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النشر الإلكتروني

Narrative and Colloquial

Selections

the Inaugural Address delivered at Tufts College. Reprinted with the permission of President Capen. By ELMER HEWITT CAPEN.

IN

N considering the many instrumentalities through which an institution of the higher learning rise to its greatest efficiency, all writers who have given profound attention to the subject agree in attaching great importance to Situation. It must be in a fair spot to which both nature and art have lent their charms. It must be retired, away from the bustle and confusion of the great world where the mind may freely give itself to undisturbed reflections. Yet it must be near some centre of life and trade, and especially does it need to feel the power of a higher intellectual life surging around it and ever lifting it to nobler and grander attainments. The image of Athens, which, for more than a thousand years, was the intellectual mistress of the civilized world, whose immortal teachers

"Still rule our spirits from their urns,"

rises before us in all her loveliness and beauty. We think how she, by her matchless climate, which fostered poetic dreams and made life seem like one long midsummer's day; by her indescribable atmosphere, which gave to the marbles of Praxiteles the richness and warmth of Titian's coloring, and relieved the severe angles of her temples, so that they seemed to be filled with a depth and softness of feeling unsurpassed by the most ornate of medieval cathedrals; by her contiguity to the sea and her relations to the mysterious East; by her commercial importance; by

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