George F. Hoar: “These gifts are the highest ornaments of a noble and beautiful character; they are surer guides to success and loftier…”

We are here in the sweet silence of a summer morning, eighteen hundred years after such a scene, and able mentally to catch some glimpse of it; some echo of the storm that has left behind it so ineffaceable a mark.

We bring you a more costly and precious gift than any jewel or diadem, though it came from an Emperor's treasury.

We bring you the heart's love of Boston where you were born, and Worcester where you took the early vows you have kept so well; of Massachusetts who knows she has no worthier son, and of the great and free country to whom you have taught…

If there is anything more beautiful than a moonlight summer night in the heart of the Forest of Dean, it is its transformation into a summer morning, with the sparkle of dew on the grass, and the sunrise on the trees; with the music of…