In a perspective of the University of Hesperus it is necessary to consider these various controlling forces as well as the spiritual light of its students. And yet to those who have faith in its growth in righteousness there is an ever-present fear. The greatness of the institution will be in inverse proportion to the reign of politics, materialism, and denominationalism in its councils, and the fear is that the people may not think straight and see clear in regard to this great fact. Upon spiritual lines alone can its spirit grow, and if an institution of the spirit is not great in the spirit, it is great in nothing.
Its vigor and vitality are of truth in its young men and women. One boy or one girl may differ from another in glory, but each comes trailing clouds of light, and of their loyalty and stout-heartedness and courage for taking life in hand too many pæans cannot be chanted, or too many triumphant ἰώ raised. They have been the reason for the existence of the institution now more than a generation. Their spiritual content is its strength, and is to be more clearly its strength when guidance of its affairs shall have come to their hands.
Their spiritual content, we say—it should reflect that life of theirs when heaven seems dropping from above to their earth underfoot—in addition to the labors and loves of men and women, a procession of joys from the February morning the cardinal first whistles “what cheer.”
While dog-tooth violets swing their bells in winds of early March bluebirds are singing. The red-bud blossoms, and robins carol from its branches. Then the mandrake, long honored in enchantment, opens its sour-sweet petals of wax. Crimson-capped woodpeckers test tree-trunks and chisel their round house with skilful carpentry. The meadow-lark whistles in mating joy. Purple violets carpet the open woods. Trees chlorophyl their leaves in the warm sun. The wild crab bursts in sea-shell pink, and sober orchards shake out ambrosial perfume. Soft, slumberous airs puff clouds across the sky, and daylight lingers long upon the western horizon. Summer is come in.
The cuckoo cries. The hermit thrush pipes from his dusky covert. Doves, whose aching cadences melt the human heart, house under leaves of grapevine and hatch twin eggs. Vast fields of clover bloom in red and white, and butterflies and bees intoxicate with honey swarm and flit in all-day ravaging. Vapors of earth rise in soft whirls and stand to sweeten reddening wheat and lancet leaves of growing corn.
Arcadia could hold nothing fairer, and the god Pan himself, less satyr and more soul than of old, may be waiting to meet you where some fallen cottonwood bridges a ravine and the red squirrel hunts his buried shagbarks.
There “life is sweet, brother. There’s day and night, brother, both sweet things; sun and moon and stars, brother, all sweet things. There’s likewise a wind on the heath.”
They have most brilliant suns. They breathe sparkling, lambent ether. They look daily upon elm and osage orange, oaks and locusts in summer so weighted with leaves that no light plays within the recess of branches. All the night winds sough through these dusky trees, while slender voices, countless as the little peoples of the earth, murmur in antiphonal chorus.
And above are the patient stars and Milky Way dropping vast fleeces of light upon our earth awhirl in the dear God’s Arms.