Personal Sketches and Tributes Schoolday Remembrances.
by John Greenleaf Whittier
To Rev. Charles Wingate, Hon. James H. Carleton, Thomas B. Garland,
Esq., Committee of Students of Haverhill Academy:
DEAR FRIENDS,--I was most agreeably surprised last evening by receiving
your carefully prepared and beautiful Haverhill Academy Album, containing
the photographs of a large number of my old friends and schoolmates. I
know of nothing which could have given me more pleasure. If the faces
represented are not so unlined and ruddy as those which greeted each
other at the old academy, on the pleasant summer mornings so long ago,
when life was before us, with its boundless horizon of possibilities,
yet, as I look over them, I see that, on the whole, Time has not been
hard with us, but has touched us gently. The hieroglyphics he has traced
upon us may, indeed, reveal something of the cares, trials, and sorrows
incident to humanity, but they also tell of generous endeavor, beneficent
labor, developed character, and the slow, sure victories of patience and
fortitude. I turn to them with the proud satisfaction of feeling that I
have been highly favored in my early companions, and that I have not been
disappointed in my school friendships. The two years spent at the
academy I have always reckoned among the happiest of my life, though I
have abundant reason for gratitude that, in the long, intervening years,
I have been blessed beyond my deserving.
It has been our privilege to live in an eventful period, and to witness
wonderful changes since we conned our lessons together. How little we
then dreamed of the steam car, electric telegraph, and telephone! We
studied the history and geography of a world only half explored. Our
country was an unsolved mystery. "The Great American Desert" was an
awful blank on our school maps. We have since passed through the
terrible ordeal of civil war, which has liberated enslaved millions, and
made the union of the States an established fact, and no longer a
doubtful theory. If life is to be measured not so much by years as by
thoughts, emotion, knowledge, action, and its opportunity of a free
exercise of all our powers and faculties, we may congratulate ourselves
upon really outliving the venerable patriarchs. For myself, I would not
exchange a decade of my own life for a century of the Middle Ages, or a
"cycle of Cathay."
Let me, gentlemen, return my heartiest thanks to you, and to all who have
interested themselves in the preparation of the Academy Album, and assure
you of my sincere wishes for your health and happiness.
