Unlike the Orators at regular
Commencements, the Class Day Orator stood alone, or had only the
Poet for rival. Crowded into the large church, the students,
their families, friends, aunts, uncles and chaperones, attended
all the girls of sixteen or twenty who wanted to show their
summer dresses or fresh complexions, and there, for an hour or
two, in a heat that might have melted bronze, they listened to an
Orator and a Poet in clergyman's gowns, reciting such platitudes
as their own experience and their mild censors permitted them to
utter. What Henry Adams said in his Class Oration of 1858 he soon
forgot to the last word, nor had it the least value for
education; but he naturally remembered what was said of it. He
remembered especially one of his eminent uncles or relations
remarking that, as the work of so young a man, the oration was
singularly wanting in enthusiasm. The young man -- always in
search of education -- asked himself whether, setting rhetoric
aside, this absence of enthusiasm was a defect or a merit, since,
in either case, it was all that Harvard College taught, and all
that the hundred young men, whom he was trying to represent,
expressed. Another comment threw more light on the effect of the
college education. One of the elderly gentlemen noticed the
orator's "perfect self-possession." Self-possession indeed! If
Harvard College gave nothing else, it gave calm.
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