University of Vermont - Ariel Yearbook (Burlington, VT)

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fought and won a thousand times, and the Stars and Stripes have waved over the wreck of the Merrimac on the breaths of a thou- sand speakers. Mr. Phelps, a year ago, made a great point in his favor, when, at Edinburgh, he suggested the establishment in the English Universities of a professorship of silence. What Ameri- can colleges should have is a chair of originality, or better still, a machine with stanchions to which students could be periodically tied, while, by some crank movement, original ideas are pumped into their imagination. Nothing, to-Uday, in the intellectual con- dition of American students is more deplorable than this general poverty of thought, and the supreme self-satisfaction with which they pad out and amble along some poor, old, decrepit subject of controversyithat has already lost half its members by such usage, and then display this ancient object of respect and venera- tion, with all the gusto of a new discoverer. Leaving, however, this subject for the present, let us speak of the Senior in particular. As he stands to-day, with his last com- mencement before him, he has at heart the toil and turmoil of active life, rather than the college years that are past. Think of it as prosaically as onefwill, there will always be for a Senior an ele- ment of serious thought in the prospect ofhis last commencement. He knows well that, for the general public, it is merely a repeti- tion of hundreds of other commencements, in the popular view as much alike as two peas, but for him this last will have a peculiar charm. It is not only the flood-time of pleasant recollections-- three days in which he lives in the past and lives intensely, three days in which he experiences again all the pleasure and all the folly of as many years-but it is, besides, the commencement of active life. It is true that the Senior here bows himself out of the college world, with all its joys and its careless life, but in the 22

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Seniors Qditonial. XXXXXXXX HE line, that, in the estimation of a Senior, would measure the college course from Freshman days to the last commencement is not a long one, but let the estimation be made at the other end of the course-let the Freshman cast his eyes forward into the future and he sees, in perspective, a field of converging lines that never meet. He looks through the big end of his telescope and the plane before him stretches out in vast proportions. Its surface, although worn by the feet of thousands, in his eyes is an untrodden waste, and in his simplicity he is its First explorer. He stands on the border-ground of his college course, already, in imagination, another Newton, darting his gaze into the wide unknown, or a DeSoto on the shores of an illimitable ocean. It is strange that undergraduates are thus, as a rule, so conceited. Nine out of ten believe most sincerely that they are turning stones that mortal hand before has never touched. They cannot see that every fragment that they move has been worn smooth in just such handlings by generations of undergraduates. The same mooted questions have been settled time and again in the very same way. Mary, Queen of Scots, has been beheaded at least four times in each generation, and Queen Elizabeth's three thousand postmortem dresses have paraded before the college public with the coming of every spring. Gettysburg has been ZI

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same act he salutes the larger audience of the world before which he is to play his part. I-Ie enters now on the stage for which his college years have trained him. Here, if his aspirations are high, and his aims exalted, with a public never slow to appreciate any noble exertion, he will not fail of his deserved applause, and, eventually, as the play draws toward its close, if still true to the high purpose of his life, he may hope to hear the Whole amphi- theater ring with the echoes that proclaim his success. 23