VALEDITORY POEM AND ORATION, Pronounced Before The Senior Class In Yale College, Presentation Day, June 27, 1881 [spine title: "Poem & Oration]

9 x 6", full black leather, gilt spine lettering, marbled endpapers, 38pp. Covers and spine scuffed and sunned, corners and spine tips worn, light spotting on half title, upper corner of pp25-26 creased with a small tear else very good condition. The poem "Whispering Elms" was written by Henry Strong Durand of Rochester, NY who wrote on the title page "To my dear Wife, 'Mercedes' from The Author, New Haven, Conn. August the first 1921". Henry Strong Durand, the class poet went on to Harvard Medical School, was the inventor of an irrigator for the surgical bandage machine and founded a summer camp in Irondequoit, New York. The class oration titled "The Land We Live In: The Excellence And Permanence Of Its Form Of Government" was written by James Leighton, of Glenburn, Penn. A lengthy but well written essay on the constitution. A sampling "There was a discord in it (the Constitution)That discord was slavery, a thing which men tried to ignore but which would not be ignored. Had it not been here. There would have been no war of 1812, no civil war" SCARCE.…