Harvard graduates whom I have known Author:Andrew Preston Peabody Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: JOHN PIERCE. 1793, D. D. 1822. I NOW commemorate a third benefactor of the college, who bestowed not money, indeed, but the loyal service, devotion, and lo... more »ve of a lifetime, and who of all its friends that I have ever known was the stanchest and firmest. To him its site was the dearest and most sacred spot on the earth ; its prosperity and honor were held second only to the well-being of the Church of Christ, of which he was a faithful minister. In his boyhood he used to walk to Cambridge, to feast his eyes with the sight of the college. He attended sixty-three out of sixty-four successive Commencements, the record broken only by his mother's funeral on Commencement Day, while he was an undergraduate, — an occasion which in his memory evidently had its sadness intensified by the time when it occurred. He was a tutor in his early manhood, an overseer ex officio for fifty-two years, Secretary of the Board for thirty-three years, and probably never absent from a meeting till his last illness. His genial presence carried with it whole stacks of sunbeams,and there never was a college occasion of any kind that was not graced and blessed by its full radiance. What he did not know about the University no man knew ; what there was in it that merited praise had no so hearty eulogist; its shortcomings no man was so ready to condone, so earnest to retrieve. If he desired length of days, it was that he might live to be its oldest graduate ; and if there were among the added stars in the successive triennial catalogues any as to which a ray of comfort blended with the unfeigned sorrow of his vividly sympathetic nature, it was those in classes earlier than his own. His social relations among liberal givers were large and intimate, and it is impossible to say of how many benefactions to the ...« less