Why Go to College [9]
or the wide-reaching panorama of field and water, but to know something also about the less obvious aspects of nature, its structure, its methods of work, and the endless diversity of its parts. No one can have read Matthew Arnold's letters to his wife, his mother, and his sister, without being struck by the immense enjoyment he took throughout his singularly simple and hard-working life in flowers and trees and rivers. The English lake country had given him this happy inheritance, with everywhere its sound of running water and its wealth of greenery. There is a close connection between the marvellous unbroken line of English song, and the passionate love of the Englishman for a home in the midst of birds, trees, and green fields.
"The world is so full of a number of things, That I think we should all be as happy as kings,"
is the opinion of everybody who knows nature as did Robert Louis Stevenson. And so our college student may begin to know it. Let her enter the laboratories and investigate for herself. Let her make her delicate experiments with the blowpipe or the balance; let her track mysterious life from one hiding-place to another; let her "name all the birds without a gun," and make intimates of flower and fish and butterfly--and she is dull indeed if breezy tastes do not follow her through life, and forbid any of her days to be empty of intelligent enjoyment. "Keep your years beautiful; make your own atmosphere," was the parting advice of my college president, himself a living illustration of what he said.
But it is a short step from the love of the complex and engaging world in which we live to the love of our comrades in it. Accordingly the third precious interest to be cultivated by the college student is an interest in people. The scholar today is not a being who dwells apart in his cloister, the monk's successor; he is a leader of the thoughts and conduct of men. So the new subjects which stand beside the classics and mathematics of medieval culture are history, economics, ethics, and sociology. Although these subjects are as yet merely in the making, thousands of students are flocking to their investigation, and are going out to try their tentative knowledge in College Settlements and City Missions and Children's Aid Societies. The best instincts of generous youth are becoming enlisted in these living themes. And why should our daughters remain aloof from the most absorbing work of modern city life, work quite as fascinating to young women as to young men? During many years of listening to college sermons and public lectures in Wellesley, I always noticed a quickened attention in the audience whenever the discussion touched politics or theology. These are, after all, the permanent and peremptory interests, and they should be given their full place in a healthy and vigorous life.
But if that life includes a love of books, of nature, of people, it will naturally turn to enlarged conceptions of religion--my sixth and last gift of college life. In his first sermon as Master of Balliol College, Dr. Jowett spoke of the college, "First as a place of education, secondly as a place of society, thirdly as a place of religion." He observed that "men of very great ability often fail in life because they are unable to play their part with effect. They are shy, awkward, self-conscious, deficient in manners, faults which are as ruinous as vices." The supreme end of college training, he said, "is usefulness in after life." Similarly, when the city of Cambridge celebrated in Harvard's Memorial Hall the life and death of the gallant young ex-governor of Massachusetts, William E. Russell, men did well to hang above his portrait some wise words he has lately said, "Never forget the everlasting difference between making a living and making a life." That he himself never forgot; and it was well to remind citizens and students of it, as they stood there facing too the ancient words all Harvard men face when they take their college degrees and go out into the world, "They that be wise shall
"The world is so full of a number of things, That I think we should all be as happy as kings,"
is the opinion of everybody who knows nature as did Robert Louis Stevenson. And so our college student may begin to know it. Let her enter the laboratories and investigate for herself. Let her make her delicate experiments with the blowpipe or the balance; let her track mysterious life from one hiding-place to another; let her "name all the birds without a gun," and make intimates of flower and fish and butterfly--and she is dull indeed if breezy tastes do not follow her through life, and forbid any of her days to be empty of intelligent enjoyment. "Keep your years beautiful; make your own atmosphere," was the parting advice of my college president, himself a living illustration of what he said.
But it is a short step from the love of the complex and engaging world in which we live to the love of our comrades in it. Accordingly the third precious interest to be cultivated by the college student is an interest in people. The scholar today is not a being who dwells apart in his cloister, the monk's successor; he is a leader of the thoughts and conduct of men. So the new subjects which stand beside the classics and mathematics of medieval culture are history, economics, ethics, and sociology. Although these subjects are as yet merely in the making, thousands of students are flocking to their investigation, and are going out to try their tentative knowledge in College Settlements and City Missions and Children's Aid Societies. The best instincts of generous youth are becoming enlisted in these living themes. And why should our daughters remain aloof from the most absorbing work of modern city life, work quite as fascinating to young women as to young men? During many years of listening to college sermons and public lectures in Wellesley, I always noticed a quickened attention in the audience whenever the discussion touched politics or theology. These are, after all, the permanent and peremptory interests, and they should be given their full place in a healthy and vigorous life.
But if that life includes a love of books, of nature, of people, it will naturally turn to enlarged conceptions of religion--my sixth and last gift of college life. In his first sermon as Master of Balliol College, Dr. Jowett spoke of the college, "First as a place of education, secondly as a place of society, thirdly as a place of religion." He observed that "men of very great ability often fail in life because they are unable to play their part with effect. They are shy, awkward, self-conscious, deficient in manners, faults which are as ruinous as vices." The supreme end of college training, he said, "is usefulness in after life." Similarly, when the city of Cambridge celebrated in Harvard's Memorial Hall the life and death of the gallant young ex-governor of Massachusetts, William E. Russell, men did well to hang above his portrait some wise words he has lately said, "Never forget the everlasting difference between making a living and making a life." That he himself never forgot; and it was well to remind citizens and students of it, as they stood there facing too the ancient words all Harvard men face when they take their college degrees and go out into the world, "They that be wise shall