VALEDICTION

Delivered at the Memorial Service in Rollins Chapel, March i, in Remembranceof the Group of Students Who Died February 25

TODAY Dartmouth stands grief-stricken and shocked in the presence of tragedy greater than she has ever known. We are stunned by the extent of loss and we are heart-sore in the multiplication of sorrows. We meet in remembrance of com- panions whose friendships we held dear. We crave the opportunity of expressing our sympathies with those in grief-stricken homes.

If the form of this service were to be devised by those whom we commemorate and with whom but little time ago we crossed the College Green or played or worked, no eulogies would be included. But I think that they would assent, though with shy embarrassment, to our recalling that they were men of a type whose normal lives, whose natural characteristics, whose aspiration, and whose promise of future achievement, have been significant in their college generation of its men of potentiality. Others than they may and will have like qualities, but the number of such in this generation will always be the less because these men can no longer be included.

It is a common phenomenon that occasionally a day of unusual atmospheric effects or of unusual color combinations will emphasize the attributes of a familiar landscape. Yet perhaps from the very fact of familiarity these may have been hitherto almost unnoticed. On some such a day, because of the altered interplay of light and dark, there is the creation of new mysteries of shadowed depths and we experience a sudden revelation of values which we had either forgotten or had never come to realize.

In some such way, at a time like this, the College is most effectively sheered of its affectations,—its petty poses and its specious sophistries. We see life in its great dimensions rather than in its minor littlenesses. We look at life objectively in terms of our relations to others rather than subjectively in demands upon others that they adapt themselves to us. We begin to sense that rationalism is not all and that there is no harder or colder form of materialism than the materialism of pure intellect untempered by influence of heart and soul. We begin to understand assertions like that of Aubrey L. Moore, the brilliant young Engish essayist, that "human nature claims to e both religious and rational. And the life which is not both is neither."

Above all, perhaps, we get impression of the value of time and that earthly life is not something upon which we are going to enter at a later time but that we are living it now. We gain some comprehension of the fact that certain things may be veritable fact even if we cannot understand them, and thereby we approach the essence of belief and faith. We do not know whence life came and it is folly to assume because we do not know the manner of its continuance that it does not go on.

One thing, however, no one can doubt, and that is that we have life now and that earthly existence has definite limitations. It is in no spirit of morbid emphasis that you or I or another should recognize that just as for these men, in whose memory this service is held, there was a last day of earthly life which they could not foresee, so there may be for each one of us.

Long years ago the Preacher said: "If the tree fall toward the south, or toward the north, in the place where the tree falleth, there it shall be."

We know how the trees of life fell for these our college mates, and we can guess how little, if at all, they could wish to alter their positions.

But as with shocked sensibilities we look at college life from the purple shadows of these days, shall we not examine ourselves so that when the trees of our own lives shall fall, and there shall be, they may lie where they have fallen without regret and without reproach! Dr. Osier, distinguished as a scientist, widely respected as a physician, and great as a human being, has said that the rule of conduct for mankind should be that we live our lives in day-tight compartments, living for the day only and for the day's work without vain regrets for the past and without anxious apprehension about the future. In substantiation of his own experience and conclusion he quotes Carlyle: "Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand."

Men of the College, think of these things with me! And if today and tomorrow and through days to come we live in our days' compartments, making each day's record as we would like to have typical of the record of our lives as a whole, we shall have raised a monument to high heaven to these men to whom themselves was given no privilege of numbering their own days.

HARDLY more than three months from now will come the Commencement Sunday on which we say Godspeed to the graduating seniors. Four of these men in memory of whom we meet today would have been sitting at that time in these pews with you, their fellows. Then to them, and in subsequent years to the others, as President of the College I should have spoken of the happiness of having had them with us and of the appreciation Dartmouth had for what they had been and for what they had done. That I do now in direct address!

AMERICO S. DEMASI WILLIAM S. FULLERTON JOHN J. GRIFFIN ALFRED H. MOLDENKE EDWARD F. MOLDENKE WILMOT H. SCHOOLEY WILLIAM M. SMITH JR. HAROLD B. WATSON EDWARD N. WENTWORTH JR.

in view of your records and of your capabilities, in consideration of the friends who knew you and held you in affection, in recognition of the qualities of high promise in you upon which this college reckoned for fulfillment of its purposes, I rejoice in the membership in this college which has been yours and I proclaim with pride the membership which is yours for all time within the Dartmouth fellowship. You whom we have loved long since and lost awhile, as we part at these crossroads,Hail and farewell!