Went alone to
Philharmonic rehearsal at Academy of Music. Watched Hazeltine and pretty Helen
Lane billing and cooing just in front of me to the very appropriate
accompaniment of Beethoven’s lovely D Symphony. A sentimental gent would say
that the handsome young couple and the glowing joyous music of that brightest
of all Beethoven’s greater works were each a sort of commentary on the other.
Then I went to 24 Union Square and saw Mr. Buggies, who left Lockport Monday,
spent a day at Albany, and reached New York this morning. I paid him another
visit this evening. He has convalesced rapidly and looks better than I expected
to see him. I feared this perilous illness might have left him with energies
impaired and faculties blunted, but he is quite himself, full of life and
vigorous thought. He is not without his hobby, namely: there is, or seems to be,
a political reaction against sectionalism, John Brownism, Higher Lawism, and
the like. This is, therefore, a good opportunity to assert the claims of the
church as a conservative law-loving institution against Calvinism and the ultra
Protestant notions it has produced; to tell Union men throughout the country
that they belong in the church; to define the limits of authority and private
judgment in political ethics. A clear statement of all this might effect a
great deal just at this time and would come with a certain authority from the
committee appointed by the last general convention of which Mr. Ruggles is
chairman.
Monday, Jem and
George Anthon dined here, and we heard Martha, which is a very pretty opera.
Last night I attended Noyes’s second lecture before the Law School; crowded,
like the first. That people should go away from a law lecture in New York for want
of seats is without precedent. This school is the only one of our seeds of
post-graduate instruction that survives and grows, our only university nucleus.
If Betts and Ogden were less hopelessly inert, it might be developed into
usefulness on a large scale.
SOURCE: Allan Nevins
and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong,
Vol. 3, p. 11-12
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