Measure your mind's height by the shade it casts. ROBERT BROWNING. The college, appealing immediately to the mental part, is yet to train every part. It is doing its duty only when it causes man to regulate appetite, to crush passion, to guide desires, to quicken affections, to prevent wrong, and to stimulate right choices. President C. F. THWING. I STUDENT LIFE STUDENT life presents many phases. Its special characteristics are strongly marked. An outside observer, misled by that which is most obtrusive, thinks of its gayety and its pranks, the noise and excitement which attend its intercollegiate games, its festivities, and, perhaps, its mistakes. Those who are familiar with it, looking beneath its frolics and ebullitions, find a more serious side, rich with ambition and earnestness, but checkered with doubts and misgivings. Hopes and fears, triumphs and defeats, are closely mingled on every college campus. Some of you are already familiar with the scenes of student life; to others its experiences and its episodes will be comparatively new. Such students may have come here with mistaken conceptions. They have heard the stories which are told in every community of college excitements, college rallies, college " events," and these things have an undue prominence in their ideas of student life. Let us understand, then, at the outset that, in the college as in the outside world, industry and good habits attract little attention, while idleness, escapades, and every act which would fain be concealed have a wonderful facility of getting themselves reported. If our great business here is not faithful and thorough work, we might as well pack our trunks and go home, and the college would better close its doors. But this kind of work is not published. It goes on unnoticed. It does not create a sudden disturbance and then mysteriously disappear around the corner. joins in no rushes. It blows no horns, it rings no bells. But it is the principal factor in college life. It fills the time and engages the energies of most of us. It It develops mental power and transforms character, but, like the great forces of nature, it usually works silently and unobserved. College life is not peculiar in this respect. The same fact holds in society at large. The manifold industries of a city or village roll on unnoticed; but let some scandalous event occur and it quickly seems to be upon every lip. The daily papers report it, the telegraph spreads it abroad. But they have nothing to say concerning the upright men and women who go steadily about their own business. A generation ago, college students had a wretched habit of expending their surplus energies in tearing up sidewalks, unhanging gates, carrying off signs and other dubious midnight performances. You have heard men relate, with a touch of glee and a touch of shame, the exploits and the disgraces of their own college days. That these things should have so largely ceased is due, perhaps, |