Fair Harvard
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"Fair Harvard" is the commencement hymn of Harvard University. Composed by the Reverend Samuel Gilman of the class of 1811 for the university's 200th anniversary in 1836, it bids the school an affectionate farewell. Of its four verses, the first and fourth are traditionally sung and the second and third omitted. Its first line, which originally read "..thy sons to thy Jubilee throng", saw a small revision between 1997 and 1998 for gender inclusivity.
The songs lyrics are these:
- Fair Harvard! we join in thy Jubilee throng,
- And with blessings surrender thee o'er
- By these festival rites, from the age that is past,
- To the age that is waiting before.
- O relic and type of our ancestors' worth
- That hast long kept their memory warm,
- First flow'r of their wilderness! Star of their night!
- Calm rising thro' change and thro' storm.
- To thy bow'rs we were led in the bloom of our youth,
- From the home of our infantile years,
- When our fathers had warn'd, and our mothers had pray'd,
- And our sisters had blest thro' their tears.
- Thou then wert our parent, the nurse of our soul;
- We were molded to manhood by thee,
- Till freighted with treasure thoughts, friendships and hopes,
- Thou didst launch us on Destiny's sea.
- When as pilgrims we come to revisit thy halls,
- To what kindlings the season gives birth!
- Thy shades are more soothing, thy sunlight more dear,
- Than descend on less privileged earth.
- For the good and the great, in their beautiful prime,
- Thro' thy precincts have musingly trod,
- As they girded their spirits or deepen'd the streams
- That make glad the fair city of God.
- Farewell! be thy destinies onward and bright!
- To thy children the lesson still give,
- With freedom to think, and with patience to bear,
- And for right ever bravely to live.,
- Let not moss-covered error moor thee at its side,
- As the world on truth's current glides by
- Be the herald of light, and the bearer of love,
- Till the stock of the Puritans die.
The song is set to the tune of Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms, composed by the Irish poet Thomas Moore, itself set to a second musical tune for My Lodging Is In The Cold, Cold Ground. Horatio Alger, an 1852 graduate of Harvard's Divinity School, composed his Harvard Odes I-IV, and Paul Laurence Dunbar originally wrote the lyrics of the Tuskegee Song, to the tune. The music also makes an appearance in the 1951 Warner Brothers Merrie Melodies animated cartoon Ballot Box Bunny featuring Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam.
The first six measures of the tune of "Fair Harvard" also appear as the first six measures of the 1982 song "Come On Eileen."
