a healthy interest in athletics. The craving for emotional experiences is rooted in sane and ineradicable human nature. It is the form of expression only that is bad. It is the lack of opportunity for the expression of normal athletic interests that more than anything else is responsible for a pathological nervous condition that seeks for irrational thrills. Athletics are the one great outlet for emotional expression, safest and sanest for youth, that adequately purges both body and soul. One need only compare the student life of colleges enjoying intercollegiate athletics to the earlier college life of the same institutions before the days of intercollegiate athletics, or with the student life in German universities, where intercollegiate athletics are unknown, to realize that our colleges have not so fearfully degenerated under intercollegiate athletics as some would have us think. The great crowd that throngs to see the head-on collision of two locomotives, staged for moving pictures, one may readily believe, is not the same crowd that attends an intercollegiate football game. It answers more nearly to the crowd that once thronged to see the gladiatorial contests in the Colosseum at Rome, where barbarism persisted in civilized society in the form of sports. This barbarism still persists in student duelling in Germany, in bull-fights in Mexico, and in lesser degree, in some states of America, in prize-fighting. But it is through the standardizing of athletics, as in our intercollegiate contests, that the civilizing of sports has been so largely brought about. Just as the head-hunting of the Filipinos readily disappeared under the civilizing influence of modern athletics, so would bull-fights in Mexico doubtless be quickly abandoned, if modern athletics once obtained firm footing there. Athletics in a high stage of development are a form of art, the love of which, as the love of any art, draws one away from unrationalized sport and the search for thrills.

When "college spirit" is urged by the defenders of intercollegiate athletics, a critic sometimes retorts: "The first question is what we mean by college spirit. A student may throw his hat in the air, grab a megaphone, give three long rahs, go through the gymnastics of a cheering leader, and yet leave some doubt whether he has adequately defined college spirit."

No! He has not defined it, and he is discriminating enough to know that he is not trying to define it, but to express it, perhaps in a poor, crude way. But why should we despise these crude expressions of loyalty? In all his life he never felt so loyal; why despise his method of expression, crude though it be? And is it so crude after all? Who can say with what sincerity and depth of feeling the boy may be shouting? Certainly there is fire, and even this fire may be purifying. With Professor Royce, let us be "loyal to loyalty."

But in fairness let us hear the accuser again. By college spirit some mean "that vision of an ideal life beyond commencement which shows a man that only through the rigid subordination of transient and trivial pleasures can he hope to become the only great victory a university ever wins - a trained, devoted, and inspired alumnus, working for the welfare of mankind. There is no evidence that the intercollegiate athletics of to-day inculcate in many men this kind of college spirit." There is certainly no evidence that intercollegiate athletics do not inculcate in many bona fide college men this kind of college spirit. Those who believe in intercollegiate athletics believe that they greatly help the college to do that very thing, and that, when intercollegiate athletics do not thus serve the spirit, it is because the college authorities have been negligent of their trust.

There is a sense in which children are both older and wiser than their parents. There are things children know by the right of their inheritance through a thousand generations which parents have occasionally forgotten. Many grave mistakes have been committed in the name of superior experience. "Some lights of the soul go out when once the gates of Boyville have closed upon us." So, also, college students are sometimes wiser than college faculties who meditate grave mistakes in the name of maturer vision. Perhaps this accounts for the thought that has been entertained by some college authorities to do away with intercollegiate athletics. Here is a phase of educational activity, conceived and entered into by the student body on its own initiative, that is big with promise for the good of the race. Presidents and deans, with a passion to teach, coveting for various fields of learning the very enthusiasm and whole-hearted devotion which have been infused into college by athletics, regard them with well-meaning but unwise jealousy, not as the allies they really are, but as rivals. Enthusiasm is a leaven which must apply narrowly before it spreads. It is something to be guided, never suppressed. It would be madness for college authorities to declare war upon intercollegiate athletics. It will be deplorable if they do not seize with eagerness and sympathetic understanding upon this opportunity for coöperative, constructive educational effort of students and faculty.

FROM A GRADUATE'S WINDOW.

NE knows it all, of course; but to realize it an old fellow must stray into the Yard he has not seen for a good while. The elms are gone, yet that is not what makes the difference. There was a Diuturnity time, not so very long ago, when they were not yet there; and the Truth before so very long, the big saplings may renew the old shade. Measured in terms of Harvard diuturnity, such changes count for little more than those of the seasons. What is gone beyond recovery, one feels, is the life which made Harvard itself from days we know only by tradition until the trumpets sounded their blast of war. Then, like that other sort of blast which comes before tempest, there swept over us a whirlwind. Just for the while, the wind is stilled again, not yet leaving visible ruin behind it. The student life, though, has been carried away. Something else, even if it prove a passing thing, tramps uniformed in the place of it. What shall ensue, when by and by there may rise some vaster Memorial, to enshrine the memories soon to be deathless, we cannot tell. All we can surely foresee is that the memories and the heroisms shall give happy meaning to boyish names which in happier days might have passed noteless into the shadows. Those who pass now shall leave behind them a message of their own, just as those have left one whose records we read in the dim light of Memorial transept.

It is fifty-three years now since the youngest man recorded there would have taken his degree. For a good while now, the elder classes there noted have had no survivors to recall the living forms of those that led the way to the stars. In twenty years more every single classmate of every man whose name is inscribed there will have vanished. Already, then, we can begin to see that what used to seem a tragic sacrifice of youth has another aspect, and a more enduring. Before long, those who fell, we thought before their time, in that Civil War which was needful for the final Union of our country, would have been with us no more, in the relentless course of nature. So, even now, their lot begins to gleam happier than that of those we fancied for a while happier. They died untired, for what they deemed the truth. They were spared the lingering and the fading inevitable for the rest, who stumbled through their allotted years of life in this naughty world, never sure of what the morrow might bring. Most of all, we elder folk may feel now, they were spared the troubled perplexity of seeing vanish the world they knew, and of living their last years in a dimness which may prove that of dusk as probably as of dawn.

Come what may, even though their old Harvard of the nineteenth century has passed, and though ours who have lived into the twentieth is past, too, Harvard will live on, as surely as its new trees will sometime grow with vigor that boys to come will fancy immemorial. The true Harvard is not of the flesh; it is of the spirit. Through the generations of its endurance from the days of King Charles the First to those of President Wilson, it has seldom kept its guise so fixed but that those who loved the past have doubted the present and dreaded the future. It has passed from theocracy to liberalism; from Calvinism to the buoyant hopefulness of the primal Unitarians and to the unfettered religious freedom of the last forty years; it has passed from a system which for nearly a century and a half grouped its classes by their social rank to one which for almost as long has respected little but the alphabet; it has passed from the rigidity of curriculum to the anarchic freedom of an elective system from which there are now symptoms of reaction. Each of these changes, and of the countless others which stirred about them, has seemed, to those who loved the olden time, sure to be fatal. Yet, as one ponders on all Harvard story, to these perilous times which mark the greatest change of all, nothing proves more wondrous than the diuturnity of its essential character. Whether the motto spread on the pages of its open books be the cause of this character or the expression of it, no man can be sure. But we surely know that nothing can belie the truth. Faithful to this faith, we can always do our discordant bests, confident that if our vision be clear what we believe true must finally prevail, and that if by chance our vision be blurred or distorted the higher truth which must surmount ours shall prevail the more nobly that it has had to ennoble it the priceless antagonism of sincere error.

RECENT BOOKS.

PROFESSOR LANGDON'S DANTE.1

DANTE is like a lamp carried out into the garden on a night in June. Moths, millers, June-bugs, and innumerable little winged and polylegged things whirl about it, brush against it, climb and cling to the glass, obedient to the law of luminous attraction. Some of the moths have beautiful wings of delicate embroidery, all covered over with oriental imagery and mystic tracery, and a few are so transparent that they hardly obscure the light at all.

Of those who throng Dante a great number experience the élan de traduire, the translator's itch, and feel special qualifications quiver within them. One is a scholar, has read Benvenuto da Imola all through, has fingered timehonored manuscripts in the libraries of Rome and Florence; a second has a facility for verse and is sensitive to the obligations between poets; a third has imbibed Italian from a gorgeously attired balia and can solve the knots of fourteenth century Tuscan; a fourth was once, or twice, in love and comprehends what Beatrice meant to Dante; a fifth is a professor of Italian literature and feels the responsibilities of his position; a sixth is by trade a translator of the classics, and having done Homer, Æschylus, Lucretius, and Virgil, turns naturally to Dante. So they go; and all persuade themselves that they have at heart the poetical and spiritual interests of the public; but deep down, in the mysterious recesses of self, is the master impulse - the fun of the thing, for there is no better fun than to try to translate Dante.

"Many are the thyrsus-bearers, but few are the mystics." Among the best known of English translators are Cary, John Carlyle, Longfellow, Plumptre, T. W. Parsons, A. J. Butler, and Charles Eliot Norton. Now comes Professor Courtney Langdon, with his translation which "frankly aims at being in every possible way an improvement on its rivals old and new." This is a bold challenge, and before considering his success, it may be worth while to lay down as rules a few of the reviewer's prejudices.

Rule 1. The translation of a poem is at best an approximation. Dante says: "Let every one know that nothing which hath the harmony of musical connection can be transferred from its own tongue into another without shattering all its sweetness and harmony." [Convivio I. 7.] This is an obvious truth: a single word suffices to prove it. Take the Italian word leggiadria; what is the English makeshift? Leggiadria has the qualities of the laughing girl, the startled fawn, the flying cloud; while the English word grace, for instance, being a monosyllable cannot give the winged significance. Elegance savors of the drawing room and millinery; Lightness is comparatively heavy.