what) to
the profit and glory of my _Alma Mater_;[3] and the fact is I seem to be
in very nearly the same case with those who addressed me, for while I am
willing enough to write something, I know not what to write. Only one
point I see, that if I am to write at all, it should be of the
University itself and my own days under its shadow; of the things that
are still the same and of those that are already changed: such talk, in
short, as would pass naturally between a student of to-day and one of
yesterday, supposing them to meet and grow confidential.

The generations pass away swiftly enough on the high seas of life; more
swiftly still in the little bubbling back-water of the quadrangle; so
that we see there, on a scale startlingly diminished, the flight of time
and the succession of men. I looked for my name the other day in last
year's case-book of the Speculative. Naturally enough I looked for it
near the end; it was not there, nor yet in the next column, so that I
began to think it had been dropped at press; and when at last I found
it, mounted on the shoulders of so many successors, and looking in that
posture like the name of a man of ninety, I was conscious of some of the
dignity of years. This kind of dignity of temporal precession is likely,
with prolonged life, to become more familiar, possibly less welcome; but
I felt it strongly then, it is strongly on me now, and I am the more
emboldened to speak with my successors in the tone of a parent and a
praiser of things past.

For, indeed, that which they attend is but a fallen University; it has
doubtless some remains of good, for human institutions decline by
gradual stages; but decline, in spite of all seeming embellishments, it
does; and, what is perhaps more singular, began to do so when I ceased
to be a student. Thus, by an odd chance, I had the very last of the very
best of _Alma Mater_; the same thing, I hear (which makes it the more
strange), had previously happened to my father; and if they are good and
do not die, something not at all unsimilar will be found in time to have
befallen my successors of to-day. Of the specific points of change, of
advantage in the past, of shortcoming in the present, I must own that,
on a near examination, they look wondrous cloudy. The chief and far the
most lamentable change is the absence of a certain lean, ugly, idle,
unpopular student, whose presence was for me the gist and heart of the
whole matter; whose changing h