Fifty Years Since Author:William Hooper Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ADDRESS BEFORE THE ALUMNI OF THE UNIVERSITY NORTH-CAROLINA. Brothers Of The Alumni— Literary Children Of One Alma Mater : We come together at this... more » annual festival, to salute and congratulate each other—to look back on the past and compare it with the present—to gratify an honest pride in contrasting the feeble and sickly infancy of our literary mother with her present vigorous maturity, and to breathe a common filial prayer that that vigorous maturity may long flourish, and not soon be succeeded by a languishing old age. Two years ago, I delivered, at another College, what I expected would be my final offering at the shrine of the muses; but since the committee, representing the public opinion, have not consented to give me a discharge from this mode of pay ing a debt of filial gratitude, I submit to their dictation, being glad to receive, in such appointment, their flattering attestation that they yet detect no mark of senility disqualifying me for appearing before a commencement audience, and especially the audience of 1859, so highly honored by the presence of the chief magistrate of the republic. I am proud to find, from two astronomical observations, that Chapel Hill lies right in the orbit of Jupiter and his satellites, and that the period of his revolution is about twelve years. I beg the professor of astronomy here to make this entry in his Ephe- meris, and to look out for the recurrence of the same phenomenon about 1871 ; if indeed, at that time, the head of this great republic be fitly symbolized by that glorious planet,and be not shivered, ere that cycle rolls around, by some disastrous ericas-Jon, into a score of name'.es asteroids. Mav heaven avert the omen! Had I said this at the city of Washington, and -were I some quarter of a century younge...« less