Eulogy for Father :: Eulogies Eulogy

Eulogy for Father This is the last of three formal memorials for my father. The first was in the surroundings of his last years, at his country church in Virginia, among his family and neighbors. The second was in the surroundings of his first years, among the boxwoods in Murfreesboro, in the presence of a large number of his buried ancestors and a smaller number of his living descendants. Today we gather to remember the middle years of his life, the years at Harvard which he considered his greatest, and which many now consider Harvard's greatest. You, his students and friends from those years, know he was a man of many talents. He was a scholar; a statesman who could see things clearly to which others were blind; a man of deep religious sensitivity; a man of the soil. He was a fighter, a boxer in his college days, a battery commander in World War I, a man who fought and bred gamecocks all his life, and, above all, a man in the thick of controversy at home and war abroad for more than fifty years of public life. Yet he was also a man who cherished honorable peace and loved to commend to his students the stern but pacific words of Lincoln's Second Inaugural: â€Å"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on...to achieve a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.† He was a devoted family man, not just for us, his blood family, but also for the larger family of his students, co-workers, and friends. He expected great things of us, as we did of him. He was a genius with words, a writer, a poet, a powerful orator, a master storyteller, a man who in a single encounter could move people to their foundations. This moving power was deeper than words. He retained it to the end, after he had lost his command of words, and the vivid recollections of a long-ago speech or conversation so common among those who have met him are more apt to be of his power and presence than of the words he used. My own most recurrent memory of him is completely nonverbal. It is the look in his eyes years ago in Virginia when he had put me on a bus to the city.