the greater her power for good in this world. 
 
 An educated womanhood ! that is the requisite 
 of the ideal that I would specially emphasize: the 
 intelligent, the well-informed mind, the educated 
 intellect, that is absolutely necessary to give full 
 force and inspiring power to the "still small voice!" 
 A woman educated, put her where you please, pos- 
 sesses immeasurably greater power for good than 
 the same woman uneducated can possibly have. It 
 is, therefore, of prime importance for a country 
 to have an educated womanhood. People in speak- 
 ing to me about this institution frequently say: 
 "What a great work your school is doing, fitting 
 so many Georgia girls to make their own living." 
 Well, that is true, and it is a very gratifying truth, 
 but I don't like for that reason for the being of this 
 school to be too strongly or too exclusively urged. 
 In the first place, I don't like to think that so many 
 Georgia girls will have to make their own living. 
 I hope none of you will have yours to make, not for 
 very long, anyhow. In the second place, I don't. 
 
106 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 like for this school to be considered as an institu- 
 tion for turning out mere wage-earners, mere bread- 
 winners, mere workwomen, however expert and 
 highly skillful. It does that, it is true, and thank 
 God that it does; far be it from me to disparage 
 or undervalue that grand function of this school; 
 but surely it does much more than that for the hun- 
 dreds of Georgia girls who come here every year. 
 Surely it improves the tone and quality and adds 
 to the authority and inspiring power of that "still 
 small voice" which must call Elijahs from their 
 caves all over the State of Georgia to speak to them 
 words that will help to make them good and strong 
 and brave and noble. That is the highest reason 
 for the being of this school. 
 
 A liberally educated womanhood is just as im- 
 portant to a country as a liberally educated manhood 
 is. From the University of Georgia there will go 
 out in a few days a class of young men graduates. 
 It is to be presumed that these young men, or many 
 of them at least, will take an active, leading part 
 in the public affairs of the country. They will vote, 
 they will attend political conventions, they will make 
 campaign speeches and party harangues, they will 
 go to the Legislature, perhaps to Congress, they will 
 fill local, State and national offices of high and low 
 degree, they will be the lawmakers and the law 
 administrators of the country; and one of the prin- 
 cipal reasons for giving them that liberal education 
 at the University is to fit them for the performance 
 of those high and responsible duties. But, young 
 ladies, there lie before you duties just as high and 
 responsible, nay, higher and more responsible, and 
 that require for their efficient performance an edu- 
 cation just as liberal and of even a finer texture! 
 In the home, as daughter, sister, wife, mother, it 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 107 
 
 will be for you, in that "still small voice," to speak, 
 line upon line and precept upon precept, words more 
 potent for good than any public speech that any man 
 can make, though he have the power to sway as- 
 sembled thousands or listening senates to command ! 
 In the schoolroom, as teacher, it will be for you, in 
 that "still small voice," to impart to young minds 
 and hearts while they are "wax to receive and marble 
 to retain" impressions, lessons that will endure while 
 life remains. In society, as organizer and law- 
 giver, it will be for you, in that "still small voice," 
 to sound the keynote of culture to which all voices 
 must accord; it will be for you, in that "still small 
 voice," to dictate what shall be the standard of con- 
 duct and behavior and to make a code of morals 
 more binding than any statute ever passed in legis- 
 lative halls ! In the church, as worker and wor- 
 shiper, in that "still small voice," it will be for you 
 to give to 1 religion its highest sanction and, like the 
 vestal virgins of old, to keep the fires burning on 
 the sacred altars. There is no other influence in the 
 world so deep-penetrating, so far-reaching, so all- 
 pervasive as woman's "still small voice" in these 
 various functions to which God and nature have as- 
 signed her! There is not a man that casts a vote, 
 that makes a public speech, that goes to the Legisla- 
 ture or to Congress or who' fills any public office of 
 high or low degree whose character has not been 
 formed, whose energies have not been aroused, 
 whose views have not been suggested and shaped, 
 whose abilities have not been developed in large 
 measure by the power of woman's "still small voice" 
 in these various fields of her activity. Oh, what a 
 perverted idea it is that women have a right to de- 
 sert these glorious fields, to abandon these high and 
 holy duties to which God and nature have assigned 
 
108 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 her to rush into politics and public life, to intrude 
 where she is not wanted or needed, to stick herself 
 unwelcomed into crowds of men, to meddle with 
 men's affairs, 'to be a voter, a speech-maker, an office- 
 seeker, a demagogue, a lobbyist, to vulgarize herself, 
 to make herself cheap and common by public parade 
 and newspaper notoriety ! But that is precisely what 
 the so-called "new woman" asserts that women have 
 a right to do and ought to do. That perverted idea, 
 that disease — for it is a disease, just as much as 
 smallpox is a disease — hasn't made its appearance 
 in Georgia yet, except in a few sporadic cases, and 
 I don't believe it ever can spread in Georgia, because 
 I believe Georgia women are born immunes to it. 
 But if that perverted "woman's rights" doctrine 
 ever should take strong hold and become thoroughly 
 established here in the South (which God forbid!), 
 it will not be a sign of progress and improvement, 
 nay, it will be a sure indication that Southern man- 
 hood has become weak and degenerate and that 
 across the fair frontlets of Southern womanhood 
 has been written the sentence, "Thy glory is de- 
 parted!" 
 
 I don't believe there is any other country in the 
 world in which women are so respected, so beloved, 
 so revered, so deferred to in all right ways as in this 
 Southland of ours. Every Southern man — that can 
 rightly be called a man — carries in his heart of 
 hearts, carries in the innermost sanctuary of his soul 
 a pure and beautiful ideal of womanhood, and to him 
 that ideal is the very holiest of holies. That is why 
 Southern men — above all other men — feel such an 
 abhorence for that female pervert, the "new woman" 
 — because by her sentiments, by her attitude, by her 
 speaky, screechy voice she does violence to that beau- 
 tiful ideal that dwells in the innermost sanctuaries 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 109 
 
 of his soul. I don't believe there is any other coun- 
 try in the world in which women can exercise such a 
 mighty influence for good as in this Southland of 
 ours. But they must go about it in the right way, in 
 the womanly way, in the Southern way. Her power 
 must come not in the mighty and great wind, not in 
 the earthquake, not in the fire, but in the "still small 
 voice!" Whenever she strains that beautiful voice 
 beyond its natural compass it loses its charm, it loses 
 its persuasive and inspiring power; it becomes re- 
 pellant to the ear and ungrateful to the soul, like 
 "sweet bells, all jangled, harsh and out of tune." 
 
 I don't believe that any other country in the world 
 has so noble, so worshipful a womanhood as that 
 which blesses and glorifies this Southland of ours! 
 It always has been so. It was so long before our 
 Civil War. In those ante-bellum days in Washing- 
 ton City during the gay season, when the grandest 
 and finest ladies in the land, the wives and daugh- 
 ters of Congressmen and high government officials, 
 were gathered there from all parts and sections of 
 the Union, distinguished and discerning foreigners, 
 who were visiting or sojourning in the city and who 
 had the entree to the best society, were invariably 
 impressed, deeply impressed by the superior beauty, 
 the superior charm, the superior grace of manner 
 and graciousness of soul of the Southern women, 
 and they were particularly struck and captivated by 
 their beautiful, musical voices, like chimes of silver 
 bells softly ringing! In those ante-bellum days no 
 cultured stranger from other sections or from for- 
 eign lands ever visited the South and mingled with 
 the best of Southern people who was not charmed 
 and captivated by the peerless women who adorned 
 Southern society and graced and glorified Southern 
 homes. During our terrible Civil War, in those try- 
 
110 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 ing times when the loftiest passions of the human 
 heart were aroused and the human soul was called 
 upon to exhibit a sublime heroism rarely paralleled 
 in the history of the race, in those days of the crucial 
 test, more admirable and illustrious than even the 
 bravery of the Southern soldiers was the matchless 
 spirit of the Southern women ; not since the Spartan 
 mother said to her son, "With thy shield or on it !" or 
 since the Carthaginian woman strung her warrior's 
 bow with hair cut from her own head has there been 
 witnessed in the world such devotion to a people's 
 cause as that which the womanhood of the South 
 gave to our struggling Confederacy. And in those 
 dreadful, shameful reconstruction days when the 
 iron heel of the conqueror was on the Southern white 
 man's neck, when the United States government was 
 doing its utmost to perpetrate upon the people of the 
 South the greatest crime- ever attempted against the 
 civilization of the world, in those dark days of wrong 
 and ruin, when Southern character was being tried 
 in a fiery furnace, it was a notable fact, much com- 
 mented on at the time and that should never be for- 
 gotten, that the Southern women bore up under the 
 strain much better than the men did; and she had 
 more to bear, for in thousands of homes from luxury 
 and abounding wealth she was brought down sud- 
 denly to abject poverty and menial toil; but her 
 heroism never faltered, and in that gloomy period 
 her "still small voice" called many a despairing Eli- 
 jah from his cave and spoke to him inspiring words 
 that revived his spirits and rekindled his courage. 
 And during all these latter years of poverty and 
 financial depression in the South, what a noble, cheer- 
 ful wage-earner and bread-winner she has been, dig- 
 nifying labor as it was never dignified before! 
 But for Southern women, the future, the irnme- 
 
BACCAIvAURDATE addresses. HI 
 
 diate future — the future, young ladies, that you are 
 about to enter — holds out greater opportunities for 
 good and glorious achievement than they ever had 
 in the past. The people of the South, the people of 
 Georgia especially, realize more thoroughly now than 
 ever before the importance of giving to women a 
 liberal and a wise education. This is evidenced by 
 the fact of the establishment and maintenance of this 
 school by the State. It is evidenced by the over- 
 whelming patronage given to this college and nearly 
 all other female colleges in the State. It is evidenced 
 by the fact that if a man can not liberally educate 
 both his sons and his daughters, almost invariably 
 the daughters get the education ; that is as it should 
 be, for, if possible, it is even more important for a 
 State to have a liberally educated womanhood than to 
 have a liberally educated manhood. A liberally and 
 wisely educated womanhood in the home, the school- 
 room, in society, in the church, means a vast deal 
 for the future good and glory of Georgia ; for these 
 institutions are the original sources, the very foun- 
 tain-heads from which flow all that is good and 
 beautiful and noble in a people's life, and these in- 
 stitutions get their tone and character, their vitality 
 and inspiration chiefly from woman's "still small 
 voice !" 
 
 Young ladies, I suppose you have all read Shake- 
 speare's great tragedy, King Lear, and of course you 
 remember Cordelia, the heroine of the play. Well,, 
 did you ever think what Cordelia stands for in wo- 
 manhood ? We do not know that she was beautiful. 
 We do not know that she possessed any of those 
 winning but superficial graces of mind, or of person, 
 or of disposition, or of manner, that are supposed to 
 constitute a woman's chief attraction for men. She 
 may have possessed all of those attributes in abun- 
 
112 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 dance, but if so Shakespeare gives us not the least 
 hint or suggestion of it. So Cordelia doesn't stand 
 for the "charming woman," as that expression is 
 commonly used, though charming she may have been. 
 But I will tell you what she does stand for; she 
 stands as the embodiment of those qualities in wo- 
 manhood that call forth from men the only kind of 
 love and adoration that is worth a woman's having! 
 Doubtless you remember how every man in that play 
 that was truly a man loved and adored Cordelia; 
 and perhaps you remember what a distinctly noble 
 kind of love and adoration it was that she drew from 
 those around her. You remember how deeply and 
 tenderly her passionate, headstrong old father doted 
 on her; and you remember how all the disaster, 
 wreck and ruin so powerfully depicted in that great 
 tragedy was brought about because that obstinate 
 father would not heed the warning of Cordelia's 
 "still small voice," as many another disaster, wreck 
 and ruin has been caused because obstinate, head- 
 strong men have refused to heed woman's "still 
 small voice!" And you remember the noble Earl 
 of Kent's chivalric devotion to Cordelia; you re- 
 member how at the imminent risk of his own life 
 and to the certain destruction of his own fortunes 
 he uttered that brave, indignant protest in her de- 
 fense and would not be silenced though a drawn 
 sword was at his breast! You remember how pa- 
 thetically even that poor servant, the Fool in the 
 play, loved and worshiped Cordelia! You remem- 
 ber how joyfully the young King of France took the 
 dowerless, outcast Cordelia to his bosom and made 
 her queen of himself and of all that he possessed! 
 You remember how easily Cordelia, by the magic of 
 her "still small voice," induced her royal husband to 
 lead his mighty armies from France into England to 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 113 
 
 -.the rescue of her old father, who had so deeply 
 wronged her. And surely if you have ever read it 
 you can never forget that touching scene when the 
 father and daughter meet after their tragic separa- 
 tion; and when shortly afterwards disaster came 
 upon them, you remember that plaintive speech of 
 poor old Lear's as they were on their way to prison 
 together, the tenderest words that ever came from a 
 father's lips, the most beautiful tribute ever paid to 
 the power of a woman's love ! And you remember 
 the closing scene of that awful tragedy, when King 
 Lear, with a breaking heart, bending over the dead 
 body of his daughter, calls to her, cries to her : 
 
 "O, Cordelia, Cordelia, stay a little !" 
 And then, thinking that he hears her speak : 
 
 "Ha! what is't thou sayest? 
 Sh! Her voice was ever soft, gentle 
 
 And low, an excellent thing in woman!" 
 
 From the bottom of my heart I echo that cry of 
 King Lear's: O Cordelia, Cordelia, grand type of 
 womanhood, stay — not a little, but stay forever to 
 bless and glorify my native State of Georgia ! With 
 thy strong, noble, beautiful character, before which 
 •every knee bows and to which all souls respond! 
 with thy golden heart that "reverbs no hollowness," 
 with thy brave spirit that defies adversity, with thy 
 sweet voice, "ever soft, gentle and low, an excellent 
 thing in woman," O Cordelia, stay forever! 
 
 Let not any new woman with her speaky, screechy 
 voice ever displace thee in the grand old State of 
 Georgia! 
 
 And now, young ladies, in conclusion, let me say 
 
 8ab 
 
114 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 that no college president ever felt for the pupils 
 under his charge a greater, tenderer love than that 
 which goes out from my heart for each and every- 
 one of you. No college president ever bade farewell 
 to a graduating class with a more earnest hope, with 
 a firmer faith than I feel that each and every one of 
 you will be good and true and noble to the glory of 
 the grand old State of Georgia and to the honor of 
 your Alma Mater. Whatever way Almighty God 
 wills that you shall tread in your journey across this 
 world, from eternity onward towards eternity,, 
 whether it be short or whether it be long, through 
 whatever regions, through whatever experiences it 
 may pass, be assured that along that way in many 
 a cave Elijahs are waiting for you, waiting for the 
 inspiring power of your "still small voice" to help to 
 make them good and strong and brave and noble ! 
 
"$u/eet Ipflaepces of tl?<? pieiades." 
 
 YOUNG Ladies of the Graduating Class: 
 During the latter days of April and the first 
 days of the month of May every evening just 
 at dusk, if you had looked over in the west, low down 
 in the skies in the golden after-glow of the setting 
 sun, you might have seen two constellations, or 
 groups of stars; you might have seen them as side 
 by side they sank softly below the horizon with the 
 closing day. Famous beyond all other star-groups 
 in the heavens are those two constellations. From 
 of old myth and fable, story and tradition have ren- 
 dered them dear to the human heart; from of old 
 earth's greatest poets have glorified them in their 
 noblest songs. Four thousand years ago one of the 
 greatest poets that ever lived, in one of the sublimest 
 rhapsodies that ever burst from the human soul, said 
 of those two constellations, "Canst thou bind the 
 sweet influences of the Pleiades ! Canst thou loosen 
 the bands of Orion !" 
 
 Orion and the Pleiades, Orion and the Seven 
 Stars, as they are more commonly called — who with 
 upturned eyes and loving heart hath not watched 
 them as from east to west in their annual and diurnal 
 journey they moved majestically across the heavens, 
 the observed of all star-gazing observers ! Orion 
 and the Pleiades, Orion and the Seven Stars, with 
 what beautiful fables did the old Eastern astrono- 
 mers personify these two constellations: represent- 
 ing Orion as a mighty and princely warrior with a 
 helmet on his head, a sword by his side, a lion's skin. 
 
 (115) 
 
116 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 over his shoulder, and in his strong right hand a club 
 drawn back to strike the dreadful beast that was 
 charging down upon him — the whole story told in 
 an outline of most brilliant shining stars ; and rep- 
 resenting the Pleiades as a group of sisters, a group 
 of beautiful sisters, each with her own soft musical 
 name, all bound together in ties of affection and 
 journeying forevermore through the heavens on a 
 mission of love, on a mission of tender, self-abnegat- 
 ing love, and singing meantime songs of joy and 
 songs of sadness, "sweet influences of the Pleiades !" 
 It is wonderful, the attractive power of that little 
 cluster of stars that we call the Pleiades or seven 
 stars ! So modest, so soft-shining up there in the 
 heavens, "like a swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver 
 braid !" Most inconspicuous, least brilliant, and yet 
 most observed, most noticed, best known, best be- 
 loved of all star-groups in the heavens are the mod- 
 est, soft-shining Pleiades! Take a little child forth 
 on a clear, starlit night, and the first group that he 
 will notice will be the Pleiades, or Seven Stars, or, 
 once point them out to him and they will be ever 
 afterwards impressed on his memory and dear to his 
 heart. There is scarcely a man or woman, scarcely 
 a boy or girl, who does not know the Pleiades, or 
 seven stars. All the world knows and loves the mod- 
 est soft-shining Pleiades! Ages ago, before the 
 mariner's compass was invented, that little cluster 
 of stars was the rude sailor's principal guide over 
 unknown waters and through the trackless seas. 
 There is not a savage in the wildwoods, there is not 
 a negro on a Southern plantation who does not know 
 and love the Seven Stars, and who does not use them 
 as his timepiece in the night and as his guide through 
 tangled swamps and trackless forests. Your astron- 
 omy teaches you, as you doubtless remember, young 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 117 
 
 ladies, that the sun in his annual journey through 
 the circle of the zodiac reaches that little star-cluster 
 or, as astronomers express it, is projected into that 
 little star-cluster of the Pleiades about the middle of 
 the month of May, the season par excellence of flow- 
 ers and of the earth's greatest beauty, and in olden 
 times people believed that it was "the sweet influ- 
 ences of the Pleiades" that gave to the sun at this 
 time his genial power and through him to our earth 
 her gorgeous robes of glorious flowers and her aro- 
 matic breath ; and even at this day astronomers be- 
 lieve that Alcyone, the principal one of the Pleiades, 
 is the center of the whole stellar universe, and that 
 around that little modest-shining cluster all the stars 
 of God with all their trains of attendant planets do 
 circle forevermore to the sublime, eternal music of 
 the spheres ! 
 
 How aptly then did that grand old poet of the 
 Bible use the happy phrase "sweet influences of the 
 Pleiades." And, my dear young friends, I wish to 
 call your attention this morning to the deep moral 
 significance of that little sentence. I wish to show 
 you this morning that "the sweet influences of the 
 Pleiades" is a metaphor of human experience, an 
 allegory of human life. I wish in this my last talk 
 to you to impress upon your young minds and hearts 
 the great perennial truth that the most powerful, the 
 deepest penetrating, the farthest-reaching influences 
 in this world, the influences that most affect human 
 character, human conduct, human happiness, human 
 life, come from quiet, unobtrusive sources, come 
 from modest, inconspicuous people. I wish as my 
 last word to you to say from the deepest conviction 
 of my soul that woman, tender, modest, inconspicu- 
 ous woman, carries in the folds of her mantle the 
 destinies of the nations ! 
 
118 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 Young ladies, I do not wish to talk to you this 
 morning as school-teachers, or as stenographers or 
 dressmakers or bookkeepers, nor in any way as pros- 
 pective wage-earners or bread-winners. Not that I 
 disparage those honorable occupations, not that I 
 fail to exalt as they should be exalted the glorious 
 women who by their own precious labor make their 
 own livelihood 1 — God forbid ! But still I do not wish 
 to talk to you from that standpoint this morning. I 
 wish to speak this morning straight to the essential 
 womanhood that lies back of all that and deeper than 
 all that. Neither do I wish to talk to you as new 
 women, nor as progressive women; because as to 
 the new woman I think she is a rank fraud and hum- 
 bug, and I hope you will never become such, and as 
 to the progressive woman, why of course I believe 
 very strongly and earnestly in the progressive wo- 
 man, and I hope you will become such. Still I do 
 not wish to talk about the progressive woman this 
 morning, because in this intensely self-conceited age 
 there is so much talk and boasting about progress 
 that it makes me tired, and I do wish sometimes that 
 this glorious nineteenth century, or twentieth as it 
 is now, would go ahead progressing without so much 
 everlasting bragging about it. I don't think it is in 
 good taste for any century, however great, to be for- 
 ever talking about itself and bragging on itself. 
 
 And, young ladies, speaking of progress, let me 
 right here give you a thought which I hope you will 
 take and which I hope you will carry away with you. 
 It is this : In this world of ours there is somewhat 
 that is progressive and there is somewhat that is not 
 progressive, and the somewhat that is not progres- 
 sive is more important than the somewhat that is 
 progressive. Human civilization is progressive, but 
 there is no progress of the human species. Hun- 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 119 
 
 fidreds of years ago there were in this world of ours 
 no railroads nor telegraphs nor telephones nor steam- 
 engines nor cotton-mills nor ice-factories nor sewing- 
 machines nor typewriting-machines; hundreds of 
 years ago little or nothing was known about natural 
 .science and the countless comforts and blessings that 
 knowledge of natural science has brought to us; 
 hundreds of years ago it had not been discovered 
 that man came from frog-spawn through a monkey, 
 and that the human soul is nothing but lumps of 
 grey matter in the brain; hundreds of years ago 
 there were no newspapers or kindergartens or normal 
 schools or industrial schools; these and such 
 Jike things belong to the somewhat that is progres- 
 sive ! But, oh, my dear young friends, hundreds of 
 years ago there were in this world of ours kind 
 •hearts, noble minds and lofty souls ! Hundreds, nay 
 thousands of years ago, as far back as history goes, 
 there lived upon this earth of ours men and women 
 -who in all the essential qualities, attributes, and vir- 
 tues of manhood and of womanhood were as true, 
 as great, as noble and as lofty as any who breathe 
 the breath of life, in this glorious twentieth century. 
 There has been a mighty progress of human civili- 
 sation. Let us thank the Almighty for it, and may 
 -God speed its still further progress, but there has 
 been no progress of the human species. If we would 
 preserve in perfect purity and integrity what is most 
 worthy, what is best, truest and highest in man's 
 nature we should take our models from the past just 
 as our. modern sculptors study the clear-cut, match- 
 less statues of the ancient Greeks. If I were called 
 -upon to point out the finest conceptions of noble wo- 
 manhood that have ever been bodied forth in the lit- 
 erature of the world I should not take them from 
 any recent or very modern book ; I should take them 
 
120 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 from certain old books; I should select them from* 
 what I believe to be, taking all things into consider- 
 ation, the three greatest books that have ever been 
 written. I should take them from Homer, from the 
 Bible, and from Shakespeare. 
 
 Let us for a moment consider the women of Ho- 
 mer. Three thousand years ago that wonderful book 
 which we call Homer was produced. The truly great 
 and noble men and women who compose the prin- 
 cipal characters of that wonderful book were not 
 amenable to those progressive and constantly im- 
 proving social regulations and social conditions that 
 make the conventional law and the conventional 
 life of our day, and therefore they are not to 
 be judged by the conventional standards of the 
 present time, but in all the fundamental and 
 essential qualities, powers and virtues of true 
 manhood and womanhood those Homeric people 
 never have been surpassed and never will be sur- 
 passed. Bloodthirsty as roaring lions, ferocious as : 
 Bengal tigers, those Homeric men gloried in that 
 dreadful war in which they were engaged, but it was 
 not an unjust war. It was waged for the honor of a 
 woman and to avenge an outrage perpetrated upon 
 the sanctity of a home; and it was fought between 
 equals, Greek and Trojan, each finding in the other 
 a foeman worthy of his steel ! It was not waged by 
 a powerful nation against a people a hundred times 
 weaker than themselves in sheer bullying and im- 
 position like two wars now being waged on this earth 
 of ours in this glorious twentieth century by two 1 of 
 the foremost and most enlightened nations in the 
 world ! Then where is your progress of the species ?'" 
 But even more admirable than the men, are the wo- 
 men of Homer. They exhibit a fine self-respect and 
 a commanding dignity of character which I am sorry 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 121 
 
 to say, not many women even in our day seem to 
 possess, and from those ferocious warriors by whom, 
 they were surrounded they drew the highest regard, 
 the tenderest affection and the profoundest deference,, 
 the wives invariably sharing not only the heart but 
 the thought of their husbands, for it never seemed 
 to occur to Homer that in sense and judgment wo- 
 man is "the weaker vessel." In true manliness, in 
 delicacy and refinement, the attitude of the Homeric 
 men towards the Homeric women has never been 
 surpassed by anything in modern chivalry. And 
 surely no women who 1 ever lived were more worthy 
 of chivalric devotion than those superb Homeric wo- 
 men ! In the literature of the world there is no con- 
 ception of a maiden more perfect in grace, tender- 
 ness, than the charming Nausicaa! Imagination 
 never bodied forth a finer illustration of the queenly 
 matron than Penelope ! But best of all is Androm- 
 ache, that matchless model of "perfect wifehood 
 and true womanhood." In no novel or romance or 
 poem or drama that I have ever read is there a scene 
 more touchingly true than the parting between An- 
 dromache and Hector when he starts for the wars,, 
 closing with the incident where he takes the babe 
 into his strong arms and after caressing it, returns 
 it to the mother: 
 
 "So speaking, to the arms of his dear spouse 
 He gave the boy ; she on her fragrant breast 
 Received him, weeping as she smiled. The chief 
 Beheld, and, moved with tender love, smoothed 
 Her forehead gently with his hand, and said" — 
 
 So throughout all the blood and thunder of that 
 sublime tragedy the "sweet influences of the Plei- 
 ades" are deeply felt, above the clash of arms and: 
 
122 baccalaureate addresses. 
 
 the trumpets' dreadful blare their songs of joy and 
 ,songs of sadness are clearly heard, and their tender, 
 self-abnegating love give to the splendid epic a beauty 
 not so conspicuous, but just as glorious as the stars 
 that blaze forth in its great Orion constellation! 
 Such, whether in times of war or in times of peace, 
 whether in ancient times or modern times — such 
 must ever be the right relations between man's mis- 
 sion and woman's mission in this world of ours. 
 You can not "bind the sweet influences of the Plei- 
 ades" nor "loosen the bands of Orion !" 
 
 But older than Homer and more wonderful than 
 Homer is that book of books, the Bible, the Hebrew 
 Bible, our Bible ! Entirely aside from its sacredness, 
 leaving altogether out of consideration for our pres- 
 ent purpose its religious character and regarding it 
 from a strictly worldly standpoint and judging it 
 precisely as you would judge any other book, solely 
 for its literary value, even from this point of view 
 the Bible is still one of the greatest books that has 
 -ever been written. The poets of the Bible, such as 
 David, Job, Isaiah, Jeremiah, possessed an elevation 
 of thought and a depth of feeling and a grandeur 
 of utterance that never has been surpassed, and that 
 no writer of our time, that no writer or speaker in 
 this glorious twentieth century, can even remotely 
 approach. But. more significant for our present pur- 
 pose than these sublime rhapsodies are the histories 
 and the narratives of the Bible, or as we commonly 
 -call them, the stories of the Bible. Oh, the beauty 
 and grandeur, oh, the height and depth and the sur- 
 passing tenderness of those old Bible stories ! How 
 truly and vividly do they present to us the everlast- 
 ing and unchanging verities of human nature and 
 human life! Side by side with monsters of wicked- 
 ness and depravity they show us in clear-cut outline 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 123 
 
 men and women who in native dignity and nobility 
 of character and in all the finer sensibilities of man's 
 nature may stand as models for mankind as long as 
 the human race endures. For these thousands of 
 years man has not added one cubit to his moral stat- 
 ure nor a single musical note to the rythmic beating 
 of his heart. There has been a mighty progress of 
 human civilization, but there has been no progress 
 of the human species ! In those old Bible stories you 
 may find women at whose feet the finest and most 
 progressive and most cultured lady of this glorious 
 twentieth century may sit and learn lessons in true 
 and heroic womanhood. Some of them are really 
 great women, of commanding dignity of character, 
 occupying high positions, and exercising a powerful 
 public influence, but we will pass these great ones 
 by and we will take for our example a woman who 
 was one of the lowliest of her sex, a working-wo- 
 man, a wage-earner, a bread-winner in the humblest 
 of occupations — 'Ruth the Moabitess, who gleaned 
 behind the reapers in the fields of young Boaz four 
 thousand years ago ! Far and away the most beau- 
 tiful idyl ever written in human language is that old 
 Bible story of Ruth. How melodious it is with the 
 sad, sweet music of humanity ! How eloquent it is 
 with noble and impassioned speech! How full it is 
 of the milk of human kindness! The distant back- 
 ground of calamity and suffering against which the 
 whole story is projected; the beautiful devotion of 
 Ruth and Noami for each other; their pathetic jour- 
 ney from the land of Moab to Bethlehem — Judah; 
 the astonished greeting they received from the peo- 
 ple there; the touching eloquence of Naomi's reply 
 to that greeting; the warm-hearted salutation that 
 passed between the rich young Boaz and the laborers 
 in his wheat-fields, genial as the summer skies above 
 
124 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 them, sweet as the breath of the new-mown fields 
 around them ; his treatment of that poor friendless 
 young woman who gleaned behind the reapers, in 
 delicacy, in tenderness, in line-grained manliness ab- 
 solutely matchless in all your tales of modern chiv- 
 alry; the courtship, the marriage, the birth of the 
 babe, and the closing scene where with "one touch 
 of nature that makes the whole world kin," old 
 Naomi holds out her arms and "took the child and 
 laid it in her bosom, and became nurse unto it" — 
 make altogether the most wholesomely touching 
 story of genuine human kind-heartedness that I have 
 ever read. And the central figure, the heroine, the 
 inspirer of this exquisite drama of real life was a 
 simple peasant woman toiling in the fields with a 
 simple peasant people four thousand years ago! 
 Then where is your progress of the species? Even 
 to this day the greatest orators of earth, when they 
 wish to give forceful and eloquent expression to one 
 of the noblest sentiments that can animate the human 
 heart, go back four thousand years and take the glow- 
 ing words from the lips of that simple peasant wo- 
 man : "Intreat me not to leave thee or to cease from 
 following after thee ; for whither thou goest I will go, 
 and where thou lodgest I will lodge ; thy people shall 
 be my people, and thy God my God ; where thou diest 
 I will die and there will I be buried; the Lord do so 
 to me and more also, if aught but death part thee and 
 me." Oh, noble Ruth! Oh, loyal-hearted Ruth, 
 stand forever as a model of true womanhood for all 
 the women of all the ages of the world — "sweet in- 
 fluences of the Pleiades!" 
 
 Now let us come to Shakespeare. By the unani- 
 mous agreement of the whole reading and thinking 
 world the very greatest book that has ever been 
 evolved from the human brain is that book which we 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 125 
 
 call Shakespeare. All women should love Shake- 
 speare, because beyond, far beyond, all other writers 
 he has glorified woman. Not by flattery nor exag- 
 eration nor idealization nor the glamor of romance, 
 but by revealing with perfect truthfulness her in- 
 effable charms and graces of manner, thought, 
 and speech, her goodness, her sweetness, her hero- 
 ism, her boundless capacity for tender, self-abnegat- 
 ing love. The feminine, the true and essential femi- 
 nine, the eternal feminine appears at its very best in 
 Shakespeare's heroines. Take his Juliet, for in- 
 stance ; Juliet, that queen rose of Shakespeare's rose- 
 bud garden of girls! Romeo's Juliet, but beloved 
 not only of Romeo but by all the other people, men 
 and women, in that wonderful play, and by all who 
 have ever read the sad, sweet tragedy of her life! 
 She is the youngest of all of Shakespeare's heroines, 
 and perhaps the most beautiful. We know that she 
 was beautiful because Romeo tells us 
 
 "Her beauty hangs upon the cheek of night 
 Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear!" 
 
 and with becoming rapture he raves about the glory 
 of her starlit eyes and 
 
 "The white wonder of my Juliet's hand !" 
 
 and even when he beholds her lying in the tomb 
 wrapped in her burial robes, he exclaims : 
 
 "O my love, my wife ! 
 Death that hath sucked the honey of thy breath 
 Hath had no power to mar thy beauty : 
 Thou art not conquered; Beauty's ensign yet 
 Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheek 
 And death's pale flag is not advanced there I" 
 
126 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 And not only Romeo, but many other more im- 
 partial witnesses bear testimony to her surpassing 
 beauty; I could quote a dozen different passages 
 from almost as many different persons in the play to 
 this effect. Yet it is not for her beauty that we love 
 Juliet, but for her warm heart, her tender sympathy, 
 her perfect sincerity, her unsophisticated frankness, 
 her self-possession through all the tempest and whirl- 
 wind that wrought her young soul, her womanly 
 heroism in all the tragic situations of her life, and 
 over all and above all for her own boundless capacity 
 for love as expressed by her own lips in that noble 
 passage : 
 
 "My bounty is as boundless as the sea, 
 My love as deep ; the more I give you 
 The more I have — for both are infinite !" 
 
 Portia, Miranda, Rosalind, Helena, Isabella, Per- 
 dita, Constance, Queen Catherine, Hermione, Im- 
 ogen, Desdemona, Cordelia, are Shakespeare's other 
 great heroines. Not one of them is a conventional 
 tragedy queen, but every one of them has a far deep- 
 er meaning than any tragedy queen that ever shrieked 
 upon the mimic stage. 
 
 As individuals they differ totally from one an- 
 other, but each one of them is, in her way, the living 
 embodiment of true and noble womanhood. All to- 
 gether they illustrate the whole wide range of admir- 
 able and lovable womanly qualities and virtues. We 
 have among them the gentle and submissive woman, 
 the high-spirited and self-assertive woman; the 
 timid, shrinking woman; the courageous, daring 
 woman; the light and playful woman; the intel- 
 lectual and serious woman; the crushed woman; 
 the defiant woman — but still, in every instance, the 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 127 
 
 womanly woman, the true woman — modest, pure, 
 warm-hearted, sympathetic, heroic, and with a 
 boundless capacity for tender, self-abnegating loveT 
 
 Young ladies, these qualities, attributes and vir- 
 tues so splendidly illustrated in the women of Ho- 
 mer, the women of the Bible, and the women of 
 Shakespeare, are the qualities, attributes and virtues 
 which must forevermore constitute the strength and 
 glory of womanhood. The new woman can add 
 nothing to them, the emancipated woman can not 
 free herself from their obligations, the progressive 
 woman can not go beyond them. My dear young 
 friends, the Almighty has endowed each and every 
 one of you with a rich abundance of these qualities, 
 attributes and virtues. Oh, cherish them as you 
 would the apple of your eye ! Strive to develop them 
 to the utmost limit of their highest possibilities I 
 Through thoughfulness and through prayer seek to 
 exercise them for the betterment of mankind and to* 
 the glory of the ever-living God! High and sacred 
 is the mission whereunto you are called. The world 
 looks for you to be the inspirers of noble deeds, the 
 preservers of lofty sentiment, the guardians of all 
 the sanctities of human life. 
 
 The profoundest and most stirring eloquence ever 
 heard in this world are your songs of joy and songs 
 of sadness. Upon your ministrations of tender, self- 
 abnegating love the salvation of the human race de- 
 pends. 
 
 Around the holy of holies over which you preside 
 all mortal interests with all their trains of attendant 
 joys do circle forevermore to the deep warm throb- 
 bings of the human heart ! It is not for you to blaze 
 forth in that great Orion constellation, but if you are 
 faithless to your mission of the Pleiades, Orion's 
 stars will lose their luster, his sword will rust in its- 
 
128 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 sheath, from his manly shoulders the mantle of lion's 
 skin will fall and a calf-skin take its place; from his 
 nerveless hand the club will drop and that ramping 
 beast will have his way with the civilization of the 
 glorious twentieth century! 
 
 In parting with you this morning I wish for you 
 precisely what I shall wish for my own precious little 
 daughters when they come to where you now are, 
 
 "Standing with reluctant feet 
 Where the brook and river meet!" 
 
 I do not expect or wish that you shall seek or gain 
 any of that glaring public notoriety which the vulgar 
 world calls fame ; but I do wish, I do expect, and I 
 do believe that wherever your lot may be cast, there 
 will be just the most precious thing, just the great- 
 est blessing that the Almighty ever gives this world 
 ■ — a good, true, warm-hearted, modest woman, exer- 
 cising with thoughful intelligence those qualities, at- 
 tributes and virtues which from old have constituted 
 the glory of womanhood and which forevermore 
 must be "the sweet influences of the Pleiades!" 
 
"T^y Gentleness j-iati? (T)ade /T\e Great." 
 
 YOUNG Ladies oe the Graduating Ceass: 
 Several months ago I read in some magazine 
 an article which contained a list of the most 
 distinguished alumni of certain leading male colleges 
 in America — Harvard, Yale, Princeton, University 
 of Virginia, and others — each institution setting 
 forth with boastful pride those of its graduates that 
 had attained to great distinction in the political and 
 professional life of the country; each claiming so 
 many governors of States, so many United States 
 senators, so many Supreme Court judges, so many 
 renowned lawyers, brilliant preachers, celebrated 
 statesmen, and so on. Well, for a male college such 
 pride, such boastfulness, such ambition is very nat- 
 ural; for from the very nature and organization of 
 human society much of the work that men are called 
 upon to do, and for which, as a rule, only men are 
 fitted to do, when splendidly done necessarily brings 
 the doer into great public notice and incidentally 
 gets for him what the world calls fame. But to a 
 woman's college such pride, such boastfulness, such 
 ambition does not appertain, for from the very na- 
 ture and organization of human society woman's 
 work, however splendidly done, does not bring her 
 into public notice, does not get for her what the 
 world calls fame; but woman's work is none the less 
 important, none the less appreciated, none the less 
 glorious for all that, and to fit her for her work re- 
 quires an education none the less thorough and pains- 
 taking, none the less high and fine, nay rather the 
 
 9 ba (129) 
 
130 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 higher and finer ! In the centennial catalogue of the 
 University of Georgia, issued a year or two ago,, 
 there was published a list of all the graduates of that 
 great institution during the entire hundred years of 
 its existence, and among them were many whose- 
 names had filled the trump of fame and who by their 
 deeds and achievements had rendered Georgia illus- 
 trious. My dear young friends, it is not to' be ex- 
 pected that your names, your precious names, will 
 fill the trump of fame, but it is to be expected that 
 each and every one of you will by your deeds and 
 achievements help to render Georgia illustrious ! 
 
 There are two things that are very commonly said 
 about women that I detest, because I believe them 
 both to be utterly untrue. One is that woman is "the 
 weaker vessel," and the other is that woman is "the 
 lesser man." Except in a physical sense woman is 
 not the weaker vessel, and in no sense whatever is 
 she the lesser man. She is neither the lesser man nor" 
 the equal man, nor, as some women seem to think 
 these days, the superior man. She is not man at all, 
 but woman ! Every nerve in her body is finer spun 
 than man's, every instinct of her nature is purer than 
 man's, every impulse of her heart is more unselfish 
 than man's, every aspiration of her spirit is nobler 
 than man's. Altogether she is a more finely organ- 
 ized, a more exquisite, a more precious creature than 
 man, and to this superior and peculiar fineness she 
 owes and must ever owe her power in this world. 
 
 From one of the psalms of David that I read to 
 you at our opening morning exercises a few weeks 
 ago there leaped forth this beautiful and significant 
 sentence : "Thy gentleness hath made me great !" 
 How suggestive of woman's power, of her power 
 over individuals, her power over communities, her 
 power over nations, her power over the world's civi- 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 131 
 
 lization is that little sentence, "Thy gentleness hath 
 made me great !" 
 
 Oh, how mighty is the power of gentleness ! The 
 mightiest and most powerful man that ever breathed 
 the breath of life in this world owed his might and 
 his power to his gentleness. Manliest of men was 
 he! Bravery, daring, boldness, aggressiveness, 
 strength of will, force of character, sternness when 
 needs be, severity when necessary, all were his in 
 eminent and preeminent degree, and in the course of 
 his stormy and deeply tragic life he had need to ex- 
 ercise all these sterner virtues, but they only served 
 as a background to emphasize and reenforce his gen- 
 tleness. With perfect will he turned his back upon 
 the supreme temptation, with perfect bravery he 
 drove the money-changers from the temple of the 
 living God, with perfect daring he faced furious 
 mobs, with perfect boldness he lashed with a tongue 
 of flame men in high positions, scribes and Phari- 
 sees, hypocrites; but these acts and such like acts 
 were only incidental to his real mission of gentle 
 words and gentle deeds ! The very flower and fruit- 
 age of his life was gentleness ! by the power of his 
 gentleness he drew to him, as he journeyed across 
 this world, the deepest love and adoration of all sorts 
 of people, from the scarlet woman that broke the 
 alabaster box of ointment at his feet to the rich man 
 of Arimathea, who begged for his dead body to lay 
 it in his own new tomb hewn from the solid rock. 
 Perennial is the influence of his gentleness. His 
 gentle words have more stirred the great depths of 
 the human heart than the songs of all the poets, have 
 more edified and inspired the human soul than all 
 other uttered speech. His gentle deeds have more 
 blessed mankind than the achievements of all other 
 reformers and heroes, and to-day all the great peo- 
 
132 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 pies of the world turn to that Man of Galilee with 
 the glad acknowledgment, "Thy gentleness hath 
 made me great !" Now mark you the quality of that 
 gentleness. It was not the weak, flabby, namby- 
 pamby kind of gentleness. It came from a nature 
 forceful as well as kind, from a heart courageous as 
 well as tender, from a spirit brave as well as beau- 
 tiful. It came from an insight deeper than your 
 psychology penetrates, from a thoughtfulness finer 
 than philosophy teaches, from a culture higher than 
 schools and colleges give! 
 
 Young ladies, such gentleness is always a mighty 
 power, nay may we not say the very mightiest power 
 for good in the world ! In its best and fullest devel- 
 opment such gentleness implies the kindly nature, 
 the loving heart, the thoughful mind, the forceful 
 character, the educated intellect, the trained hand. 
 Such gentleness is emphatically, distinctly, and spe- 
 cially woman's power. It is the power by which she 
 makes happy homes; it is the power by which she 
 refines, elevates, adorns and charms society; it is 
 the power by which she creates all of the dearest, 
 purest and noblest joys of this human life of ours! 
 Well then may the world turn to her and say, "Thy 
 gentleness hath made me great!" "Hath made me 
 great" because such gentleness more than any other 
 power on this earth enkindles, inspires, brings out 
 what is best and noblest, what is truly greatest in 
 man's nature. 
 
 Deep, deep in every true woman's heart the Al- 
 mighty has planted the gentle instinct, and with it 
 lias given her the noble desire, the most earnest de- 
 sire of her nature, to use her power of gentleness to 
 fill the world, each her own individual world, with 
 sweetness and beauty, with happiness and joy and 
 love. To cultivate that instinct, to cherish and grat- 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 133 
 
 ify that desire, to develop to the utmost that power 
 should be the paramount aim and purpose, pervad- 
 ing and transcending all other aims and purposes, of 
 a woman's education, of her education while she is 
 yet in the schoolroom and her education through her 
 own earnest thoughtfulness, after she has received 
 her college diploma and has left the schoolroom. 
 
 It is a sad thing to me to observe how many wo- 
 men are neglectful of this mighty power, how many 
 women undervalue this power. I would wish that 
 every young woman, and especially every young 
 Georgia woman, would get by heart, not merely 
 commit to memory, but get by heart, those lovely 
 lines of one of the older English poets : 
 
 "Ah, wasteful woman she who may 
 
 On her sweet self set her own price, 
 Knowing that man can not choose but pay, 
 
 How hath she cheapened Paradise, 
 How given for naught her priceless gift, 
 
 How spoiled the bread and spilled the wine 
 Which spent with due respective thrift 
 
 Had made brutes men and men divine!" 
 
 Young ladies, if after you have graduated from 
 this college you strive not after still further and 
 higher and yet higher graduation in the crucial 
 school of experience and in the noble school of your 
 own earnest thoughtfulness, you will have missed 
 the chief benefit that this college and all other schools 
 that you have attended meant to confer upon you — 
 you have "spoiled the bread and spilled the wine." 
 If as soon as you enter society you allow the fine 
 enthusiasms that have been enkindled in your young 
 souls to be extinguished by the world's frivolities 
 and trivialities, if as soon as you come in contact 
 
134 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 with the harsh, discouraging, belittling actualities 
 of real life you abandon your lofty faith and allow 
 your beautiful ideals to fade away from the horizon 
 of your being as the crimson blush fades from the 
 morning sky, then you will have thrown away the 
 most precious gift with which the Almighty has en- 
 dowed you — you have "spoiled the bread and spilled 
 the wine." If as you journey across this world, 
 "from eternity onward towards eternity," you grow 
 not more and more in charm of manner, in refine- 
 ment of thought, in beauty of speech, in decision of 
 character, in earnestness and singleness of purpose, 
 in depth of feeling, in breadth and magnanimity of 
 mind, in warmth and sympathy of heart, so that 
 wherever you may be placed, by whatever circum- 
 stances and environment encompassed, there shall 
 exhale from your very presence an atmosphere of 
 womanly gentleness that no mortal being can enter 
 without feeling its sweet, ennobling, inspiring influ- 
 ence, if you attain not to this, then you have failed 
 to develop what is best in you, you will have failed 
 to realize the greatest possibilities of your nature — 
 you have "spoiled the bread and spilled the wine." 
 If when you shall come to that exalted throne that I 
 trust awaits each one of you, when on your fair brow 
 shall rest the glorious crown of womanhood, when 
 at your feet shall kneel the loyal-hearted courtier 
 lovingly obedient, joyfully acknowledging your di- 
 vine right to rule, and around your knees shall 
 gather as adoring subjects with lovelit eyes, chil- 
 dren fresh from the hands of God, bone of your 
 bone and flesh of your flesh, if in that realm of 
 home you reign not so that every stranger and way- 
 farer that enters its domain shall pronounce it good 
 and beautiful, that to every visitor and honored guest 
 its hospitality shall be a golden benediction, that the 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 135 
 
 loyal-hearted courtier and every adoring subject with 
 lovelit eyes shall feel that just the dearest thing on 
 «arth is a woman's gentleness, and shall realize that 
 in the whole universe just the most powerful influ- 
 ence for good, for time and for eternity, is a woman's 
 gentleness, if when your queendom comes you reign 
 not so, then you will have neglected the most pre- 
 -cious opportunity ever vouchsafed to human being 
 in this world — you have "spoiled the bread and 
 spilled the wine." 
 
 Young ladies, quite a number of years ago I heard 
 a very distinguished man, a man of national fame, a 
 man of great intellect and the highest culture, of 
 wide observation and the finest insight say (I quote 
 his own language as well as I can remember it after 
 this lapse of years), said he: "I have traveled over 
 well-nigh the whole civilized world and I have min- 
 gled with what is termed the best society in nearly 
 all the foremost nations of the earth, and I have ob- 
 served with special care and interest the women of 
 different countries and different climes, and all preju- 
 dice and partiality aside, I assert without doubt or 
 reservation that the finest creature in form of wo- 
 mankind that the Almighty has yet placed on this 
 planet is our own Southern gentlewoman, 
 
 "Heart on her lip and soul within her eyes, 
 Soft as her clime and sunny as her skies !" 
 
 He spoke with the utmost sincerity and I believe 
 he spoke the absolute truth ; and I believe he might 
 .-have gone a step further and said, and the finest 
 specimens of this finest creature may be found right 
 here in the grand old commonwealth of Georgia! 
 I am glad that instead of the conventional word 
 ""lady" he used that nobler word "gentlewoman" — 
 
13G BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 a word yet uncorrupted by fashion and undegraded 
 by vulgar usage. My young friends, whatever your 
 work in life may be, your special work or your gen- 
 eral work, we expect of course that you will do it 
 well. We expect you to be, according as your fate 
 may determine, a good stenographer, a good book- 
 keeper, a good dressmaker, a good school-teacher, 
 a good business woman, a good housekeeper, or 
 what not, but over all, through all, and above all, 
 at all times, in all places, under all circumstances,, 
 in the completest, noblest, highest sense of the ex- 
 pression, we wish you to be a Georgia gentlewoman ! 
 So then the commonwealth may indeed turn to you 
 and say, "Thy gentleness hath made me great!" 
 No State or people or nation can be truly great ex- 
 cept through a gentle womanhood. 
 
 My dear young friends, it is God's will that man 
 with his creative intellect shall discover nature's 
 laws and fill the world with his masterful inventions- 
 and works of art ; with his aggressive will shall gov- 
 ern the nations; with his strong and valiant arm 
 shall "subdue the earth and have dominion over it." 
 It is God's will that woman, with her fine, discern- 
 ing mind shall decide what is the true, the beautiful 
 and the good, and shall say what shall prevail and 
 what shall not prevail; with her pure and gentle 
 spirit shall guide the human race in paths of right- 
 eousness, peace and love; with her exquisite taste 
 and deft fingers shall dress the garden of the earth 
 and keep it and make it a fit and happy habitation 
 for mankind. Who then will say that woman's place 
 in the universe is of less dignity and nobility than 
 man's? True, it is of less publicity, and it is well" 
 that it should be so. Even man with his thick skin 
 and tough texture is often spoiled and demoralized 
 by publicity ; to woman with her finer moral fiber and' 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 137 
 
 more sensitive spirit it can not but be harmful and 
 disastrous. So, my dear young friends, don't be- 
 lieve the wild and foolish words that are being too 
 much spoken on this subject these days. Don't be- 
 lieve that here in your own State your sex is under- 
 valued, mistreated, downtrodden, simply because^ 
 Georgia men don't want to see Georgia women han- 
 kering and seeking after that miserable public noto- 
 riety that the vulgar world calls fame and doing all 
 sorts of other mannish things. Be assured that the- 
 men that love you most deeply and tenderly, that ap- 
 preciate you most highly and finely are the very men 
 that don't want to see you do these things. 
 
 My dear young friends, Georgia to-day stands in 
 need of your power. Georgia is waiting with eager 
 expectation to welcome you to the fountain-heads of 
 her civilization with your purifying and beautifying 
 power — not any new-born public power, but an old 
 power, a power as old as the universe, as old as the 
 human heart, as old as manhood and womanhood, 
 a power as old and mighty in its gentleness as the 
 genial sunshine and grateful showers of these sweet 
 spring days that have brought the sap up from the 
 roots of flowers to fill the world with bloom and 
 beauty and fragrance. Your advantage is that this 
 innate power of yours has been educated and trained 
 for its work in this State school; so the State has 
 a right to expect great things of you. Your Alma 
 Mater believes that you will not disappoint the State. 
 
 With her warmest love, with her most earnest 
 prayers and blessings, and with exulting pride, your 
 Alma Mater sends you forth to the heart of Geor- 
 gia's civilization, believing that you will use your 
 power for the honor and the glory of the common- 
 wealth, so that in the coming years her inhabitants, 
 her sons and her daughters from the mountains to. 
 
138 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 the sea, will rise and say, "Thy gentleness hath made 
 me great" ; so that in whatever community, in what- 
 ever social organization, in whatever household, in 
 whatever home your life may fall or your work be 
 wrought, all the people thereof will rise and say, 
 "Thy gentleness hath made me great" ; so that when 
 you shall have finished your mysterious journey 
 across this world and shall have passed over to the 
 great beyond, your influence will live after you 
 through the years and through the ages and genera- 
 tions yet unborn will say, "Thy gentleness hath made 
 ,me great !" 
 
"^a<?<; /T)emii}isse Olim Juvabit!" 
 
 "OUNG Ladies of the Graduating Ceass: 
 In the first book of that superb poem, "Virgil's 
 iEneid," you doubtless remember the striking 
 scene where ^Eneas at the close of an eventful chap- 
 ter in his life and in that of his Trojan companions, 
 gathers those companions about him and makes to 
 them a noble and inspiring speech, closing his elo- 
 quent address with these words : "O socii, haec nobis 
 meminisse olim juvabit!" — "O comrades, it will 
 be pleasing to us to remember these things here- 
 after!" 
 
 That utterance of the Trojan hero suggests a 
 truth that dwells in the deepest depths of the human 
 spirit, and it seems to me it is a truth that should be 
 specially applicable to you this morning. For this 
 morning you close a chapter in your life; a chapter 
 which by reason of its characteristic events and ex- 
 periences, by reason of its own atmosphere and en- 
 vironment, by reason of its special loves and affec- 
 tions, must forever stand out in clear-cut, bold re- 
 lief from all the other chapters in your existence. 
 It is the chapter that tells the story of your college 
 life. 
 
 That life, with its lights and shadows, its joys and 
 sorrows, its bitter and sweet, is now ended. It is a 
 tale that is told, a sentence that has been written and 
 can be changed nevermore ! 
 
 Your work as students of this college is finished, 
 and, for better or for worse, must stand as it is be- 
 fore man and God for time and for eternity. My 
 
 (139) 
 
140 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 dear young friends, as you this morning look back 
 on that chapter in your life's story now ended, I 
 earnestly trust that the warm young heart of each 
 one of you echoes the sentiment of the Trojan hero, 
 "O sociij hacc nobis meminisse olim jiwabit!" — 
 "O classmates, it will be pleasing to us to remember 
 these things hereafter!" 
 
 I once knew an old man who was educated at a 
 country school over here in Hancock county, Geor- 
 gia, in the early part of the nineteenth century ; and 
 it was delightful to hear him talk about his early 
 school-days, so full of recollections that were very 
 dear to him, so full of simple, sweet, noble memo- 
 ries that he had gathered into his heart in the days 
 of his youth to be brought forth now to cheer the 
 spirit and charm the conversation of his old, old 
 age. And I also once knew another old man who- 
 was educated at a country school in the State of Mas- 
 sachusetts about the same time or somewhat later, 
 and he, too, used to talk a great deal about his early 
 school-days, but nearly always with bitterness, with 
 fault-finding, with sarcasm, with censorious criti- 
 cism. I suppose the difference between the two 
 might most readily be accounted for by the differ- 
 ence in the character of the two schools, but I felt 
 sure that it was also owing very largely to the dif- 
 ference in the spirit of the two men. For the kind of 
 memories that we garner into our hearts as we pass 
 through this human life depends as much on the sub- 
 jective spirit as on the objective event. Young" 
 ladies, I do> hope that in future years when your mind 
 shall revert to your college-life in Milledgeville, it 
 will be in the spirit of that generous-hearted Geor- 
 gian that rejected the bitter and treasured only the 
 sweets of his early school-days. 
 
 In behalf of your Alma Mater I ask you, in the 
 
BACCALAUREATE addresses. 141 
 
 language of the motto- of the Brotherhood of Elks, 
 "Let her faults be written in sand, but let her virtues 
 be engraven in enduring letters on the tablets of your 
 heart !" 
 
 Oh, blessed is the man or woman who as he jour- 
 neys through this vale of smiles and tears gathers 
 into the garners of his soul an abundant harvest of 
 sweet, simple, noble memories ; who, as he turns the 
 pages or closes the chapters in his life's story, may 
 frequently and truly say, "Haec nobis meminisse 
 ■olim jwvabitl" 
 
 Young ladies, I believe that one of the best tests 
 by which the real culture, the deep culture of any 
 person may be judged is by the kind of memories 
 that he has treasured up, by the kind of memories 
 that are dearest and most sacred to him. Open your 
 mind to me and let me see the memory treasures 
 that you have stored away in the sanctuaries of your 
 soul and in all the secret chambers of your heart, and 
 I can tell you the kind of spirit with which you are 
 endowed and the kind of culture that you have ac- 
 quired. 
 
 As the various and multiform events and expe- 
 riences occur in our lives, how little do we know, 
 how little do we suspect the rank that each will take 
 in memory. It is not until long years after the events 
 have occurred that the soul, by some subtle psychic 
 law with which the will has naught to do, gives to 
 each event its spiritual value. 
 
 It sometimes happens, strange as it may seem, 
 that we remember with greatest pleasure, or at least 
 with deepest gratification, events and experiences 
 which at the time of their occurrence were full of 
 pain and suffering for us, as of dangers bravely met, 
 difficulties laboriously overcome, adversities nobly 
 conquered, hardships heroically borne! Such were 
 
142 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 the memories of which ^neas speaks in his "Haec 
 nobis meminisse olim juvabit!" Such are the 
 memories that old soldiers bear of arduous cam- 
 paigns and bloody battlefields. And, young ladies, 
 probably such will be some of your most gratifying 
 memories of your student-life at the Georgia Normal 
 and Industrial College. 
 
 Again, it sometimes happens that sad events, the 
 great, deep sorrows of our lives, are mellowed by 
 time into the sweetest of memories. Emerson says, 
 "The room in which the corpse of our best beloved 
 hath lain becomes to us on that very account one of 
 the sweetest and pleasantest places." Then again, 
 and perhaps still more frequently, it happens that 
 happy and joyous events and experiences become 
 under certain conditions and in certain moods of 
 our mind, the mournfulest of memories. How beau- 
 tifully is this truth suggested in those exquisite lines 
 of Tennyson : 
 
 "Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, 
 Tears from the depth of some divine despair 
 Rise in the heart and gather to the eyes 
 In looking on the happy autumn fields, 
 And thinking of the days that are no more. 
 
 "Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns 
 The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds 
 To dying ears when to dying eyes 
 The casement slowly grows a glimmering square- 
 So sad, so strange, the days that are no' more. 
 
 "Dear as remembered kisses after death, 
 And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned 
 On lips that are for others ; deep as love, 
 Deep as first love, and wild with all regret ; 
 O Death in Life, the days that are no more." 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 143 
 
 And still more touchingly the same idea is sug- 
 gested in that sweet psalm of David, "By the rivers- 
 of Babylon there we sat down and wept, yea we 
 wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our 
 harps on the willows in the midst thereof ; for those 
 that oppressed us required of us mirth, and they that 
 carried us away captives said sing us one of the 
 songs of Zion, but how can we sing the Lord's song 
 in a strange land?" 
 
 But, young ladies, it seems to me that the most 
 significant truth in the psychology of memory is 
 this, that our dearest and most precious memories 
 and those that exert the most powerful influence 
 over our lives are nearly always about simple things, 
 of events and experiences that are not far to seek 
 but that occur in the ordinary course of any ordinary 
 human life, that are the common heritage of all man- 
 kind, that spring, as it were, spontaneously from the 
 very heart of nature. Wordsworth, in his little 
 poem, "Daffodils," gives us a profound hint of this 
 truth. Says the poem : 
 
 "I wandered, lonely as a cloud 
 
 That floats on high o'er vales and hills, 
 When all at once I saw a crowd — 
 
 A host of golden daffodils 
 Beside the lake, beneath the trees, 
 Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. 
 
 "The waves beside them danced, but they 
 Outdid ttje sparkling waves in glee; 
 A poet's heart could but be gay 
 
 In such a jocund company; 
 I gazed and gazed, but little thought 
 What wealth the show to me had brought. 
 
144 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 
 
 "For oft when on my couch I lie 
 
 In vacant or in pensive mood, 
 They flash upon the inward eye 
 
 Which is the bliss of solitude, 
 And then my heart with pleasure fills 
 And dances with the daffodils." 
 
 And the same thought is suggested in the closing 
 lines of Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper" : 
 
 "Whate'er the theme, the maiden sang 
 As if her song could have no ending, 
 I saw her singing at her work 
 And o'er her sickle bending; — 
 I listened motionless and still; 
 And as I mounted up the hill, 
 The music in my heart I bore 
 Long after it was heard no more." 
 
 As from the bosom of mother earth spontaneously 
 sprang the daffodils that made so deep and lasting 
 an impression on the poet's mind, as from the lips 
 of the untutored maiden spontaneously flowed the 
 simple song that lingered so long and sweetly in the 
 poet's heart, so from the bosom of every-day human 
 existence, so from the bosom of every-day human 
 loves and affections, spontaneously spring those ex- 
 periences in our lives that in long years afterwards 
 become our dearest and most precious memories. 
 
 The touch of a hand, the tone of a voice, the ex- 
 pression of a countenance, the loving light beaming 
 from kindly eyes, the sympathetic word or the in- 
 spiring word spoken just at the fitting time, gracious 
 actions, unselfish deeds, the loyalty of devoted hearts, 
 the simple and sweet amenities of family and social 
 life, warm personal friendships, deep personal loves, 
 
BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 145 
 
 some rare and beautiful human spirit with whom 
 mayhap it has been our blessed privilege to dwell 
 during the formative period of our lives, some great 
 and lofty nature that we have known in our youth 
 and that stands in our mind in matchless grandeur 
 like the Apollo Belvedere among the statues — these 
 and the like of these are the elements that go to make 
 the sweetness, the beauty, the gladness, the glory, 
 the sacredness of this human existence of ours, and 
 these are the elements that go to make those expe- 
 riences in our lives that in after years become our 
 dearest and most precious memories. Such memo- 
 ries, dwelling quietly in the human soul, frequently 
 exert a powerful influence for good over the dispo- 
 sition, character, and conduct of men and of women. 
 God pity the man, God pity the woman, whose life is 
 not enriched with such memories. God grant, my 
 young friends, that your lives may be abundantly so 
 enriched, and I do hope that among these precious 
 memory treasures, some of the dearest and most pre- 
 cious may be those that you have garnered into your 
 hearts during your student-life at Milledgeville. 
 
 And so, my dear young friends, I end as I began, 
 earnestly trusting that when to-morrow you shall 
 bid farewell to your Alma Mater, and fast-moving 
 trains shall bear you swiftly away from Milledge- 
 ville with its majestic old capitol, its grand old man- 
 sion, its modern college buildings, its elm-shaded 
 streets, its environing hills, its traditions of the past, 
 and its life of the present, the warm young heart of 
 each one of you, as you wave your final adieus, may 
 echo the sentiment of the Trojan hero, "O socii, 
 haec nobis meminisse olim juvabit!" — "O class- 
 mates, it will be pleasing to us to remember these 
 things hereafter!" 
 
JUN 
 
 1905 
 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
 
 019 746 812 9