Obedient to this idea of leaving my successor a free hand, my wife and myself took a leisurely journey through England, France, and Italy, renewing old acquaintances and making new friends. Returning after a year, I settled down again in the university, hoping to complete the book for which I had been gathering materials and on which I had been working steadily for some years, when there came the greatest calamity of my life,--the loss of her who had been my main support during thirty years,--and work became for a time, an impossibility. Again I became a wanderer, going, in 1888, first to Scotland, and thence, being ordered by physicians to the East, went again through France and Italy, and extended the journey through Egypt, Greece and Turkey. Of the men and things which seemed most noteworthy to me at that period I speak in other chapters.
From the East I made my way leisurely to Paris, with considerable stops at Buda-Pesth, Vienna, Ulm, Munich Frankfort-on-the-Main, Paris, London, taking notes in libraries, besides collecting books and manuscripts.
Returning to the United States in the autumn of 1889, and settling down again in my old house at Cornell, I was invited to give courses of historical lectures at various American universities, especially one upon the ``Causes of the French Revolution,'' at Johns Hopkins, Columbian University in Washington, the University of Pennsylvania, Tulane University in New Orleans, and Stanford University in California. Excursions to these institutions opened a new epoch in my life; but of this I shall speak elsewhere.
During this period of something over fifteen years, Ihave been frequently summoned from these duties, which were especially agreeable to me--first, in 1892, as minister to Russia; next, in 1896, as a member of the Venezuelan Commission at Washington; and, in 1897, as ambassador to Germany. I have found many men and things which would seem likely to draw me away from my interest in Cornell; but, after all, that which has for nearly forty years held, and still holds, the deepest place in my thoughts is the university which I aided to found.
Since resigning its presidency I have, in many ways, kept in relations with it; and as I have, at various times, returned from abroad and walked over its grounds, visited its buildings, and lived among its faculty and students, an enjoyment has been mine rarely vouchsafed to mortals. It has been like revisiting the earth after leaving it. The work to which I had devoted myself for so many years, and with more earnestness than any other which I have ever undertaken, though at times almost with the energy of despair, I have now seen successful beyond my dreams. Above all, as I have seen the crowd of students coming and going, I have felt assured that the work is good. It was with this feeling that, just before Ileft the university for the embassy at Berlin, I erected at the entrance of the university grounds a gateway, on which I placed a paraphrase of a Latin inscription noted by me, many years before, over the main portal of the University of Padua, as follows:
``So enter that daily thou mayest become more learned and thoughtful;So depart that daily thou mayest become more useful to thy country and to mankind.''
I often recall the saying of St. Philip Neri, who, in the days of the Elizabethan persecutions, was wont to gaze at the students passing out from the gates of the English College at Rome, on their way to Great Britain, and to say: ``I am feasting my eyes on those martyrs yonder.'' My own feelings are like his, but happier: Ifeast my eyes on those youths going forth from Cornell University into this new twentieth century to see great things that I shall never see, and to make the new time better than the old.
During my life, which is now extending beyond the allotted span of threescore and ten, I have been engaged after the manner of my countrymen, in many sorts of work, have become interested in many conditions of men have joined in many efforts which I hope have been of use; but, most of all, I have been interested in the founding and maintaining of Cornell University, and by the part Ihave taken in that, more than by any other work of my life I hope to be judged.
