spherical trigonometry. Is there any son of an American college
who has really entered into such life as this who does not look
back lingeringly to his undergraduate days, grateful not only
for the instruction and the teachers he knew, but also for those
childish outbursts of pride and idealism when the deepest, poignant
loyalties caught up his spirit in unforgettable scenes:
Ah! happy days! Once more who would not be a boy?
A friend of mine had a son who had been planning for a long time
to go to Yale. Shortly before he was to enter college he went with
his father to see a foot-ball game between Yale and Princeton.
On this particular occasion Yale vanquished the orange and black
in a decisive victory. After the game the Yale men were marching
off with their mighty shouts of triumph. The Princeton students
collected in the middle of the foot-ball-field, and before singing
“Old Nassau,” they cheered with even greater vigor than they
had cheered at any time during the game, and this time not for
Princeton, but for Yale. The sons of Eli came back from their
celebration and stopped to listen and to applaud. As the mighty
tiger yell was going up from hundreds of Princetonian throats, and
as the Princeton men followed their cheers by singing the Yale
“Boolah,” the young man who stood by his father, looked on in
silence, indeed, with inexpressible admiration. Suddenly he turned
to his father and said: “Father, I have changed my mind. I want to
go to Princeton.”
[Illustration: The Serpentine Dance after a Foot-ball Game]
Such events are associated (in the minds of undergraduates) not
only with the physical, but with the spiritual, with the ideal. The
struggle on the athletic-field has meaning not simply to a few men
who take part, but to every student on the side-lines, while the
pulsating hundreds who sing and cheer their team to victory think
only of the real effort of their college to produce successful
achievement.
Standing beneath a tree near Soldiers’ Field at Cambridge, with
undergraduates by the hundred eager in their athletic sports on one
side, and the ancient roofs of Harvard on the other, there is a
simple marble shaft which bears the names of the men whom the field
commemorates, while below these names are written Emerson’s words,
chosen for this purpose by Lowell:
Though love repine and reason chafe,
There came a voice without reply--
’Tis man’s perdition to be safe,
When for the truth he ought to die.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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