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The cement that knits thy walls is tempered with associations and memories that are stronger than the parts they bind together!
Once again I saw the old guard-room, on the wall of which there hung for over forty years that noble motto, "Duty is the sublimest word in the English language," which was placed there by Colonel John P. Thomas, then Superintendent, upon the reopening in 1882, illustrating the guiding principle of his own life and intended by him to emblazon the pathway and illumine the spirit of every cadet with that fine sentiment attributed to the immortal Lee.[1]
I located the old lamp-room, where the room orderlies carried their glass lamps every morning to have them trimmed and filled.
I looked in the four different rooms that I occupied, and I thought of room-mates who are no more. How many here tonight have mourned over those lost room-mates and chums of their cadet days! As I think of them, so many are the struggling memories and contending fancies that rush thick upon the heart that I hardly know whether I address myself to the "dim shadows and dusky reminiscences that have passed away or to the more palpable forms of the real presence."
Fellow graduates! Let us in spirit gather around the old Citadel and garnish the urns of those dear fellows with the garlands of brotherly affection, and, as we journey into the vast confines of the past, let us not dismiss with haste the visions which flash and sparkle across our sky, but brood on them and draw out of the past genuine life for the present hour.
Proud as we are that we are the sons of this Academy, well may we say, with Byron in "Childe Harold":
And be the Spartan's epitaph on me:
"Sparta hath many a worthier son than he".
- ↑ In a paper entitled "The Forged Letter of Gen. Robert E. Lee," read before the Virginia State Bar Association in 1915, Prof. Charles A. Graves, of the Law School of the University of Virginia, presents additional evidence tending to prove that General Lee did not write the "Duty" Sentence: "Duty, then, is the sublimest word in our language."
