Part 1 (2/2)
Their positive contribution cannot be suht in the s, where it modestly evades the public eye, in the academic formalities of presidents' reports and the journalistic naivete of college periodicals; in the diaries of early graduates; in newspaper clippings and azine ”write-ups”; in historical sketches to commemorate the decennial or the quarter-century; and from the lips of the pioneers,--teacher and student For, in the words of the graduate thesis, ”we are still in the period of the sources”
The would-be historian of a woe to-day is in much the same relation to her material as the Venerable Bede was to his when he set out to write his Ecclesiastical History The thought brings us its own inspiration If we sift our miracles with aswell We shall discover, as, that in addition to the coether exert, each one also brings to bear upon our educational problems her individual experience and ideals Wellesley, for example, with her women-presidents, and the heads of her departments all women but three,--the professors of Music, Education, and French,--has her peculiar testi the administrative and executive powers of woanization
This is why a general history of the h of value, cannot tell us all we need to know, since of necessity it approaches the subject froes must speak as individuals; each one ht, experimental days are definitely past--except in the sense in which all education, alike for men and women, is perennially an experiinations of college girls one hundred, two hundred, five hundred years hence, the women ere the experiment and who lived the romance must write it down
For Wellesley in particular this consciousness of standing at the threshold of a new epoch is especially poignant Inevitably those forty years before the fire of 1914 will go down in her history as a period apart Already for her freshe hall is a mythical labyrinth of memory and custom to which they have no clue New happiness will come to the hill above the lake, new beauty will crown it, new memories will hallow it, but--they will all be new And if the coenerations of students are to realize that the new Wellesley is what she is because her ideals, though purged as by fire, are still the old ideals; if they are to understand the continuity of Wellesley's tradition, ho have coh the fire must tell them the story
II
On Wednesday, Nove the fire-scarred ruins at the extree Hall unearthed a buried treasure To the ordinary treasure seeker it would have been a thing of little worth,--a rough bowlder of irregular shape and commonplace proportions,--but Wellesley eyes saw the symbol It was the first stone laid in the foundations of Wellesley College There was no cereuests Mr and Mrs Henry Fowle Durant caust 18, 1871, was the day--and with the help of the workmen set the stone in place
A month later, on the afternoon of Thursday, September 14, 1871, the corner stone was laid, by Mrs Durant, at the northwest corner of the building, under the dining-rooh the growth and expansion of all the years, wo of Wellesley
In Septeuests invited, but at the laying of the corner stone there was a siiven a Bible, by Mr Durant, and a Bible was placed in the corner stone On December 18, 1914, this stone was uncovered, and the Bible was found in a tin box in a hollow of the stone
As e had scattered for the Christathered about the place where, forty-three years before, Mrs Durant had laid the stone
Mrs Durant was too ill to be present, but her cousin, Miss Fannie Massie, lifted the tin box out of its hollow and handed it to President Pendleton who opened the Bible and read aloud the inscription:
”This building is humbly dedicated to our Heavenly Father with the hope and prayer that Hein this institution; that His word ht here; and that He will use it as aprecious souls to the Lord Jesus Christ”
There followed, also in Mrs Durant's handwriting, two passages from the Scriptures: II Chronicles, 29: 11-16, and the phrase from the one hundred twenty-seventh Psalm: ”Except the Lord build the house they labor in vain that build it”
This stone is now the corner stone of the new building which rises on College Hill, and another, the keystone of the arch above the north door of old College Hall, will be set above the doorway of the new adraven IHS
will daily remind those who pass beneath it of Wellesley's unbroken tradition of Christian scholarshi+p and service
But we o back to the days before one stone was laid upon another, if we are to begin at the beginning of Wellesley's story
It was in 1855, the year after his e, then a part of Needham, and planned to make the place his summer home Every one who knew hiave that passion free play when he chose, all unwittingly, the future site for his college There is no fairer region around Boston than this wooded, hilly country near Natick--”the place of hills”--with its little lakes, its tranquil, winding river, its hallowed memories of John Eliot and his Christian Indian chieftains, Waban and Pegan, its treasured literary associations with Harriet Beecher Stowe Chief Waban gave his naan Hill, froirls have looked out over the blue distances of Massachusetts, Chief Pegan's efficient and tis without heels, because ”He handsome foot, and he shapes it hisself”; and Natick is the Old Town of Mrs Stowe's ”Old Town Folks”
In those first years after they began to spend their summers at Wellesley, the fareenhouse, but Mr Durant meant to build his new house on the hill above the lake, or on the site of Stone Hall, and to found a great estate for his little son Froht more land; he laid out avenues and planted them with trees; and then, the little boy for whom all this joy and beauty were destined fell ill of diphtheria and died, July 3, 1863, after a short illness
The effect upon the grief-stricken father was startling, and to many who knew him and more who did not, it was incoy of one of his contemporaries, he had ”avoided the snares of infidelity” hitherto, but his religion had been of a conventional type During the child's illness he underwent an old-fashi+oned religious conversion The reater men, and the world has always looked askance Boston in 1863, and later, was no exception
Mr Durant's career as a lawyer had been brilliant and worldly; he had rarely lost a case In an article on ”Anglo-American Memories”
which appeared in the New York Tribune in 1909, he is described as having ”a powerful head, chiseled features, black hair, which he wore rather long, an olive cos of wrath and scorn and irony; then suddenly the soft rays of sweetness and persuasion for the jury He could coax, intimidate, terrify; and his questions cut like knives”
The author of ”Bench and Bar in Massachusetts”, as in college with hi the five years of his practice at the Middlesex Bar he underwent such an initiation into the profession as no other county could furnish Shrewdness, energy, resource, strong nerves and mental ladiators of this bar were accustomed to inflict With the lessons learned at the Middlesex Bar he removed to Boston in 1847, where he became associated with the Honorable Joseph Bell, the brother-in-law of Rufus Choate, and began a career alement of cases in court was artistic So well taken were the preliminary steps, so deeply laid was the foundation, so complete and comprehensive was the preparation of evidence and so adroitly was it brought out, so carefully studied and understood were the characters of jurors,--with their whims and fancies and prejudices,--that he won verdict after verdict in the face of the ablest opponents and placed hieneral consent at the head of the jury lawyers of the Suffolk Bar” Adjectives less auous and more uncomplimentary than ”shreere also applied to hi his juries did not always call forth praise from his contemporaries In one of the newspaper obituaries at the tied with resorting to tricks unbeconity of a lawyer,” but the writer adds that it is an open question if soht not have been paralleled by the practices of some of the ablest of British and Irish barristers Both in law and in business--for he had important commercial interests--he had prospered He was rich and a h critical, had not found it unnatural that he should make himself talked about in his conduct of jury trials; but the conspicuousness of his conversion was of another sort: it offended against good taste, and incurred for him the suspicion of hypocrisy
For, with that ardor and impetuosity which seem always to have made half measures impossible to him, Mr Durant declared that so far as he was concerned, the Law and the Gospel were irreconcilable, and gave up his legal practice A case which he had already undertaken for Edward Everett, and fro to release him, is said to be the last one he conducted; and he pleaded in public for the last ti at the State House in Boston, soht to confer degrees, a privilege which had not been specifically included in the original charter
His zeal in conducting religious s also offended conventional people It was unusual, and therefore unsuitable, for a lay friars had established no precedent in Boston of the 'sixties and 'seventies, and indeed Mr Durant's evangelical protestantisht not have relished the parallel Boston seems, for the most part, to have averted its eyes from the spectacle of the brilliant, possibly unscrupulous, so souls to Christ But he did bring them We are told that ”The halls and churches where he spoke were crowded The training and experience which had e and jury, nohen he was fired with zeal for Christ's cause, made him almost irresistible as a preacher Very many were led by him to confess the Christian faith Henry Wilson, then senator, afterwards vice president, was as onderful and far-reaching” We are assured that he ”would go nowhere unless the Evangelical Christians of the place united in an invitation and the ministers were ready to cooperate” But the whole affair was of course intensely distasteful to unemotional people; the very fact that a ued his instability; and it is unquestionably true that Boston's attitude toward Mr Durant was reflected for e which he founded
But over against this picture we can set another, h possibly not raduates of Wellesley and the early teachers write of Mr Durant, they dip their pens in honey and sunshi+ne The result is radiant, fiery even, but unconvincingly archangelic We see hiray, with a gray felt hat, the briray hair slightly curling at the ends; the fine, clear-cut features, the piercing dark eyes, the ht de power of half a dozen ordinary persons and everything received his attention He took the greatest pride and delight in s as beautiful as possible” Or he is described as ”A slight entle and wise as a good man's are, and with a halo of wavy silver hair His step was alert, his whole for the college, in chapel, one Septe of 1876, on the supre in conclusion all ould venture upon Hadley's Grammar as the first thorny stretch toward that celestial mountain peak, to rise” It is Professor Katharine Lee Bates, writing in 1892, who gives us the picture: ”My next neighbor, a valorous little mortal, now a member of the Smore efficacious still Perhaps a dozen of us freshmen, all told, filed into Professor Horton's recitation rooorous e notice was theit a required study for the senior class of the year
'79 grappled with biology, '80 had a senior diet of geology and astrono women, as to his juries in earlier days, he could use words ”that burned and cut like the lash of a scourge,” and it is evident that they feared ”the sos of his eyes”