Vanderbilt University - Commodore Yearbook (Nashville, TN)

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18 THE COMET • o GLASS or ’59 ♦ o» OFFICERS L. S. Mekriam...............................President. C. IS. Hurke................................Vice President. O. II. Wilson...............................Secretary and Treasurer. C. M. Luttekloh..............................Historian. W. G. Hunt a.................................Poet. ----JULY, 1920------ TO iiim whose heart beats true to the things which were once a source of inno- cent pleasure, and which are constantly enveloped in the inmost recesses of his soul, a gentle remembrance serves almost to carry him hack to the days them- selves wherein all of which he now but dreams was so real. As Time advances on his rapid journey, bent on a destination the end of which no mortal knows, nor, indeed, can know, striking ruthlessly with his great scythe those of us whose term of mundane existence has expired, we may well bethink us, Whither do we tend ! “Time and tide wait for no man.” Truly has tiiis been exemplified in all the times of life and death. We meet a friend budding into robust manhood, endowed with a priceless legacy, that of good health and a vigorous constitution, at the very threshold of life, upon the stern demands of which he is soon to enter; we accost him, greet him, ask him “ Quo tenetis iter ” bike all other mortals, he cannot divine. He is alloat upon the great sea, tossed hither and thither by the litful waves, at the mercy ot Provi- dence, which alone has knowledge on what shore he shall land, bite is a terrible problem, for the solution of which we are placed here. We are brought into this world

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•' THE COMETH- 19 without any consultation as to our desire or aversion to assuming its cares, set down amid a great multitude of peoples, and left to choose between the good and the bad. There is the first step in the problem, illustrating the mutability of Fate, the immuta- bility of Heaven. We are not the architects of our fortunes— “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, Hough hew them how we will” We are but the tools of Fate. “ The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together; our virtues would be proud, if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair, if they were not cherished by our virtues.” Our nature is, therefore, dual. We are taken away with the same utter indifference to our wishes. These reflec- tions of a philosophic cast intrude themselves upon me, and claim my attention, this sultry, hot July afternoon, to such a degree that I cannot refrain from penning them, the various little arguments so conducive to inactivity notwithstanding. Suggested, as they are, by the general Alumni meeting, and particularly by the Beuniou of the Class of ’s'J. at the Commencement in June, 1 emerge from the “innocuous desuetude” into which I had fallen, and derive pleasure from these afterthoughts. It is simply phenom- enal to witness what changes thirty years have made. Hip Van Winkle's astonishment could not have been much greater, though he slept twenty years. We have been awake, yet thought it hardly possible that such revolutions could be wrought. The old Campus that was the delight of every student’s heart, the buildings, so massive and so admirably adapted to the purposes for which they were erected, still stand, which fact makes them all the dearer; but the improvement, the additional structures, make it the nourishing University it is. Such liberality of spirit prevails, a thing sadly lacking at the close of the 19th century, and as an immediate consequence, advantages have been taken. 1 was struck with the healthy inter-fraternity spirit manifest on every hand; the same old Creek letters are still there, and though others have from time to time entered, it seems as if something were against them ; they languished and became factors of the dead past. Hach has striven with honest emulation, as in the time when we “of ’80” were there. Beautiful chapter houses have been built, and are really the objects of chief interest to visitors. But the Class of ’80 concerns me most nearly, and 1 shall make a few notes, for my own reference and pleasure, of the several graduates who wended their way into the busy world. The reunion was, hi every seneo of the word, a success, and it did my old heart good to see friends, of some of whom I had not even heard in more than a quarter of a century—almost a life-time.