Middlebury register. (Middlebury, Vt.) 1886-1937, 1920-06-25
CHARLES B. WRIGHT
DELIVERS FAREWELL ADDRESS
The Common Aims OF College and Community" Theme of
Sunday Sermon
Marks Termination of Th yve years Mddlebury
College

hACNAAJ ~ an AAONNNNA NANNAANllA
lest one good custom should corrupt
the world. Yet surely we have never
passed the border-line of safety, and /
trust that not seldom in the years to
come there may go out from these halls
choice spirits, of generous endowment
and careful training, who shall join to
the best that we can give the added
best that the greater schools can fur
nish, and then come back, with a full
knowledge of our traditions, with an
ardent love of our past, with sympa-
thetc devotion to the things this col
lege stands for-come back to the old
familiar haunts and count the giving
of a lifelong service here the highest
possible academic honor.
TRIBUTES TO TWO PRESIDENTS
"Nor would ! fail to recall today, in
the list Of things l am glad Of, the hap
ply relations that have been mine with
the two presidents under whom it has
been my privilege to serve You,
President Brainerd-for of you l feel
that | must speak in the terms of d.
rect address have been for me an
influence that l gratefully and affec-
tionately acknowledge. l became your
pupil in the days of my inexperience, |
remain your pupil still; and the les
sons you have taught me-would that
they might have been better learned
have been given in that best of ways,
by personal example: the lessons of
an untiring eagerness in the quest of
truth, Of scholarship both broad and
deep, of a sympathy so inclusive that
a zeal for science has never quenched
the humanistic fire How much the
college owes to you it will be the pleas
ant duty of some future historian to
record; mine is the humber but no less
pleasant task of declaring my own in
debtedness.
at has been an exceptional pleasure,
too, to have worked with President
Thomas, and to have been given. in
these years of his vigorous and success
full leadership, so generous a measure
of his confidence. None but ourselves
can know, l think the peculiar quail
ity Of that companionship; it is good
to declare, in this public way, how
much it has meant to me. Never has
he forgotten, as he might so easily
and so properly have done, the old
relation of his student days nor have
l, in turn, forgotten, trust, that in
the changed order of this later time
that relation has been reversed. I owe
him much for an unfailing courtesy,
and he never showed himself more my
friend, unseltish and deferential than
when he accepted without demur my
deliberate judgment that the time had
come for bringing my work to a close.
A REMARKABLE RECORD
"Those years OF the past seem very
fair as they rise out of the mists of
memory From that far-off day in
June of 80, when to an untfied youth
who had never taught from a college
of which he had never heard, came the
cordial invitation to its English chair,
to the present hour when the records
show that he has taught more Middle
bury students than any other man,
that he has been at the head of one
for the longest period in
the history OF the college, that less
than $50 of the living alumni were
graduated before his coming, and that
every woman with a Middlebury de-
gree has received it in the years of his
teaching service from then until now
those years have been filled with one
series Of kindnesses unde-
served. One cannot express in formal
words the gratitude he feels; he can
only cry with Bolingbroke, 'Evermore
thanks, the eXchequer of the poor, and
say in all sincerity that if he had it all
to do over, and could know the end
from the beginning, while he would
do so many things so differently, he
would come again as he came before
to as true friends as a man was ever
blessed with, and to this old campus,
the dearest spot in all the wide, wide
world
A LOOK FORWARD
"But | linger too long in these pleas