Temple University - Templar Yearbook (Philadelphia, PA)

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30 Oymnasii’m

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Let us. then, be up and doing. With a heart for any fate; Still achieving, still pursuing. Learn to labor and to wait. 29 Phi Alpha . J DIMA MAY VAN liUSKIRK.

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Glass Qropljerg It was one of those glorious days in summer on the coast of Maine when the sun of half-a-morning-gonc made a golden path of light across tumbling, frolicking white-caps of the Atlantic Ocean. The mad things carpeted with snowy froth, the blue of the peeping depths, the bosom of the sea up to the horizon line and the gentle waters, too, that usually lay almost affectionately among the cliffs just beneath my study-windows. This morning-ocean had been a daily treat and inspiration for nearly five years. In all seasons I had lived here with the three vast glories of creation: mountains in the rear, billowing sea over all my east, and the heavens above. And this forenoon 1 was especially thankful when that mighty longing,—the spell of the splendor and freedom of the sea (stole) o’er my soul. I had gone down to New York the afternoon before, in our new compressed-air system that now stretched —with about eight parallel tubes—along the whole coast. The publisher, Macmillan, had accepted my Prolegomena of Aesthetics and all my worrying and grind of the past year were over. Still, my nerves were somewhat of a frazzle for a fellow of my persistent, bachelor mood, and I felt as though I were in a living presence of solace and good cheer as I lounged in the cushions of my eastern windows. Nothing, except the usual crash” in New York, had been disturbing on the trip. It was during the passage in the Tube.—although taking up only half an hour,—that I experienced a decided alteration in a usually comfortable nervous condition. Habitually when resting in complete physical ease, the stream of consciousness. I am aware of, seems to range in another position of mind than that I can fully call myself. So here I was seeing and hearing all that this other jx-rson within me had to say and show. There were passing, successively, happenings of and about the Prelgomena I had attempted to write; scenes at the Battery elevated railroad I had just witnessed; some feeble effort to realize the speed at which I knew the car was moving in the air-passage, concluding it was impossible to comprehend a rate of a thousand miles an hour,—while feeling nothing; I saw plainly, some of the the names of the great modern philosophers moving mysteriously and confidently across the path of perception, and seeming to expound their'pet dogmas of pragmatism, subjective idealism, or pure reason. A game of chess at which I had been beaten played itself over again, ami I could see the smile of my opponent as he reinstated at one point his knight to its position, formerly at king’s bishop three. The line of consciousness never appeared to weary. The brilliant play of the lights of some gems I had seen in a shop on Fifth Avenue, crossed the mental sight; some pictures of Rubens and Whistler; one of Ruskin’s descriptions of a storm at sea: a particularly fine (juardruple expansion marine engine I had been shown about a month before, and so 31