try might one day look to them for support, and they would recollect that the first and noblest of all duties was to serve that country, and if necessary to devote their lives in her cause.”[1] The effect was electrical. This was not the droning, musty stuff they had heard here so often. This was fierce reality, this was Life—perhaps even Death. Dulce et decorum… Then and there many a youthful heart received the inspiration which, when the hour soon came, as foretold by the speaker, was to give the sons of Harvard an honored place in the times that tried men’s souls.
Architecturally, Bernard had chosen in Holden Chapel an excellent meeting-place; for the long rows of benches, with the gangway between them, and with the speaker’s desk at the upper end, gave a surprisingly accurate imitation, in little, of the House of Commons itself. This similitude to the home of their oppressors, all the same, was the last thing to recommend it to the Yankee representatives. Practically, too, they found it uncomfortable, and in a few days they requested of the Corporation “the use of the new chapel during their session in the College, on account of some inconveniences which attend their sitting in the old one.” The Corporation consented, and ordered that while the House occupied the new chapel, “prayers be attended in the old, morning and evening.”
- ↑ Tudor, Life of James Otis, 355.
