University of the South - Cap and Gown Yearbook (Sewanee, TN)

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Lo! mighty mother, now be judge, and say Whether in all thy creatures more or less Change doth not reign and bear the greatest sway; For who sees not that Time on all doth prey? But Times do change and move con- tinually: So nothing here long standeth in one stay: Wherefore this lower world who can deny But to be subject still to Mutability? Change is all around us In the course of one year, a Sewanee student sees green leaves, brown leaves; summer thundershowers, and snowstorms; ice, and the warm sun. Abbo ' s Alley one moment blooms with daffodils, and in the next is haunted by skeleton trees

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pick cotton in the fields. At one time, this sort of thing may have been true for some people, but the important thing about the South is not its plan- tations and smaller farms in them- selves, but the way in which an agri- cultural wav of life has given to the Southerner a peculiar vision of the unity of all life ' s experiences. One is not a farmer five days of the week, and something else over the weekend. One ' s work is not something one can forget about at five o ' clock, and then come home and do what one really wants to. Southern religion has also taken on this character. In the South, the church has always been one of the central points of community life, and its influence has extended beyond Sundays into all kinds of activity. Southerners have always had a ten- dency to see religion in everything they do, and to recognize the reli- gious and humanistic implications in all their endeavors. When Bishop Leonidas Polk laid the cornerstone of the University of the South, on October 10, 1860, he stood on this mountain, and said that this institution is established for the cultivation of true religion, learning, and virtue, that thereby God may be glorified and the happiness of man may be advanced. He spoke the ideals which have governed every true university, from Plato ' s Academy to our own Sewanee community. But in a verv real sense, his words were given to him by the rock of Southern culture on which he was founded. But even a mountain can change. Change is in the nature of things; it is one of the undeniable principles of life itself. In Edmund Spenser ' s mutability cantos, Change personified challenges mother Nature:

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