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Show How Phillips Wrote Oration Phi Beta Kappa Address at Harvard in 1881 Composed While He Lay Stretched Upon a Sofa Couch. Accompanied by my friend of other 'days, the late John Boyle O'Reilly, the poet, I was walking through Essex Es-sex street, Boston, one afternoon in the summer of 1SS2 when my attention atten-tion was attracted to a face in the window of a typical how-windowed Boston home. It was a lace like that of a graven image, perfectly motionless, motion-less, and there was an expression of severe dignity, and yet of perlect repose re-pose upon it. I turned to Mr. O'Reilly. "That looks like Wendell Phillips," I said. "It looks like Wendell Phillips because be-cause it is Wendell Phillips," Mr. O'Reilly replied. "That is his Boston home. Here he has lived for many years, resisting the Inevitable march of business, which is soon to swallow and neighboring streets. "Mr. Phillips," Mr. O'Reilly went on, "is very fond of sitting in that window. Sometimes he occupies his chair there for hours, seeming scarcely scarce-ly to move, and I have been told that frequently when in that perfect repose he writes mentally portions of an oration ora-tion or address. "But even more interesting to me was the manner In which Mr. Phillips wrote his now famous Phi Beta Kappa oration, 'The Scholar in a Republic,' Repub-lic,' delivered last year at the centennial centen-nial anniversary of the Phi Beta Kappa Kap-pa society at Harvard. You may recall that the address was one that stung. He spoke for civil and religious liberty," lib-erty," and he made a bitter accusation against men of scholarship who took bo little part in public affairs, and who when they did, usually sided with the aristocratic and the rich. "Well, in the room at the rear of the one In which you saw Mr. Phillips sitting at his window a moment ago there is a sofa couch. After Mr. Phillips Phil-lips had accepted the invitation to address ad-dress the Harvard Phi Beta society, he shut himself up In his room, as I have been told, for three or four days, and most of the time he lay stretched out upon that sofa couch. Occasionally, Occasion-ally, some member of the household chancing to pass through the room, would see his lips moving, but they would hear no sound. They knew that he was writing his oration for the Phi Beta Kappa anniversary celebration cele-bration writing it menially, although I should add, that one of my friends Is of the opinion that the address thus composed was not the one delivered to the Harvard students and alumni, but was another one. "But as 1 have the story, at the end of the three or four days Mr. Phillips arose from the sofa, which he had not left except. to take his meals, or his night's sleep or to perform some de- voted service for his Invalid wife, and he arose with the address completed. Yet he had not put pen to paper; he had not a scrap of memorandum of what he had planned to say. But the address every word of it was indelibly indeli-bly printed upon the tablets of his mind, so that he read it clearly and without error, when he came to deliver de-liver it, with his mind's eye. Consequently, Conse-quently, at no time that he was delivering deliv-ering that superb and classic oration did he run any danger of forgetting any portion of it a great danger that is constantly before anyone who writes out an address on paper and then commits it to memory." "But what you have said does not explain Mr. Phillips' wonderful, melodious melo-dious voice, his perfectly distinct enunciation, and his apparent conversational conver-sational tone," 1 said. "Ah," answered Mr. O'Reilly, "God gave him that exquisite vocal organ for public speaking, and he was ever mentally practising enunciation, and the lurking power that is in the ap parently uncontemplated gesture." (Copyright, 1910, by E. J. Edwards.) |