St Stephens Academy - Academician Yearbook (Port Huron, MI)

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Class of ’21 EDWARD DOUGHERTY - - PRESIDENT GRACE MOORE - - - TREASURER JAMES LAMB .... SECETARY Reading from left to right: Seated — Verda Dougherty, Grace Moore, Madeline Gleason, Elizabeth French. Standing — George Walton, Edward Dougherty, Cecil Burke. This year’s Sophomore class is an unusually small one, only eight in number, but if we can take Jimmy Lamb’s word for it, what is lacking in quantity is made up in quality. Jimmy, by the way, was absent when the above picture was taken. Ed Dougherty was there, though. He and Cecil Bourke, you know, are the shining stars of our orchestra. Madge Gleason likes music, too, especially when there is a waxed floor to go with it. George Walton’s name is almost certain to adorn the staff of some future Academecian, while Verda Dougherty’s literary genius is demonstrated elsewhere in these pages. Grace Moore’s weakness is Cap, but we’re not sure about Elizabeth French’s unless it is conversation. Taken all in all, it’s a group hard to beat.

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Paradise Lost While Milton was familiar with the Greek and Roman mythology, his ideas for Paradise Lost are drawn from the Bible account of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and the Anglo-Saxon poem of Beowulf. Satan, who sat “High on a throne of royal state” with “A mind not to be changed by place or time” and who thought it “Better to rule in hell than serve in Heaven” is the central personage of this poem. He is not a Biblical charac- ter. Milton got his idea from Anglo-Saxon sources and our ideas of Satan are from Milton, not from the Bible. Milton’s Eve is an interesting study revealing now and again what he would have had his own wife be. His immortal Paradise Lost was finished in 1665 and first printed in 1667. It long struggled hard with bad taste and political prejudices, be- fore it took a secure place among the few productions of the human mind that continually rise in estimation, and are unlimited by time or place. It is divided into twelve books or cantos ; it begins with the Council of Satan and the fallen Angels, the description of the erection of Pandemonium, and ends with the expulsion of our first parents from Paradise. The first book is as unsurpassed for magnificence of imagination as the fourth is for grace and luxuriance. A tide of gorgeous eloquence rolls on from beginning to end, like a river of molten gold, outblazing, we may surely say, everything of its kind in any other poetry. In Paradise Lost, we rarely meet with feeble lines. There are few in which the tone is not in some way distinguished from prose. The very artificial style of Milton sparing in English idiom, and his study of a rhythm not alw r ays the most grateful to our ears, but preserving his blank verse from atrivial flow, are the causes of elevation. As a study of character Paradise Lost would be a grievous failure. Adam the central character, is something of a prig; while Satan looms up a magnificent figure, entirely different from the devil of the Miracle Plays. Regarded as a drama, Paradise Lost could never have been a success, but as poetry with its sublime imagery, its harmonious verse, its titanic back- ground of Heaven, Hell and the illimitable void that lies between, it is un- surpassed in any literature. M. MEEHAN ’20. Little specks of sawdust, Some sand — about one grain — All when brought together Make up a Freshman’s brain.

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Fortune Favors the BraVe “Between the dark and the daylight, When the night is beginning to lower Comes a pause in the tramps occupation Which is known as the supper hour. ,, Where and how to procure this sadly needed meal was the discomforting state in which Bill Farrel found himself one warm autumn day in 1917. This weary willie of the road had since early boyhood followed the trail leading to temptation and vice, “the railroad tracks,” sleeping and riding in box cars at night and begging his meals during the day. Bill Farrel was not an old man though his shabby clothes and unshaven face made him appear one. On the contrary he was comparatively young, having just attained the age of twenty-four. Of his early boyhood he knew little other than that he had been bon in a small town in northern Michigan, and at the age of twelve been left ar orphan. Two weeks after his mother ' s death he had been taken in by Mrs Carvel, the town ' s aristocrat, who was attracted by the lad’s beauty; but after two months as society ' s “darling little boy” and “mamma ' s pretty baby” the memory of his own sweet mother overwhelmed him and he re- solved to run away. The eleven years succeeding his departure from his native town were years of untold adventure for the boy, and though he travelled far and wide his life was generally good but for the one blot on his character, “aversion to work.” On this particular day which he happened to be spending in a small suburb of Buffalo, Bill decided he was hungrier than he had ever before been, caused by the fact that he had been turned away from the homes of three village citizens without even a morsel of bread. However, the fourth attempt he made at a small gabled cottage proved more successful for a