THANKS FOR BRINGING ME ALONG Delta State University – State of the University Address August 17, 2006 Recently, I finished one of my summer reads. It was a novel entitled The Dante Club written by Matthew Pearl. His setting was Boston in the late nineteenth century where a villain was committing murders according to visions in Dante’s Inferno. Among the principal characters of the story were several literary figures, Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.), James Russell Lowell, the publisher J. T. Fields, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow who was the greybeard in the group. It was a lively tale, and the poets solved the mystery. In the final scene, Pearl has them heading for a large social event to celebrate. I want to share with you the two concluding paragraphs of the novel, and then I’ll tell you how they relate to today’s address.
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It was raining now, a night rain; a gentle, Christian rain. It must have been very inconvenient for J. T. Fields, driving from Boston to Cambridge only to go back to Boston again, but he had insisted. Holmes and Greene had left a good space for Longfellow between them (in the carriage), on the seats across from Fields and Lowell. Longfellow, as he climbed up, hoped he would not be asked to speak in front of all the guests during the banquet, but if he were, he would thank his friends for bringing him along.
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