Though in principle I am speaking as the voice of the MLA and expressing its concerns, I have noticed in reading past presidential speeches that presidents are helpless to do other than to express their own hopes, couched in various literary frames of reference, in addresses tending toward the homiletic. I cannot hope to escape the invisible but nonetheless inflexible conventions of the convention. But perhaps the expression of my own thoughts can be on this occasion what Stevens calls the little string that speaks for a crowd of voices. I choose as my text Wordsworth's vow at the end of The Prelude: What we have loved, Others will love, and we will teach them how.