The Serpentine Dance after a Foot-ball Game
Such events are associated (in the minds of undergraduates) not only with the physical, but with the spiritual, with the ideal. The struggle on the athletic-field has meaning not simply to a few men who take part, but to every student on the side-lines, while the pulsating hundreds who sing and cheer their team to victory think only of the real effort of their college to produce successful achievement.
Standing beneath a tree near Soldiers’ Field at Cambridge, with undergraduates by the hundred eager in their athletic sports on one side, and the ancient roofs of Harvard on the other, there is a simple marble shaft which bears the names of the men whom the field commemorates, while below these names are written Emerson’s words, chosen for this purpose by Lowell:
Though love repine and reason chafe,
There came a voice without reply—
’Tis man’s perdition to be safe,
When for the truth he ought to die.
Not only upon the shields of our American universities do we find “veritas”; in spirit at least it is also clearly written across the face of the entire college life of our times. Gentlemanliness, open-mindedness, originality, honor, patriotism, truth—these are increasingly found in both the serious pursuits and the play life of our American undergraduates. The department in which these ideals are sought is not so important as the certainty that the student is forming such ideals of thoroughness and perfection. This search for truth and reality may bring to our undergraduates unrest or doubt or arduous toil. They may search for their answer in the lecture-room, on the parade-ground, in the hurlyburly of college comradeships, in the competitive life of college contests, or even in the hard, self-effacing labors of the student who works his way through college. While, indeed, it may seem to many that the highest wisdom and the finest culture still linger, one must believe that the main tendencies in the life of American undergraduates are toward the discovery of and devotion to the highest truth—the truth of nature and the truth of God.