njamin Robbins
Curtis, the great lawyer, who was one of the judges of the Supreme Court
of the United States; for the very able chief justice of Massachusetts,
George Tyler Bigelow; and for that famous wit and electric centre of
social life, George T. Davis. At the last annual dinner every effort was
made to bring all the survivors of the class together. Six of the ten
living members were there, six old men in the place of the thirty or
forty classmates who surrounded the long, oval table in 1859, when I
asked, "Has there any old fellow got mixed with the boys?"--11 boys whose
tongues were as the vibrating leaves of the forest; whose talk was like
the voice of many waters; whose laugh was as the breaking of mighty waves
upon the seashore. Among the six at our late dinner was our first
scholar, the thorough-bred and accomplished engineer who held the city of
Lawrence in his brain before it spread itself out along the banks of the
Merrimac. There, too, was the poet whose National Hymn, "My Country, 't
is of thee," is known to more millions, and dearer to many of them, than
all the other songs written since the Psalms of David. Four of our six
were clergymen; the engineer and the present writer completed the list.
Were we melancholy? Did we talk of graveyards and epitaphs? No,--we
remembered our dead tenderly, serenely, feeling deeply what we had lost
in those who but a little while ago were with us. How could we forget
James Freeman Clarke, that man of noble thought and vigorous action, who
pervaded this community with his spirit, and was felt through all its
channels as are the light and the strength that radiate through the wires
which stretch above us? It was a pride and a happiness to have such
classmates as he was to remember. We were not the moping, complaining
graybeards that many might suppose we must have been. We had been
favored with the blessing of long life. We had seen the drama well into
its fifth act. The sun still warmed us, the air was still grateful and
life-giving. But there was another underlying source of our cheerful
equanimity, which we could not conceal from ourselves if we had wished to
do it. Nature's kindly anodyne is telling upon us more and more with
every year. Our old doctors used to give an opiate which they called
"the black drop." It was stronger than laudanum, and, in fact, a
dangerously powerful narcotic. Something like this is that potent drug
in Nature's pharmacopoeia which she reserve
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