UNIVERSITY COURIER.
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future clouded indeed in mystery; we cannot lift the sacred veil; we can only trust to our own strength and abilities. We are urged on by an inexorable destiny. We must not stop to look back fondly to the past, hoping for a release of responsibilities. It is only in comparison to the superiority of the idea that rules a nation that it grows and ripens into a strong unit among the other nations.
EXCHANGE.
The poet who dishes up his mixture for the Vanderbilt Observer should be dismissed from the service and favored with a pension. Listen to his jingle:
For over the mountains other men Came, seeking friends and honor. And people saw the land would then Have wealth soon crowded on her. And there were men who raised a hand To fight foes desperate, And these have named their native land "The Volunteer State."
Such perfect metre, and the theme how original and grand. Verily, another star shineth in the world of Pegasus. The editor says he has received a poem of 279 stanzas, beginning—
Oh, who will pet my billy-goat When I am far away?
which he intends giving us in broken doses. Give us all of your other poems in broken doses, please, and confer a favor on suffering humanity.
We like the Alabama University Monthly. Its articles are well selected and its departments well apportioned. "Longfellow" we read with interest. No writer ever had a grander theme. The name of Longfellow will be a household word long after the heroes of war have passed from the minds of men. The purity of his life and the grandeur of his character reveals itself in every line of his writings. Such men are truly great. The politician who, like Richard Brinsley Sheridan, will talk for hours on the beauty of an unsullied life, and then follow it up by a shameful debauch—such men who may gild their sins by superior statesmanship, commendable though it may be, lose their shallow lustre in the presence of such men as Longfellow.
We were much pleased at receiving among our many new exchanges the Buchtel Record, from Akron, Ohio, not only because it is a good paper, but because it hails from the home of our boyhood. Beneath the giant oaks of its grand old campus our happiest days were spent. Then no intricacies of calculus, no cobweb-like projections of descriptive geometry haunted us day and night like evil spirits, disturbing our peace. We think the exchange department rather too extensive. A college paper should be representative, and a too liberal use of exchange articles betokens a lack of energy or talent on the part of its managers.
The Calliopean Clarion in spite of its high sounding name is an unpretentious, but nevertheless, well edited magazine. It might deservedly be called a model were it not for its fondness for continued stories. The hero of "Under the Elm Trees's Shadow," like the heroes of all college stories, is buttonholed by representatives of every secret society from Epsilon Mu to Upsilon Nu;
carries off all prizes, is never "hazed," is beloved by the Faculty, and at last in his Senior year falls in love with a pretty "co-ed." When the hero Ralph "stooped to kiss the fair face" of the pretty "co-ed." we know that college men all over our broad land held their breath in dreadful suspense. What if at this juncture the inevitable father should have appeared upon the scene? We shudder at the hero's recklessness, but will read on and end the suspense. No, [To be continued] confront us in glaring letters. What a fraud. Think of college men being obliged to wait one weary month to find whether the curly-headed Ralph was successful or not. Take our advice, Brother Clarion, and don't lead your heroes on such treacherous soals, or your story may of necessity have rather an unpoetic termination.
If the illustrations of the Columbia Spectator are humorous, then we certainly fail to appreciate them. After trying for one whole hour to raise a respectable laugh, we were finally compelled to give up in dispair. We looked at them upside down and from every conceivable angle, but the fact still stared us in the face, we couldn't laugh. No, they were not intended to be laughed at, they were only inserted to fill up space. Two stories and half a dozen poems probably exhausted the literary talent of Columbia College.
And from the ashes of Swarthmore College arose the Phoenix. Rehabilitated? Turn over the pages of the Phoenix and judge for yourself. An excellent paper, typographically, still better in its subject matter. Here is its column of "Cinders,"—live cinders, all of them.
The Sunbeam, from Ontario Ladies' College, Whitby, Ont., is a good, common sense magazine into which no love stories ever find their way. We know the article on "Varnish versus Soapsuds" will strike a responsive chord in all who are fortunate enough to read it. The sentiments are very fitting to this age of sham. We think the ladies of the Hamilton College Monthly would raise the standard of their paper by substituting for their silly continued love stories such articles as appear in the Sunbeam. We did think the Hamilton College Monthly was about as good as we could expect from a ladies' school, but changed our opinion quite suddenly upon receiving the Sunbeam. For the benefit of our readers we give an extract from the three and a half page story of the Hamilton Monthly: * * * * "She raised her head and answered 'yes.' Oh, the old question and answer. How many lips have asked it, and how many have replied. Will it ever grow old? Will it ever cease to make the heart throb faster? Lovers from time immemorial have whispered them to each other, and they will until the end of time. Methinks that even the angels in Heaven must smile when they hear them. Oh, but when the answer is 'no,' what a chill sinks down upon the heart, how the spirit is abashed and grieved." Bah! Imagine if you can, the angels giggling over two sentimental lovers. Quite an exalted opinion of the highest tate of angels.
The Badger, from the University of Wisconsin, says: "Kansas State University started a Y. M. C. A., which is already doing good work. There is a universal tendency to charge our State institutions with having little or no religious influence over those attending, but it is evident that the statistics from Cornell, with the encouraging result in Kansas and our University, indicate