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another Alma Mater. As years go by, his love of college becomes second only to his love of country. The college becomes more and more a human being, for whom it is an honor to work, to live, and to die. Indeed, every man who has once taken her name is in some sense bound to work, to live, and to die for her. In business, in politics, in religion, in everything, it is she who cheers him, as he struggles to hold his standard high. Much modern teaching dwells on the development of self; yet he who devotes himself to the rounding out of his own powers may be good for nothing, whereas he who devotes himself to what he loves better than himself, and thus abandons much that looks good for him because he must do something else with his whole heart, — must do it often in a romantic and what may seem a reckless loyalty, such a man achieves a power beyond the reach of the professional selfdeveloper. Education is not in a high

sense practical unless it has an ideal in it and round about it. I know the common talk that colleges unfit their students for those daily duties which might chafe a mind that has tasted intellectual joy. No college can make everybody unselfish and wise; yet among human powers for unselfishness and wisdom I know none like that of a healthy college. If by a practical life we mean such a life of service as is not merely endured but enjoyed, lived with enthusiasm, then surely the most unpractical people in the world are the men and women who put away their ideals as childish things.

"The light of a whole life dies

When love is done,"

a poet says; and though he means the love between man and woman, his verse would be more deeply true if "love" might take on the wider meaning of that faith and energy and courage and enthusiasm which light the dim and tortuous way. With this, no life while sense

remains can be crushed by drudgery or woe. Without it, a life of drudgery is a life of Egyptian darkness. "Where there is no vision the people perish."

The college helps her sons and daughters to keep alive the vision. She diffuses about them what Mr. Justice Holmes has called "an aroma of high feeling, not to be found or lost in science or Greek, not to be fixed, yet all-pervading." She shows, in steady brightness to the best, in flashing glimpses to the worst, the vision without which there is no life. She teaches her children not to shun drudgery but to do the work, and in doing it to know its higher end. The question whether a thing is everlasting truth or commonplace is often a question whether it has or has not a light in it. Homer, even when he tells us how Telemachus put on his clothes, is not commonplace. "I suppose," says Ruskin, "the passage in the Iliad which on the whole has excited most admira

tion is that which describes a wife's sorrow at parting from her husband, and a child's fright at its father's helmet." It is education that helps us see, as Homer saw, the high meaning of the commonplace in every part of life, the beauty whereby the drudgery of daily life becomes transfigured. It is education that teaches us not to measure the best things in the world by money. It is educated men and women, beyond all others, who throw into their work that eager sacrifice of love for which no money can pay, and to which, when work cries out to be done, no task is too forbidding, no hours are too long. The practical life is the life of steady, persistent, intelligent, courageous work, widening its horizon as the worker grows in knowledge, and, by doing well what lies before him, fits himself for harder and higher tasks. But the practical life of educated men and women is, or should be, even more than this. It makes, or should make, every

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task the expression of an enlightened spirit. There were in the nineteenth century few lives more practical than those of the "heroic boys" who, in the exquisite words of their old comrade, 'gave freely and eagerly all that they had or hoped for to their country and to their fellow-men in the hour of great need." In such a practical life as every man or woman ought to lead, such a practical life as educated men and women are bound to lead or be false to their trust, it is the vision that abides and commands.

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