number,
whether student or townsman, from whose recollection can have faded
away the image of the orator, his form and attitude, his voice and
action, and some of his thrilling words, especially when he described
the nation holding in one hand the Declaration of Independence which
proclaims human equality, and with the other grasping the manacles and
scourge to torture millions of human beings bought and sold, and
compelled to labor in slavery.

Professor Chamberlain took charge of the Class of 1828 in Latin and
Greek when they entered on their Junior year. As soon as our class met
him in the east recitation-room--he being seated at a small table on
his left, and the class in lines of a half-parallelogram extending on
the right and in front of him--we felt that we had come under a noble
teacher. Some of us who loved the languages that he taught, and also
had become acquainted with the best of the upper classes, carried with
us none other than very high anticipations of a most profitable and
pleasant term of study. And so it proved. How he used to electrify us
at times by repeating something that had just been recited, as at the
close of the Agricola of Tacitus, his strongly marked face all lighted
up, new significance and something like inspiration being given us,
when with his deliberate, distinct, emphatic, rhythmical, rich
utterance, flowed out that prophetic sentence in the world's
literature, 'Quidquid ex Agricola amavimus, quidquid mirati sumus,
manet mansurumque in animis hominum, in aeternitate temporum, in fama
rerum!'

"I remember that while my class were in the Oedipus Tyrannus of
Sophocles and the Medea of Euripides, I was suffering from weak eyes,
and went to the recitation-room with no other preparation than that of
hearing each lesson twice read to me by two different students, who
did me the kindness to perform that service. But with Professor
Chamberlain's luminous explanation and comment, no Greek of my whole
college course more deeply interested and helped me.

"He heard the rehearsal of my Commencement oration, and some of his
words on that occasion I have not ceased to remember with gratitude.
Nor was I the only one who received from him words of encouragement
that proved of most valuable service in our subsequent career. Still
it was the _moral_ element that constituted his highest power of
influencing young men, and was his distinguishing personality. May I
say, for one, that in this moral an