ADDRESS.

ASSOCIATES! ALUMNI OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA:

WE meet in these venerated halls to recall the cherished associations of our youthful days. We are pleased to acknowledge, with grateful recollection, a debt here first incurred, which subsequent experience has served only to augment. We come to bear our testimony to the infinite usefulness of that wider scope of instruction in science, in letters, and in moral and intellectual cultivation, which we gained in the days here passed. We desire to offer, if it be of value, our aid in sustaining and promoting the welfare and fame of an Institution, to which we are bound by a sympathy never extinguished in a generous heart. The air around us breathes tranquillity and peace. The associations of the place, the scene, and the object of our assemblage, excite emotions and revive remembrances tinctured by none of those shadows which the hopes, the fears, the chances, and the toils attendant upon the race of life we have been obliged to run, may have cast upon our pathway. We have been widely separated by accident and necessity, and the scarce perceptible influences of passing years. Our pursuits have diverged farther and farther into the ever-varying

channels, whither the prospects of fortune and fame have led us; or the allurements of passion and ambition; or the current of fortune, good or bad, that could not be, or has not been, resisted. But to this spot we come-are pleased and happy to come -with a spirit as unworldly as that in which the chosen people came trooping, year by year, to their holy mountain, and to the brook that flowed fast by the oracle of God. Nothing allures us but the love of letters. No associations are revived but those of rivalry and toil in the search of knowledge and truth. Tully, in the most busy periods of his active life-when apparently absorbed by the labors of that forum, to which he was forever called by those who believed that fortune, and even life, were to be rescued from every peril by the magic of his tongue; when engrossed by the ceaseless duties of the highest public stations, and annoyed with the rivalries of political intrigue-twice revisited the scenes, far distant from Rome, where in youth he had studied the lessons that prepared his bright career. Twice did he seek, with a fond heart, the little isle of Rhodes, a rock scarce seen in the blue waters of the Mediterranean, but of world-wide fame from the schools in which his own unrivalled eloquence was trained. Twice did he repair to Athens, where he had imbibed the spirit of that pure philosophy which he transplanted and made to flourish in the ruder soil of imperious Rome-where he had revolved,

in groves and porches once trodden by Plato, those thoughts that taught him there was nothing so strongly to be coveted as active virtue and deserved esteem, for which suffering, and exile, and death. were to be cheerfully encountered-where, with an eye that seemed almost to have caught some rays of a diviner light, soon to be revealed, he pierced the darkness that shrouded the life beyond the grave; and recognized, with confident belief, the unity, the design, the benevolence, and the providence of God, "by whom and from whom all things were." As Tully sought and lingered at those scenes; and in his letters and his converse recurred to them as objects which he "deeply loved;" so do we come hither, in the strong assurance that we can indulge no emotions more natural and just than those which fill the heart, when they who have been long separated, meet voluntarily on the spot, where, in by-gone days, they prepared themselves for the struggle and duties of life.

To say that I am honored in being chosen to express these feelings, for those who love to remember they were nurtured in these halls, is to do less than justice to the spirit with which I have come to the performance of my pleasing duty. I am carried back to the day when, surrounded by my young companions, I here bade adieu, not without sorrow, to those who had led us, not more as guides than friends, to the opening portals of busy life. Un