college and his country. It is hard for a boy to understand that in life, whatever he does, he helps to make or mar the name of his college. I have said "in life” — I may say also "in death." Not long since, I saw a Harvard Senior on what proved to be his death-bed. The people at the hospital declared that they had never seen such pain borne with such fortitude, "and," said the Medical Visitor of the University, "he was through it all such a gentleman." A day or two before his death an attendant asked him whether he felt some local pain. "I did not," said he, "until you gave me that medicine." Then instantly he added, miserably weak and suffering as he was, "I beg your pardon. You know and I don't. It may be the medicine had nothing to do with my pain." I believe no man or woman in the ward saw that boy die without seeing also a new meaning and a new beauty in the college whose name he bore. As has often been said, the youth who loves his Alma Mater will always ask, not "What can she do for me?" but "What can I do for her?" Responsibility is-first, last, and always the burden of my song, a student's responsibility to home, to fellow students, to school, to college, and (let me add once more) to the girl whom he will ask some day to be his wife. "Moral taste," as Miss Austen calls it, is nothing without moral force. "If,” said a college President to a Freshman class, you so live that in a few years you will be a fit companion for an intellectual, high-minded, pure-hearted woman, you will not go far wrong." Keep her in mind always, or, if you are not imaginative enough for that, remember that the lines "No spring nor summer's beauty hath such grace As I have seen in one autumnal face" were written of a good man's mother. |