A few years ago a Harvard athlete played in a hard and exciting
foot-ball game against Yale. Toward the end of the game, when it
was nearly dark, this man was fairly hurled through the Yale line
in a play that shortly afterward resulted in giving the game to the
Cambridge men. It seemed a strange irony of circumstance that just
before time was called the heroic player was disqualified. When the
game was over and the crimson men were marching wildly about the
field, yelling for Harvard and carrying the foot-ball players on
their shoulders, the man whose playing was largely contributory to
this triumph was down in the training-quarters, almost alone, but
with the satisfaction that, although forgotten by the crowd, he had
“played the game.” Certain alumni, who had seen this man’s plucky
but unpraised fight for his Alma Mater, sent to him these words of
Kipling:
And only the Master shall praise us, and only the Master shall
blame;
And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame,
But _each for the joy of the working_....
We must admit that the undergraduate’s philosophy of life may be
obscure at times, even to himself; that it is as subtle and evasive
as the moods of youth; and that its expression is as cosmopolitan
as nationality, and as varied as human nature. For some students,
too, we must conclude that trivialities and immoralities bury far
out of sight the true meaning of college training and life-work;
but in other students, and these are the majority, underneath his
curriculum and his customs, his light-heartedness, his loves,
and his seeming listlessness, one may discern the real American
undergraduate, energetic, earnest, expectant, and strenuously eager
for those great campaigns of his day and generation in which the
priceless guerdon is the “joy of the working.”
IV
REASONS FOR GOING TO COLLEGE
Recently I attended the commencement exercises at one of our large
universities. As undergraduates and friends of the graduating
class were gathered in a large church awaiting the arrival of the
procession, in a seat directly in front of me sat a middle-aged
woman and a man whose appearance and nervous expectation drew
general attention. The man’s clothes were homely and of country
cut. His face was deeply lined, and wore the tan of many summers.
I noted his hard, calloused hand resting on the back of the seat
as he half rose to look at the door through which the seniors were
to enter. The woman by his side was a quiet, sympathetic person to
whom a phrase from Barrie would be applicable: she had a “mother’s
face.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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