American Thumb-prints: Mettle of Our Men and WomenStephens, Kate
History
American Thumb-prints: Mettle of Our Men and Women
Stephens, Kate
National characteristics, American; University of Kansas; Women -- Social conditions
Yet in the face of every concession there came anew to your conscience
the conviction, haunting unceasingly, of the need of the idea in
academic life, of the need of the love of study for its own sake, of
a broader education of the sympathies, of greater activity in the
intangible world of thought and feeling--desires of souls “hydroptic
with a sacred thirst.” To these alone did it behoove us to concede, for
through the spirit alone could the “high man” sustainedly lift up his
heart--
“Still before living he’d learn how to live--
No end to learning.
Earn the means first--God surely will contrive
Use for our earning.
Others mistrust and say, ‘But time escapes,--
Live now or never!’
He said, ’What’s Time? leave Now for dogs and apes,
Man has Forever.’”
The ratio of Hesperus students who chose the old form of scholastic
training, called through long centuries the Humanities, was some
little time ago not more than one-fifth of those in the department of
literature and arts. Since the number was so small--all departments
would then hardly count five hundred students--the growth was favored
of that most delightful feature of small-college life, friendship
between instructor and undergraduate. Such offices often grew to
significant proportions during a student’s four collegiate years. All
genialities aided them; and nothing sinister hindered.
The young folks’ hearts were as warm as may be found upon any generous
soil, and they held a sentiment of personal loyalty which one needed
never to question. They went to their University, after such longing
and eagerness, so thoroughly convinced that there was to be found the
open sesame to whatever in their lives had been most unattainable,
that their first attitude was not the critical, negative, which one
notices in some universities deemed more fortunate, but the positive
and receptive. If they did not find that which to their minds seemed
best, had they not the inheritance of hope?--a devise which Hesperus
earth and air entail upon all their children, and upon which all are
most liberally nurtured.
Then the Hesperus youth had a defect, if one may so put it, that
aided him materially to a friendly attitude with his instructors. He
was, with rare exceptions, as devoid of reverence for conventional
distinctions as a meadow-lark nesting in last year’s tumble-weed
and thinking only of soaring and singing. In this, perhaps, is the
main-spring of the reason why nearly every student, either through
some inborn affinity or by election of studies, drifted into genial
relations with some member of the faculty.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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