The daily morning journal and courier., 1897-06-25
DE FOREST PRIZE MEDAL
WON YESTERDAY BY ALEXANDER
 WHEELER OF BRIDGEPORT.

Yesterday Afternoon-Three of tho
 Speakers Are Residents of New Haven
 MT. WheeIer's Grafton on The Prome-
 theus of Aeschylus and of Shelley.
 The DeForest prize medal, which is annually awarded to that member of the Yale senior class who shall write and pronounce an English oratlon in the best manner, and for which the competitive speaking was held yester- day afternoon in Battel chapel, was awarded at the close of the speaking and after consultation by the judges to Alexander Wheeler '97 of Bridge port, Conn. There were this year six competitors for the prize, three of whom are residents of New Haven. The six competitors with the subjects on which each spoke were as follows:
 Walter Durham Makepeace, Spring field, Mass, ''The French Revolution and the English Poets;" Nathan Aver smyth, New Haven, Conn.,, "The Pro- metheus of the Aeschylus and the Prometheus of Shelley" William Stone Hubbell jr., Buffalo, N. Y, "The Grail Legen in English;" Alexander Wheeler, Bridgeport, Conn.,, "The Prometheus of Aeschylus and the Prometheus of Shelley" Henry Hotchkiss Townshend, New Haven, Conn, "The French Cana dians;" William Henry Harrison Hew- itt, New Haven, Conn, "The Prome- theus of Aeschylus and the Prometheus of Shelley"
 President Dwight presided and intro duced each speaker, and at the close of the contest he with three members of the academic faculty present, con- stituted the judges. After a short con- sultatton by these gentlemen it was an- nounced that MT. Wheeler had won the medal.
 MT Wheeler is one of the highest stand men in the senior class and has a large circle of friends who congratu- late him on his success. The winning of the DeForest medal is one of the greatest honors of the college course.
 His oration is here published in full:
 MT. Wheeier's Oration.
 There are moments in the lives of all of us when there comes rushing over our souls, like driving flood, mighty sense of the
 wrong of the world. Let the forces of
 wealth, of authority, of conservatism, be directed with seltshness and brutality against the rights of the progressive and the innocent-and be the injustice where it may-eyer. the hearts. protest is the same, ever within us rises the same mingling of sympathy and wrath and desire that only
 grow the ercer as they realize too often their perfect impotence.
 For this tremendous mood the world has
 found expression in the story of Prone
 theus which first secured abiding utter anee In the immortal tragedy of Aeschylus.
 It is indeed a question whether the myth of the titanic fire bringer and sufferer un- der the consequent anger of Zeus bore this meaning for the mighty dramatist himself. Sharp-eyed modern scholarship has remind
 cd us that the drama of the Prometheus
 Bound Is but fragment of | triology de-
 picting the theft of fire from heaven, the
 punishment of the offender, and his final release after due period of expation; that
 the note of defiance to authority is there
 fore but an incident in greater whole; that q universally reyerent and God-fearing
 poet could hardly have intended such an incident to be regarded with approval by
 an audience that respected authority and honored the gods; and that therefore this whole aspect of the play is to be taken as Illustrating the dramatic power of the poet rather than his ideal sympathies,
 But whatever the scholars and critics may decide, and they are by no means agreed upon such an interpretation as has been here outlined certain 1t Is that for the world the sufferings and the defances of Prone
 theus do mean the sufferings and the deti- ances of generosity, freedom, and progress
 in the presence of the cruel and settled selfshness of authority. Let Prometheus stand in the mind of Aeschylus for what you will; in the worlds mind he has ever
 stood for the heroic mood that will not "ilatter crime where 1t sits throned," and
 that will dare challenge and endure all the
 thunder blasts and lightning furies of the divine wrath itself rather than unsay one
 generous work, rather than undo one free It therefore was to have been expected that in our great modern protest against legalized and hoary shans and our great
 modern revolt against priests and Kings of men should have turned with especial sympathy to the Prometheus story as the embodiment of their intensest feelings | Such men were Goethe and Byron and our | own fierce young radical Lowell Such q
 man was Percy Bysshe Shelley
 | To us it seems Il misfortune that a boy of | Shelley's independent and yet susceptible | temper should have been placed In an en- | vironment of conventional and arstocratic | responsibility, against which his whole na- l ture rose in rebellion. rut thus into an at l titude of war with the world from his ear | Hest days, he was goaded to ever tiercer
 resistance at every turn of his life. At 1 Eton the iniusticeS of the Tagging system
 stung him; at Oxford it was the orthodox
 les and hypocrisies of the ultra-respectable | traditionalists; and his school and college | experiences were but the prophecies of all
 the later scenes of his troubled career. 1 The defiant protest into which he was thus l driven-and we can not help thinking it
 would have been moro of q protest had 1t l been less of q shriek--is the keynote of all | his poetry, from the rant atheism of Queen | Nab to the last generous cry for the people | of Hellas, who were finding their liberty 1 again at the very moment when the fever | of his life was soothed forever In the fair | Italian waters.
 | The Prometheus of Shelley Is the genius
 of human progress suffering under the op- | pression of q jealous God but 1t culminates | not in any reconciliation, but in the down. | fall of the tyrant and the union of the once suffering but now unbound and exalted | champion of humanity with the enthroned
 Beauty unbeheld." This is treatment of
 the theme far different from that of the Greek and indeed, except for the fact that 1 both deal with sublime theme sublimely,
 we will find but few resembances between | the two great poems.
 | What else can we expect2 Look at this | stern Marathon-fghter. Aeschylus, mature. | grave balanced, with as much of the Ro. i mana gravitas as Cato himself. citizen sol 1 dier, man of the world, rationaliZer indeed i but devout wOrshipper too, the Milton of l the Greeks. On the other hand see this | hot headed radical boy. saturated with Lu- cretius and Hume and the French RevOlu- 1 tion. social reformer disbeliever in mar | riage, vegetarian. democrat. atheist, with a l head full of Utopian schemes for the aboIi- l tion of injustice and the perfection of So- | Ciety-and then ask whether the two men | will have the same story to tell
 1 In point of simplicity. for instance, Aes- 1 chylus is the true Greek. The columns of | the Parthenon have not a more grand and | massive plainness than this great tragedy. l standing on that perilons border-laad of ] beauty where Dorian mergeS into Ionian