We are very apt in this part of the world to trace every thing back to the "Mayflower," and there is no small reason for it now, when we consider how signal a mark our great mother University on the Cam has put upon this region about Boston harbor and its affluents. One of the first expeditions which the Pilgrims at Plymouth sent out, was one by boat under command of Miles Standish to explore the waters of Massachusetts Bay, as Boston harbor was then called. As they passed the islands, which then as now stand watch and ward over the entrance of this estuary of the Charles, they bestowed upon those islands a name which they still bear, that of the Brewsters, after their Elder, William Brewster, who had been a scholar of Peterhouse in the great university in England. A year or two later, when that solitary Englishman - how he came, when and whence, we are at a loss to know - built his hut on the Shawmut peninsula, not far from where Louisburg Square now is in Boston, the old Cambridge planted here another of her sons, who had fled, as he said, from the Lords bishops, and was destined to fly once again from the Lords brethren, - for William Blackstone was not only a son of that great University, but he had taken his honors at the hands of our immediate parent, Emmanuel College. Then again a few years later, when he welcomed the great immigration under John Winthrop, it was a child of Trinity that accepted the hermit's invitation, so that in this way, as it were, the great English University became sponsor at the founding of the New England Boston.

It is a striking fact that during the ten years or so following the coming of Winthrop, the two great English Universities sent into this wilderness fully a hundred of their best men, to strengthen the purpose and tone the spirit of the new settlement. It is not too much to say that in the history of colonization, ancient or modern, never before and never again has learning ever entered so deeply into the foundations of a people; nor is it too much to say that never in New England have learned men been so large a proportion of her population as in those formative years of this portion of the American people. And who were these men, the larger part of whom were from Cambridge, and of whom at least a score were from Emmanuel? There was Simon Bradstreet, destined to span the two charter-periods of New England, and to be the veteran around whom the old-charter men rallied after the deposition of Andros. There was John Cotton, another son of Emmanuel, and what would early Boston have been without him and John Wilson, the leaders of its first church, - Cotton of Lincolnshire, bringing here the saintly memories of Botolph's town, and Wilson, the earliest of the Boston ministers? How much would our own college history have lost had we been without Dunster and Chauncy, our earliest presidents? And what did the saintly grace of the great Apostle to the Indians, John Eliot, give to our Massachusetts history, for without him we should have lost that singular example of a man who may be said to have created a language, certainly in its literary form, of which the monument of his patience and erudition, and the proof of how a language may die, stands to-day in the score copies or more which have come down to us of the Indian Bible. What would the first gathering of the church here in Cambridge have been without the saintly Thomas Hooker, who led his flock through the wilderness to lay the foundations of another State on the lower Connecticut? What would our good friend, Dr. McKenzie, be, if he were debarred tracing his professional lineage back to Thomas Shepard? There too was Nathaniel Ward, who framed for the young Colony its "Body of Liberties," and who held up to their gaze some of their foibles in his "Simple Cobbler of Agawam?" What a void in the history of toleration would exist if Roger Williams with his doctrine of Soul-liberty, as he called it, had not passed, for the good of both, I suspect, from the bay of the Massachusetts to that of the Narragansetts? These were but few of the spirits who were transplanted from the banks of the Cam to the neighborhood of the Charles, and fairest among them all, the most fortunate character that ever passed into our earlier American history, John Harvard, that son of Emmanuel, who is foremost in our minds in these festival days.

And who was John Harvard? We knew very little of his history a few years ago, and notwithstanding the labors of devoted antiquaries we now know little more than what was the line of his ancestry and how he acquired a fortune, which for the early days of the Colony was considerable, and will help account, together with his private character, for the honorable way in which the early records of Charlestown show that he was received here. Let us go back to 1605 and to Stratford-upon-Avon - Shakespeare's Stratford. We may stretch a point in trying to associate together the name of William Shakespeare, the first name in English literature, with that of John Harvard, the most august one in the history of American education. We know that at this very time William Shakespeare had finished his career as an actor in London, and giving himself to the writing of plays, had eclipsed everybody. He was longing to acquire the competence that would allow him to retire to his native town, and was in a fair way to do it. Aubrey tells us he was in the habit of making a yearly sojourn among his old neighbors at Stratford, and we know that he was buying land there, adding to his acres almost with every visit, raising crops as an amateur farmer, and even entering a suit against one Philip Rogers because he had not paid the ambitious farmer for some grain which had been sold to him. This Philip Rogers was very likely the kinsman of the fair Katharine Rogers, whom Shakespeare might have seen before the altar in the parish church of Stratford, one morning in 1605, when her father, a substantial burgher of the town, gave her away to young Robert Harvard, of Southwark. Who knows but that the poet, just then at work upon his Lear, may have stood in the crowd of friends about that altar and have heard the sweet voice of Katharine Rogers repeat her vows; who knows but, on his return to his desk, Shakespeare bore with him a reminiscence of that sweet voice, and of that young bride, destined to become in more senses than one, the alma mater of the yet-undreamt-of College in the wilderness; who knows but that the vision of that altar and its vows was in his mind, when he wrote those words of his description of Cordelia, -

"She had a voice ever soft, gentle and low - An excellent thing in woman!"

and if there is any truth in the proverb that the smell of the bullock's blood is apt to beget a savagery in the slayer, the sweet voice of our Katharine may not have been without avail in mollifying the asperities of temper - if he had any - in that young Surrey butcher, Robert Harvard.

Two years later our John Harvard sprang from this marriage, and he was eighteen when the plague swept off his father and some brothers and sisters. With some money, which his father's will had given him, he entered a student, at Emmanuel in 1627, and evidently, from the position that he took there, the butcher's money achieved for him a certain social advantage. He took his bachelor's degree in 1631 and his master's in 1634, and the signatures which he left on each of these occasions on the records of the University and that solitary volume of the library, which dying he left to the college here, are the only objects in existence which may be supposed to have received the impress of his gentle hand.

And during all this period of his college career where was Katharine, his mother! Upon the death of the butcher, from whom she received her portion, she married in due time a grocer, who, dying, left his property to swell the butcher's. She again married a cooper, and his moderate fortune was added to that of the butcher and the grocer, and so when Katharine, the much-husbanded, died, a year after her son took his master's degree, she had a considerable fortune to leave to her two sons, John and Thomas, and the latter son dying, it all came to John Harvard.

The young clergyman - for it would seem that he was in orders, and his association with Emmanuel, the puritan seed-plot, had given a bent to his theological views - soon married Ann Sadler and drawn by those sympathies, we may well believe, which took Cotton and the other Emmanuel men to the New World, he is found before long in the New England Charlestown, where he built a house, which Judge Sewall tells us of, and which seems to have stood till the fire which swept the slopes of that peninsula during the battle of Bunker Hill, levelled it to the soil.

A devastating breath more merciless than that of the flames, the rough and searching blasts of our Boston east winds, found or developed in that young and devoted life the seeds of consumption, and before he had time to impress his character upon the community in which he had cast his lot, death took him off in the latter part of 1638. You know that by a will he had rendered it possible for the purpose of the infant Colony, which had been recorded two years before, to be carried out, - a will which no man has told us he had ever seen, but whose provisions have come down to us, in the grateful comment of his friends and of those of the college. And so the figure of John Harvard rises before us to-day, doubly sacred, very likely for the scant knowledge which we have of him, lofty and august in the ideal which he represents, the gift of the great University on the Cam to this other great University of the Charles!