Massachusetts College of Art and Design - Palette and Pen Yearbook (Boston, MA)

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H U N D R R D NINE

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V .5.1 N DOM I 39 THE CLASS OF NINE TEEh

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The Senior Class W E always intended, when the time came to tell our story, to write a simple history of our progress from Smock Day to Commencement. It was to describe how we gradually laid down our early fallacies and took up lasting truths and prin- ciples; and it might have been a useful gift and guide to coming classes. But we were plainly not the class to write it. We have never advanced with any annual regularity. Our pilgrim jour- ney has been without a beginning and without an end, as intricate and roundabout as a Victorian wallpaper. We are still engaged upon it; our years have run together, and we are even now inno- cently discovering great guiding principles of life and the use of poster paint that we forgot when we were sophomores, vowing the same resolutions, arguing the old questions. Our story is as much a present indicative as a history, a confession of the faiths we have sometimes mislaid but never outgrown. And if we have been always voyaging, never arriving, if we have traveled a great way around to reach our original starting point, we have at least seen far lands and many strange delights. On dark winter afternoons, as if to prove the poetry of earth is never dead, we used to ride past our street-car stop deep in the nineteenth century British poets. The castles and the cypress and the damsels richly clad rose up before us in unending splen- dor, English firelight mingled with Italian sunlight, the red roses of Omar shone like a dayspring; and for all that they were dead, long dead, for all their yearnings after yesterday which made them seem twice old, the poets floated back to us miraculously young and eager. We discovered Boston, walked up and down her streets by day and night, in snow and sunshine. We knew the lamplit gloom of Bates Hall, we fed the ducks on Muddy River, we went down to paint the tulips gravely nodding in the grass by General Washington’s horse. Our way led past the State House dome