CHAPTER XI

THE OPENING OF THE UNIVERSITY

T the opening of the university, Morrill Hall stood alone upon the brow of a hill in an

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open field. There was no street across the university grounds, where Central Avenue now runs, and no bridge spanning Cascadilla Creek. The crowds of people ascended the hill through the cemetery, or wound along the dusty way which passed the grounds of the present McGraw-Fiske house; or the bolder followed the bank of the creek beyond Cascadilla, to a place just north of the site of the present iron bridge, where, by climbing half-way down the bank, they reached the top of a ladder which they descended; they then crossed the stream upon two or three boards supported loosely upon timbers, and climbing the opposite bank by a similar ladder, scrambled to the top through brushwood and forest until they reached the open orchard north of the present lodge of the Psi Upsilon fraternity. They then followed the line of a rambling stone wall which marked the boundary of the university property to the west, along the crest of the ridge in front of the present row of professors' cottages on Central Avenue. Two ravines of considerable depth had to be crossed to reach the eminence where the library building now stands, and where the bells had been mounted on a rough framework of timber.

We have been permitted to use the accompanying contemporary account of the inauguration of the university, by George William Curtis, which, however, veils his own graceful participation in that event.

"In the very height of the presidential campaign, one bright autumn morning was hailed in the pleasant town of Ithaca, in New York, with ringing bells and thundering cannon, but for no political celebration whatever. Had the little town, dreaming upon the shore of the lake so long, suddenly resolved that it would justify the classic name with which SurveyorGeneral De Witt blessed its beginning, and as old Ithaca produced a wise man, so the new should produce wise men? The surveyor who so liberally diffused so Greek and Roman a system of names through the hapless wilderness of Central New York half a century ago, would have smiled with delight to see the town decorated through all its broad and cheerful streets with the yellow and red of autumn, and ringing its bells of joy because a university was to open its gates that day. But old Paris, Salamanca and Bologna, Salerno and Padua, Göttingen and Oxford and Cambridge would surely have failed to recognize a sister could they have looked into Ithaca. Indeed they would have felt plucked by the beard, and yet they would have seen only their fair, legitimate descendant.

"The hotels and the streets and the private houses were evidently full of strangers. Around the solid brick building, over the entrance of which was written The Cornell Library,' there was a moving crowd, and a throng of young men poured in and out at the door, and loitered, vaguely expectant, upon the steps. By ten o'clock in the morning there were two or three hundred young men answering to a roll-call at a side door, and the hall above was filled with the citizens. Presently the young men pressed in, and a procession entered the hall and ascended the platform. Prayer and music followed, and then a tall man, spare, yet of a rugged frame and slightly stooping, his whole aspect marking an indomitable will, stood up and read a brief,

simple, clear, and noble address. It said modestly that this was but the beginning of an institution of learning for those upon whom fortune had omitted to smile; an institution in which any person could acquire any instruction in any branch of knowledge, and in which every branch should be equally honorable. Every word hit the mark, and the long and sincere applause that followed the close of the little speech showed how fully every word had been weighed and how truly interpreted. But the face and voice of the speaker were unchanged throughout. Those who best knew what he had done and what he was doing, knew with what sublime but wholly silent enthusiasm he had devoted his life and all his powers to the work. But the stranger saw only a sad, reserved earnestness, and gazed with interest at a man whose story will long be told with gratitude and admiration."

After a graceful and felicitous speech from the lieutenant-governor of the state, an ex-officio trustee, the president of the new university arose to deliver his inaugural address. Of a most winning presence, modest, candid, refined, he proceeded to sketch the whole design and hope of the university with an intelligence and fervor that were captivating. It was the discourse of a practical thinker, of a man remarkably gifted for his responsible and difficult duty, who plainly saw the demand of the country and of the time in education, and who with sincere reverence for the fathers was still wise enough to know that wisdom did not die with them. But when he came to speak of the man who had begun the work and who had just spoken, when he paused to deny the false charges that had been busily and widely made, the pause was long, the heart could not stay for the measured delay of words, and the eloquent emotion consumed the slander as a white heat touches a withered leaf. It was a noble