The daily phoenix. [volume] (Columbia, S.C.) 1865-1878, 1875-07-11
Gen. Preston's Address.

lowing extracts from the "eddrcss" Of
Gen. John S. Preston before the alumni
Of the University of Virginia:
The whole brood of nurselings-the
offspring of fifty years annual parturition
of the foremost school of letters, science
and philosophy, in this new world-have
called me, one of the first-born but
humblest of the flock, to stand here by
our nursery cradle and speak to them
and you. It is q very notable honor, the
most notable of my life, and I undertake
it with tremulous reverence for the
high responsibility it imposes. My fos-
ter-brothers are the learned, the wise, the
heroic, elders and teachers of the land;
fathers" the "Socrdtici riri" Coming
out from the obscurity of age and lost
country, what theme can 1 assume to
celebrate in the presence of the alumni of
the University of Virginia? The litera-
ture, the science, the philosophy, together
with the embodied thought of these fifty
years, have spread before us world full
of themes SO various, that your speaker
may we'll be more troubled in selection
than in treatment. Were to take any
of thousand, appropriate to this day
and occasion, I might succeed in win
ming your sympathies and awakening
your interest. Standing here, as it were,
on the portico of our own academy,
where for fifty years wisdom has talked
with her sons, we can see the great book
and volume of nature unfolding like
scroll to draw our wondering, upturned
gaze, or we can wander to and fro in
shaded avenues amid the graceful forms
Of art,
'tAnd see how Apollo, fair-haired god,
Draws in and bends his golden bow,
While on the left fair Dian waves her
torch"
And there let the sweet allurements of
fancy WOO our hearts and minds to flont
along in the bright enchantment of her
fowery pathways. Or better, higher,
nobler still, gaze upon that picture
Athens, the eye Of Greece, mother of
arts
And eloquence." With her
Schools of ancient sages. His who
bred
Great Alexander to subdue the world"
And
"Blind Mecigenes, thence Homer called,
Whose poem Phmbus challenged for his
Thence what the lofty, grnve tragedians
taught
In chorus or iambic, teachers best
Of moral prudence, with delightreceived,
In brief, contentious precepts, while they
treat
OF fate, and chance, and change in hu-
man life;
High actions and high passions best
describing.
Thence to the famous orators repair,
Those ancients whose resistless elo-
quence
Welded at will TINT fierce democratic,
Shook the arsenal, and fulmined over
Greece
TO Macedon, and Artaxerxcs throne"
Or, coming back from the school
to the day and the hour, might with
nimble fingers unweave our thread of
fifty years from she warp and woof of the
worlds history, and hang our joys on its
golden tissues, like rich jewels, or our
griefs and woe on its torn and jagged
shreds. But, my young friends, these
themes are for your sympathies; they are
the fond words of lullaby-"Rogue
blanda dtQue infrdcta" here Mt our
mothers cradle to sootho and charm
those who still cling to her breast. They
are for the coming world-thc after to-
day. Science and philosophy own no
past. When Gallileo died, Newton was
born, and the soul of the Italian imprcg-
mated the spirit of the Englishmnn.
They gather up the past, carry It forward
and with prophetic calculation toss it
into the future, to mould new laws and
new forms. Year by year they gather
here ut the store-houBes oil for their
lamps, or faggots for their torches, or
snatch Promethean FIRE, only to guide
their footsteps onward to nm undefined
and boundless future, to which they are
beckOninO and Wooinp vor1r youu r, 6ovo
ton. But with us grey boards, .'stand-
ing on the silent, solemn shore of that
vast ocean we must sail so soon," who
see the harvest sickle glittering near, in
the unified hand of the reaper, to whom
time is calling every hour to another birth,
the stern present and the rigid, immuta-
BILE past now prevails. For us must seek
for other themes, sterner than the die
tates of scholastic science, broader than
that which spans the earth, stronger than
that which binds the ocean, higher than
that which measures the stars Of heaven.
1t is that theme which burdens every
soul, which worships eternal truth and