6
THE STUDENTS JOURNAL.
turning the world. Pernaps hunting for an ideal society and a place to cast our anchor; and we have become firmly convinced that to college we must return if we would be satisfied. It is there that we find our friends and our books, and it is there that we miss in large degree the race for wealth and power. We know that never again will we find our "ideal society," that it is gone never to be again assembled, and we are sad.
Let us wander out into nature and find comfort and forgetfulness. Down on the Swan's Marsh we find a lonely spot. Here live two old fishermen, whose dark, sallow skins and dull, expressionless countenances at once betray their mode of living and their total lack of interest. Their home is a dug-out on the creek bank, with a floor of dirt and a roof of long slabs to which the bark still clings. In front of this they sit and smoke their pipes and tenaciously cling to their mortal existence. We envy and at the same time pity their solitude and their stupidity, but nothing can be done for them. They do not appreciate either man or nature.
In front of the fisherman's hut the river winds down picturesquely among the trees in its bed of hard round pebbles. Old elms leaning out from the bank color the water underneath a deeper green, and are suggestive of deep pools and hungry fishes. Travelers sometimes pass this way and cross the ford which winds back and forth down the stream for many yards to lead finally to a road up the opposite bank. But our old settlers notice little of this. Even an old bull-frog—probably as old a settler as the fishermen themselves—after croaking most dismally, blinks his eyes wearily in the sun and gives up his vain attempt to attract their attention. Wealth and power are to them terms as meaningless as the brotherhood of man or sympathy with nature. Little of comfort is there here, or even of forgetfulness, for we find ourselves making comparisons; and our bodies mechanically follow our minds back to their old haunts.
But our ideal society is gone, and we have found nothing to take its place. Solitude will not let us forget our loss, so our only hope is in activity—work. When hard at work we get little time to think,and it may be well that we must work to live.
FLOWERS THAT BLOOM IN THE SPRING.
" In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnished dove;
In the Spring a young man's fancy * * * "
But this is the summer, so hot and dry that the very weeds mournfully droop their heads; and a young man's fancy is much more apt to turn in an irrelevant sort of way to a certain "dusty miller" who lived on the river Dee. And it comes to the prosaic conclusion that the dusty miller would have been much more comfortable had he taken a plunge in the Dee; so the young man divests himself of his fancy and seeks the bottom of the Kaw (careful to assure himself beforehand however that the bottom is not more than five feet from the top). He comes out at last sadly reflecting on why he is obliged to do so, again resumes his fancy, and goes in search of another flower.
Flowers are very scarce however, and fancy must either pick some very sad looking weeds, or go to the green house for flowers which look forced and stilted and will very surely betray that they are borrowed. Let him who would find flowers search for them in season, and, as we have been told, upon the path of duty-if among the thorns and weeds that path can be found. But we must await the season and hunt for the path, nor get angry and blue because some of our improvements to this old universe are not adopted.
Tis in the Spring indeed that the poet's fancy roams untrammelled. Once upon a time there was evolved from a poet's overladen brain the following:
"This sunlit morning is the first of May.
And verdant Freshmen and the wily Sophs
Do make Rome howl and Lawrence people pray.
And Juntors grip of the downriver Desert.
And Juniors grin at the despairing Profs."
That was indeed a flower but it grew in season—that is to say, in the Spring. Now