Page 184 - YB1902

Oration: "Cbe Inborn 5parll. IP A'I.I. ~ !miHEN rosy-fingered Aurora rolled hack the curtain of continual 1m! night; when time was still in its infancy and poor little Adam was running around all by himself; long ere evolution had begun to raise men to a perfect mankind, the omniscient providential Di- vinity-the omnipotent Creator-foresaw the necessity of instilling into the mind of man that ,;inborn spark" upon which many future generations of college orators might speak with fervor, which should resound from our Lugdummian rostrum to the gcm-bestuddcd canopy above, and with such eloquence as would make the silver-tongued nestor, from whose lips flowed honeyed words, turn green with envy. How many times has the story of this spark resounded, like the clarion notes of the trump of heaven, through the illusive ether which surrounds this universal habitation, where exterual tuan spreads for his little day his fleecy sails which he must furl as he enters at life's sunset the port which is the goal of mortality? How many are its services? It is at once the cause of war and peace, of love and hatred, of good and evil. It is a useful some- thing upon which the wisdom of the college Senior depends to mystify the audience and to give the judge new views. It has carried many a ship- wrecked orator, with shattered sails and rudder lost, floating clown the stream 01 Time, in safety past the Scylla of the necessity of writing some- thing and the Charybdis of failure. Even the wading Georgie Washington is drawn from the sea of conflict to the shore of the hearts of his country- men by the mightiness of his inborn spark of patriotism. And the Oe111os_ theues of Hope sails proudly into port because her captain is possessed of an inbr-edspark of Democracy. Even the Renaissance is made iridescent by a spark or genius. But as I look down into the dim corridors of 'Time,through which I can barely discern Old Father himself running with his hoary locks, his gleaming scythe and his hour glass so dreadful to sinful man, and his COI11- panion is a day when there shall be no more sparks of genius, of patriotism inbred with the Fijian mind; when Webster's inborn eloquence shall have mingled its ashes with the decay of inborn morality, of inborn brute in- 162