Free The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster by Joshua C. Kendall

conferendis innotescat [As our concern for those taking academic steps becomes known]. . . .” After finishing his Latin introduction, Stiles ceded the floor to the ten top-ranking seniors. At exactly 3:47, as Stiles would later note in his factoid-filled diary, Sir Meigs began his cliosophic oration in Latin. Twelve minutes later, Sir Barlow delivered the commencement poem, “The Prospect of Peace,” which concluded with his utopian vision:
    THEN Love shall rule, and Innocence adore,
Discord shall cease, and Tyrants be no more;
’Till yon bright orb, and those celestial spheres,
In radiant circles, mark a thousand years.
    Barlow was expressing the millennial thinking that had first gained wide currency with the publication Of Plymouth Plantation, the journal of Webster’s ancestor, the early Massachusetts governor William Bradford. For the optimistic Barlow, the American Revolution was the signature event that signified the end of Satan’s nefarious influence. Having inspired his Calvinist listeners with his dream of a glorious future for America, Barlow sat down to a round of applause. Barlow’s patriotic composition, published later that year, would make a lasting impression. “Your poem does you honor in this part of the country,” Buckminster wrote Barlow from New Hampshire that fall, “and every person that has seen it speaks very highly of it.”
    Though Webster’s remarks weren’t as heralded as Barlow’s, they do reveal something about the arc of his own intellectual career. The sixth student orator that afternoon, Webster addressed the state of natural philosophy (the objective study of nature) in his sixteen-minute address. “There are few subjects,” he began, “in the whole circle of literature that present a larger field for the exercise of genius or furnish more sublime and rational satisfaction for a speculative mind.” Webster proceeded to cover the discipline’s history, starting with the Egyptians and the Greeks. Classical philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, he argued, were stuck in “a maze of irregular discoveries which their own strength of genius was insufficient to understand, much less to explain.” But then came the Dark Ages during which all learning declined. In the Renaissance, scientific progress resumed and Isaac Newton managed to put the field on a solid empirical footing.
    While Webster had initially toyed with the idea of becoming a poet like Barlow, by the end of his senior year at Yale, he saw himself as a budding philosopher. The “immortal” Newton, who had discovered “the nice order and regularity observed by those stupendous bodies that compose the solar system,” was the intellectual hero whose example he wished to emulate. Webster’s literary ambition now focused on acquiring and organizing knowledge: “Those who design to distinguish themselves in the literary world may, by a proper degree of application, make themselves masters of the arts and sciences, which during the earlier ages of civilization, were scarce known to mankind, and which have been advancing, with some interruption, to their present degree of perfection for more than 4000 years.” Like Dwight in his valedictory address two years earlier, Webster also reminded his fellow graduates of the need for “uncommon acquisitions of knowledge.” Having completed his “liberal education,” Webster was thoroughly steeped in the ideals of the Enlightenment. He was committed to bringing order to the world through his intellectual labors, though he hadn’t yet figured out exactly what those labors might be.
    Sir Tracy gave the last speech of the day, the valedictory address. The class tutor typically addressed the seniors, but Buckminster did not wish to return to Yale. In a letter to Barlow sent from Portsmouth, Buckminster had mentioned the difficulty of traveling to New Haven, adding, “I am really disconnected from College.” Sir Tracy finished his remarks at 5:28. How Webster and his