SANDERS THEATRE.At half past nine o'clock the whole upper balcony was occupied by ladies for whom it had been reserved. At ten minutes past ten there was a sudden commotion, when Mr. Charles Reed, marshal, led Mrs. President Cleveland in from the north door to a seat between Mrs. President Eliot and Mrs. Secretary Endicott. Next to them in turn sat Mrs. Robinson and Mrs. Mayor O'Brien. Cols. Stearns and Wallace presented Mrs. Cleveland with some choice flowers amidst great applause. At 10.30 a loud peal of applause greeted Dr. Holmes as he mounted the platform, and a few minutes later President Eliot entered at the head of the procession. As the most honored guest of the day, President Cleveland, entered, he was welcomed with great enthusiasm. In a few minutes the platform was filled by the faculty and invited guests.

Back in the chancel sat the President and Fellows of the University. In the first row, beginning at the left, sat President Cleveland, Gov. Robinson, Gov.-elect Ames, Mr. George Bancroft, Mr. Lowell, the Hon. John Taylor, representative from Cambridge University, England, Prof. Creighton, of Emmanuel College, England, Judge Cooley, Dr. Holmes, J. D. Dana, Mark Hopkins and President Dwight. Other prominent guests on the platform were: Sir Lyon Playfair, Signor Lanciani, Mr. Winthrop, Presidents McCosh, Robinson, Adams, Gilman, Barnard, Bartlett, Hyde, Smith, Seelye, Pepper, Brainard, Carter, Angell and Buckham. Professors Allen, Brush, Baird, Smith, Leidy, Dana, Drisler, Chase, Hall, Gildersleeve and Hedge. Dean Gray, Judge Brigham, Dean Huntington, Father Byrne, Major Powell and Karl Schurz, and a body of instructors occupied the rest of the platform and the first few rows in the pit.

The graduates scrambled for seats like school boys, in their eagerness to hear and see all the exercises of this memorable day. Now one great rumbling and rushing resounded through the building, as the few fortunate undergraduates got a foot of standing room, and then a mighty hush fell on the assemblage, as the president of the alumni association arose and made a short introductory address, welcoming the guests and especially the president of our great republic. At this point the building fairly shook with the cheers and applause of all present.

The following was the warm and earnest prayer by Prof. F. G. Peabody.

PRAYER.Almighty God, who hast formed the generations of mankind into one family, a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it has passed. Put into our hearts to-day the spirit of prayer and praise and thanksgiving. We thank thee, Our Father, for the wonderful and increasing stream of blessings on which the life of our university has been born and in which we have found the depth and breadth of thy love and help. Grant that the faith of the fathers may not depart from the children; that this may be the age of integrity, of simplicity, and of reverence. We pray for our university; make her great through her influence; make her prosperous through her usefulness. We pray for all institutions of learning; that teachers may be taught of thee, that scholars may find that wisdom that comes from above. We pray for our country; as she has been able to withstand these evil days, so in the days of her greatness help her still to stand. We pray for those in authority over us, that they may be able wisely to rule others because their hearts are taught of thee. May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ abound among us here. May, the love of God our Father be the light that guides our way; and the communion of his Holy Spirit be the strength of our life as it has been through the past, so now, into the unknown future and evermore. Amen.

A beautiful rendition of Gounod's hymn, "Domine salvam fac," was given by the anniversary chorus, which occupied the gallery above the platform. Mr. James Russell Lowell arose to speak. The sound of welcome that greeted him was deafening, and it was some moments before he could commence his memorable oration. His words, of which we can only print extracts, held the audience spell-bound from beginning to end, and were interrupted more than once by applause and laughter.

LOWELL'S ORATION.It seems an odd anomaly that, while respect for age and deference to its opinions have diminished, and are still sensibly diminishing among us, the relish of antiquity should be more pungent, and the value set upon things, merely because they are old, should be greater in America than anywhere else. It is merely a sentimental relish, for ours is a new country, in more senses than one, and, like children, when they are fancying themselves this or that, we have to play very hard in order to believe that we are old. But we like the game none the worse, and multiply our anniversaries with honest zeal, as if we increased our centuries by the number of events, we could congratulate on having happened a hundred years ago. There is something of instinct in this, and it is a wholesome instinct, if it serve to quicken our consciousness of the forces that are gathered by duration and continuity: if it teach us that, ride fast and far as we may, we carry the past on our crupper, as immovably seated there as the black care of the Roman poet. The generations of men are braided inextricably together, and the very trick of our gait may be countless generations older than we.

Mr. Ruskin said the other day that he could not live in a country that had neither castles nor cathedra's, and doubtless men of imaginative temper find not only charm but inspiration in structures which nature has adopted as her foster children, and on which Time has laid his hand only in benediction. It is not their antiquity but its association with man that endows them with such sensitizing potency. Even the landscape sometimes bewitches us by this pathos of a human past, and the green pastures and golden slopes of England are sweeter both to the outward and to the inward eye, that the hand of man has immemorially cared for and caressed them. The nightingale sings with more prevailing passion in Greece that we first heard her from the thickets of a Euripidean chorus. For myself, I never felt the working of this spell so acutely as in those gray seclusions of the college quadrangles and cloisters at Oxford and Cambridge, conscious with venerable associations, and whose very stones seem happier for being there. The chapel pavement still whispered with the blessed feet of that long procession of saints and sages and scholars and poets, who are all gone into a world of light, but whose memhries seem to consecrate the soul from all ignoble companionship.

Are we to suppose that these memories were less dear and gracious to the Puritan scholars, at whose instigation this college was founded, than to that other Puritan who sang in the dim religious light, the long-drawn aisles and fretted vaults, which these memories recalled? Doubtless, all these things were present to their minds, but they were ready to forego them for the sake of that truth, whereof, as Milton says of himself, they were members incorporate. The pitiful contrast which they must have felt between the carven sanctuaries of learning they have left behind, and the wattled fold they were rearing here on the edge of the wilderness, is to me more than tenderly - it is almost sublimely - pathetic. When I think of their unpliable strength of purpose, their fidelity to their ideal, their faith in God and in themselves, I am inclined to say, with Donne, that

"We are scarce our fathers' shadows cast at noon."

Our past is well nigh desolate of aesthetic stimulus. We have none, or next to none, of these aids to the imagination of these coigns of vantage for the tendrils of memory or affection. Not one of our older buildings is venerable, or will ever become so. Time refuses to console them. They all look as though they meant business and nothing more. And it is precisely because this college meant business - business of the gravest import - and did that business as thoroughly as it might with no means that were not niggardly, except an abundant purpose to do its best, it is precisely for this that we have gathered to-day. We come back hither from the experiences of a richer life as the son who has prospered returns to the household of his youth, to find in its very homeliness a pulse, if not of deeper, certainly of fonder, emotion than any splendor could stir. "Dear old mother," we say, "how charming you look in your plain cap and the drab silk that has been turned again since we saw you! You were constantly forced to remind us that you could not afford to give us this and that which some other boys had but your discipline and diet were wholesome, and you sent us forth into the world with the sound constitutions and healthy appetites that are bred of simple fare. It is good for us to commemorate this homespun past of ours, good in these days of reckless and swaggering prosperity, to remind ourselves how poor our fathers were, and then we celebrate them because for themselves and their children they chose wisdom and understanding and the things that are of God rather than any other riches. This is our Founders' day, and we are come together to do honor to them all.

This two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of our college is not remarkable as commemorating any venerable length of days. There is hardly a country in Europe that cannot show us universities that were older than ours now is when ours was but a grammar school with Eaton as master. Bologna, Paris, Oxford, were already famous schools when Dante visited them 300 years ago. We are ancient, it is true, on our own continent, ancient even as compared with several German universities more renowned than we. It is not, then, primarily the longevity of our alma mater, upon which we are gathered here to congratulate her and each other. Kant says somewhere, that as the record of human transactions accumulate, the memory of man will have room only for those of supreme cosmopolitical importance. Can we claim for the birthday we are keeping a significance of so wide a bearing and so long a reach? If we may not do that, we may at first affirm confidently that the event it records and emphasizes is second in real import to none that has happened in this western hemisphere. The material growth of the colonies would have brought about their political separation from the mother country in the fulness of time, without that stain of blood which unhappily keeps its own memory green so long. But the founding of the first English college here was what saved New England from becoming a mere geographical expression. It did more, for it insured, and I believe was meant to insure, our intellectual independence of the old world.