12
UNIVERSITY COURIER.
EXCHANGE.
In a dim lit gallery Hangs a painting old; and as the struggling Light upon it falls, weirdly the outlined Forms, dimmed and stained with years, seem almost Lifelike. Gazing, the past before us sweeps Like some grand pageant heralding deeds of fame. Heroes long dead arise and do those deeds Again which made their names immortal. Love's triumphs, war's dread scourge and chivalry Arise before us. Where is the master-hand That touched these forms to life? Where is the Frenzied eye that pierced the human soul And saw unwritten poems, unpainted pictures There? The picture lives, the artist dreams no more. Perchance some rude carved slab, placed by a Friend, alone his resting place reveals. Rise, pure Soul, rise; thy thoughts still live. A grander tomb Than chiseled marble tells thy fame. That grand Old picture in the gallery there, is thought's
Monument and thine.
—Simpsonian.
The Badger sheds a tear because the law department of the University of Wisconsin is not receiving proper attention from the professors in charge. "It is very exasperating," says the Badger, "for students to find the Professor's chair empty twenty mornings out of twenty-four." The editor in a very out-spoken way shows up a neglect very common in colleges, and by no means confined to the U.of W.
The Vanderbilt Observer has made a decided change for the better. The articles, with the exception of one entitled, "Southern Sycophants," are well written and worthy of publication. The writer of the article in question rebukes Southern people for inviting Northern capitalists, in the following strain: "We cry for no such assistance. We are not base mendicants, but free men, the sons of valiant and noble sires. Let the South be for Southerners! Let that same chivalrous, loyal, brave and true people which were here when the first cannon thundered at Sumter, live in it forever, untainted by the baneful influence of Yankee principles! We want no Yankee, with his wooden nutmegs and coppers, who comes in all his haughtiness to civilize a ruined race." The writer is evidently "spoiling" for a little gore, but wouldn't it be well to show some originality and begin a controversy on some subject to which the speech of Spartacus would not be applicable? Such ebullitions of rage when persistently indulged in, are very disastrous to the nervous system, and are more likely to prove a greater bane to the gentlemen in question than the influences of Yankees and Yankee capital.
The Baldwin Index hopes "that the Courier will be manly enough to admit its ignorance, or misrepresentation of the courses of instruction at Baker University," alluding, doubtless, to a statement of ours in which we spoke of Baker University as an institution with high school instruction. Like the Index "we recant nothing." By the contest productions alone, published in the last number, we are reminded more forcibly than ever that our statements are true, and our criticisms just. The erations are ideals of verbosity, and mutilated similes. We notice further that these embryo orators have all taken the precaution to load well their sentences
with compound adjectives, which to their credit, be it said, shows a degree of forethought truly praiseworthy, considering the tendency of the sentences to soar. Ex: "A sun-kissed day, or star-begirdled night, the song of some sweet-voiced poet, the rest-giving loveliness," etc. The same orator looks beyond the Mystic River and sees "'angels frescoeing heaven's lofty dome; angelie sculptors chiseling out statues of angels and seraphims, from heaven's snowy marbles." (All work strictly first-class; goods guaranteed to stand in all climates without disintegration.) Again, with usual abstruseness he informs us that "true education is giving a man to understand that he may be a note of an eternal symphony in the psalmody of God," and "shall be a thing of beauty and a joy forever." Ye gods! what revelations! Can it be that we are to rack our brains over languages and mathematics for four years only to become in the end a note in a "symphony of psmalmody?" Can it be that he is advocating a doctrine akin to that of Metempsychosis? Bosh, we don't believe such stuff. We believe that after four years of study we will get our skeepskin with B. S. (not S. S.) on it and go into business. Orator No. 2 wrestling with the subject "Behind the Thought there is a Mind" tells us: "Couple to the thoughts of our great thinkers, the silver tongue of eloquence and we can erect a pyramid of evidence in proof of our assertion, reaching from Demosthenes up to the twenty-fifth year of Baker University." Shades of departed Demosthenes, Cicero and Webster, how your dry old bones must rattle with envy! But though the world advances we would be satisfied had we only the oratorical ability of a Webster or a Sheridan, the heights on which the embryo orators of Baker repose we can never hope to attain. "The Power of Silent Force" says orator No. 3, "moves the very foundation walls of the planet in its pent up fury." From this we should judge that a planet is a sort of disabled body requiring a brace of some kind to keep it on an equal footing with its celestial brethren. Again, "it burst the blazing gates of heaven's world-filled vault, sending them flaming through blackened space to their respective orbits each, and balances them in their eternal flight across the surface of the sky, etc.; it entwines its threads of gold around the rugged brow of night-embraced earth, wreathing it in smiles of joyous welcome." But the words of Dante Alighieri come to us
"So obscure, profound it was, and nebulous. That nothing, whatever, I discerned therein."
Specimen copies of the Index ten cents. One number will be kept in the COURIER archives as a memento of college (?)————(?).
LOCAL.
Prizes.
Topeka.
Elections.
Appointments.
Boles-Eidemiller.
Richards-Miller.
Good-bye Geometry !
Some of the Seniors weep.
While others rejoice greatly.
The long and the short of it—Clark and Morgan taking the prizes.