THE TRAITOR OCEAN. A child, he watched the storm-beat coast, And high above the roaring gale Too young he was to understand The dangers strange and weird. But childhood days soon passed away, In weather fair and foul he sailed, For many years his good ship's crew The ship was driven on the rocks E. HUGHES, '07. THE LAST LAP-A PREACHMENT. Now that the Easter vacation is over we have passed the last quarter pole and the home stretch lies before us. To the man who has done faithful work all year, the last lap is something heartening, not a source of discouragement. He stands, most probably, as a reward for his energetic endeavors, at the coveted mark of 80 per cent; perhaps even better. A few more weeks of steady onward pushing and the tape is crossed and his year's work happily ended. The new system of examinations, which dispenses with final orals for those who attain the requisite average, sets a premium on faithful and consistent study throughout the year. Your shirker, who could attain a high position by reasonably hard work, is willing and anxious to secure a place among the upper men of his class, for, after all, final examinations in the heat of spring time and when the sluggish fever of the season lay heavy upon us, never seemed aught but a severe strain. To be rid of the need of undergoing final orals as well as of the anxiety which is sure to attend them-that is a boon and worth a manly effort. The students have taken advantage of this excellent opportunity and have put their shoulders to the wheel with gratifying results. Some few men, of course, have shirked; that is to be expected. Others, through illness or some chance hard luck which befell them at the mid-year's, failed to "qualify." To these men we offer commiseration and at the same time. encouragement. For, after all, their case is not so extremely hard. In preceding years the leaders as well as "trailers" of the various classes were obliged to undergo all the finals, no matter how high an average they had obtained. The fact that for the few unfortunates, through no real fault of theirs, the new scheme has failed to operate, ought not to be any reason for discouragement. They will have an opportunity to redeem themselves by securing an average which they feel capable of attaining, and of proving to professors and friends that they can and will "make good." Now that we are on the last lap, every man, even if well above the requisite 80 per cent, ought to make an honest effort on the home stretch to "put up" the best and strongest finish of which he is capable. Those who are on the verge can pull themselves well onto safe ground by the hard work of a month. The same sort of sturdy endeavor will make the labor of the finals much easier for those who will have to take them. In a word we all owe it to ourselves, to say nothing of those who have our best interests at heart, to make the last lap of this year as clean and fast, at the very least, as that part of the course which we have covered thus far. COLLEGIATE INFLUENCE IN LITERATURE. Prof. Beers of Yale is unique in his opinions on English. With a vigorous minority, he cries down college entrance examinations in English and the university training along this line, which which follows. Literature, he holds, is not a scientific but an aesthetic matter, and accordingly not teachable. It is obvious enough that such a theory is antagonistic to the methods at present in vogue; but however radical it may appear, it should obtain to the extent of modifying the wide importance given to the dry bones of English study. Just how it can help to an appreciation of the best in our literature, or give facility in writing the language, to grind slavishly at early Saxon or laboriously count the recurrence of a certain phrase in a play of Shakespeare, does not seem very evident. The reduction of English study to the formality of mathematics lends color to Prof. Beers' contention that English, and especially the study of its literature, should be lifted above the plane of the scientific to that of the aesthetic. While the opinion of the distinguished Yale professor opens a wide field for controversy, and unquestionably deserves serious consideration, we are interested just at present with another opinion which he expresses: College training can do little for the creation of literature. This seems harsh enough at first blush, but gains strength when we recall the great names in the field of American writing. Our literary men of the first two generations of the nineteenth century, Emerson, Longfellow, Hawthorne, Lowell, Holmes and many others, were mainly college bred; such has not been the case since the Civil War. "The men who have been making our literature during the last thirty or forty years are, as a rule, not college graduates. Bayard Taylor and Walt Whitman, Bret Harte, |