U niversity
of
O regon M onthly
33
doomed prep-cap comes- to taste the sweets of college life and sips
instead the muddy waters of the race. He farms out his mind fot
four years to learned professdrs who “take lodgings in a head that’s
to be let unfurnished.”
Act II. The half-blown sophomore (who will soon be fully
blown) is the happiest man on the campus. His dormitory boardbill
to the contrary notwithstanding, “he on honey dew hath fed, and
drunk the milk of paradise;*’ But the sad confession at the end of
the aet is :
“My only books
Were woman’s looks
And folly’s all they’ve taught me.”
Act III. It is one of the unexplained mys-
t,efie’s of college life that the loquacious sopho
more, “who thinks too little and who talks too
much?’ who alternates' between “moping melan
choly and moonstruck madness” | is''ever trans
formed É tO h e quiet, sensible, dignified and al
together delightful junior, so full -of. merit, so
worthy of cpmmendatiori, and yet So uncon
scious-of the dreadful fate jn store for him. For
the happy tranquility of the junior year is “butr<
the torrent’s srrioothneès, ère it dash- below.”
He is -to. be a senior, and that is worse than
death, Genung or freshman elocution.
Act 9 sees the senior, the “bright consummate flower” òf four
college .years. But alas the bloom is 'shed^ànd only the dried, with
ered seed-pod remains of what was so fair a year ago.
Act V, life after graduation, may spoil or save* the drama J. Tt
is the only act outside*of, college influence.and many a man has sue-,
cèeded in spite of a bad " start.
But to exercise to the full our rodential perequisite, let us look
once more at thè Senior. Pale and wafiTr'om the fiction of midnight
oil, there is yet something sublimely .pathetic about him.
“Above the Smoke'and‘"stir of’this dim-sfldt
Which meti call, earth,”
in his mind he hovers, sustained by ! self-generated -superheated at-
m^sphere^.tvhiàW'cooledj?j^tthe chill Winds of ad'veYsity, will: soon
let him know the ,significance of, Newton’^,¡^‘¿dnd law. Yet behold