Free Lake Wobegon Days by Garrison Keillor Page A

planet. I dare not speak these dreams to any person—any
sensible
man would laugh uproariously at such a notion! but then no “sensible” man could have accomplished here what we have done. This College is the one great work of my life. May God grant me a humble spirit to give all thanks to Him for bringing me to this place.
    He decided to hold another grand occasion to celebrate the great work that had been brought so far, and once the thought struck him, he went into a fever and spent two days shut in his office writing an address. He called it Founders Day, October 30, and invited everyone he could think of, of whom some two hundred attended, including Mr. Bayfield, who was in the area foreclosing. The
Forward
wrote:
    Approaching New Albion College from the east, the writer gained the crest of a hill crowned with blazing oak and gaudy maple and, upon glimpsing the distant campus through the trees, stopped the team so as to impress the agreeable vista onhis memory, for against Nature’s dying ostentation, New Albion unfolds a seemly tableau of such simple unaffected grandeur as to appear imagined, an apparition of Academe in the desolate forest, with its trim and handsome cottages, the well-laid walks and promenades, the orderly plantings of ornamental trees, and, bestriding all, the majestic spire of Main itself like an upraised finger calling all to stand in hushed wonder at what Providence had wrought…. Notable citizens from as far distant as St. Paul were in attendance to gaze upon the marvel for themselves, and those who admire the art of oratory found it in abundant supply.
    Two-thirty P.M. , October 30, was perhaps the high-water mark of Henry’s life, for which the previous thirty-eight years had been rehearsal, when Mr. Bayfield spoke a few words of introduction to the crowd and Henry arose in his voluminous black gown, took his place before the fresh oak lectern on the porch of Main, placed his right hand in the gown between the third and fourth buttons and stretched out his left in the hortatory position, glanced down at his two-pound address, and lobbed the first sentence out toward the woods. Underfoot he felt solid white pine planks, behind him was solid brick rising to a spire from which a bell would toll when he sat down, and before him lay a yard something like he had known at Harvard, with grass and little trees trimmed to make perfect globes. And his audience, too, of course: two rows of solemn faculty, trustees, and dignitaries, including Governor Alexander Ramsey, Honorable Thaddeus Browne, the steamboat titan, Honorable Charles F. Peabody and Honorable Horatio Parker of the New Albion Land Company, Honorable Aldrich Bryant, Honorable Emerson Fremont, Honorable James Knox, Bishop Upton of the Methodist Church, and behind them, students and New Albion citizens in solid ranks, leaning forward to catch his voice. For several nights running Henry had had bad dreams, dutifully recorded in his journal (“Night sweats … lost in woods, running, terrible darkness & sounds of crashing & tearing … figures rising up from behind rocks & my own voice weeping & pleading … awoke exhausted & lay awake until dawn”), which he attributed to nervousness, but he was himself now as he warmed up to his address—a true physical feat, speaking outdoors, it demanded a stout man to sustainthe force and trajectory to carry the vowels in full cry to the farthest listener, and he was not helped by a breeze off the water, but Mr. Reithman, writing home, reported, “I crept away into the woods after an hour and his voice followed me there. I walked over the first hill and stood in a rocky ravine and put my arm around a tree and still Dr. Watt was there; the very rocks seemed to ring, and even the tree trembled to our president’s peroration.”
    The address itself was lost in the turmoil of the following winter, and we have only a half-page of notes taken by a student, R. Williams, who perhaps thought he would be