Iowa State University - Bomb Yearbook (Ames, IA)

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Tribute By HAM LIN GARLAND IT is with profound grief that I read of the death of Professor Beardshear. He was a splendid type of American, and though I did not know him well, I honored him. I met him first at a college banquet at Drake University, and as he rose to speak he seemed a powerful, brusque and serious man. It was only later when a guest in his home that I learned to know his essentially fine, poetic nature. Every hour he could snatch from his manifold duties he spent with me wandering over the fields or lying prone in the shadow of full foliaged maples, cushioned upon the sward. Though a man of reticent mood, he opened his heart to me there, disclosing his love for poesy and nature, hinting at such sweetness and subtility, such aspira- tions and hope, that I fell silent in wonder ofthe wide contrast between his tall, broad-shouldered, physical self and his essen- tially poetic soul. It is nearly ten years since that glorious June day, but I have carried the picture of him in my mind almost undimmed by the multitudes of other personalities I have faced and felt. His was a most exceptional mind, and I feel that death has cut short a really great career. I join all those who knew him in a feeling of grief so profound that it takes on the pain of a personal loss. I think the many students who knew him do well to set him over warriors and those who seek for place and power. Such lives as his are good to think of in this day of eager and not too scrupulous pursuit of wealth. He was fitted for higher honors than ever came to him, and his recog- nition as a great educator came late. But of those things he made no complaint. HAMLIN GARLAND.

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WILLIAM MILLER BEARDSHEAR

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A Tribute TO OUR LATE BELOVED PRESIDENT BY ONE OF HIS CLOSEST FRIENDS MR. W. R. BOYD or CEDAR RAPIDS, town WILLIAM MILLER BEARDSHEAR AN APPRECIATION O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells: Rise up-for you the Hag is flung-for you the bugle trills, For you bouquets and ribbonld wreaths-for you the shores a-crowding. For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning: Here-Captain! dear father! This arm beneath your head! I ' d th t n the deck I IS S0l11B I'B3lTl 2 0 -. You've fallen cold and dead. ND it is so now. We scarce can make him dead-any of uswho knew Doctor Beardshear. But recently he seemed so strong, so ful! of power, so much to do that only he could do, Some lives there be which may end at any time and none take note of their departure outside the family circle: most lives, perhaps, end so. And there are other lives, commanding the attention of the world, which seem to close as grandly and as naturally as the splendid setting of an unclouded sun after a perfect day. lt is finished comes unbidden in such cases- and we write it down almost triumphantly. But it would seem that the most precious of all lives have their ending without twitight and evening bell. The darkness comes suddenly and at high noon, and we all but for- get, for the moment, what has been, in mournful contemplation of what seems unfinished and on hand. Thus ended this great life, and in this hour of grief and darkness, we stand vainly asking: I-low can it be that he has gone away? I-le crowded into thirty years the work of sixty. I-le toiled as though he knew the limitations Time had set for him, and meant to triumph over them. But he needed yet more years. Doctor Beardshear is dead at fifty-one years of age. What is unfin- ished other hands must grasp and do. Ours it is just now to look for a moment, and with such appreciation as is to us vouchsafed upon what has been and ever will be the result of these brief but strenuous years of noble, untiring and unselfish work. William Miller Beardshear sprang, as did Abraham Lincoln, out of the loins of labor, and out of the heart of the continent. lt was a typical country home that john Beardshear and Elizabeth Coleman established on the banks of the Little Miami, and here the future leader and,master of men was born. It may always be taken for granted, almost Without testimony, that a great man has had a noble mother. The forbidding philosophy of Schopenhauer contains one dictum universally attested by observation and experience, that a child receives its mental and moral fiber as an inheritance from its mother. The father may or may not aid in the endowment. Both parents of William M. Beardshear were sturdy folk: the father honest and