Chapter XX
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The struggle for admission to college was ended, and I could er Radcliffe whenever I pleased. Before I entered college, however, it was thought best that I should study another year under Mr. Keith. It was not, therefore, until the fall of 1900 that my dream of going to college was realized.I remember my first day at Radcliffe. It was a day full of i for me. I had looked forward to it for years.
A potent force withirohan the persuasion of my friends, stronger even than the pleadings of my heart, had impelled me to try my strength by the standards of those who see and hear. I khat there were obstacles in the way; but I was eager to overe them. I had taken to heart the words of the wise Roman who said, "To be banished from Rome is but to live outside of Rome." Debarred from the great highways of knowledge, I was pelled to make the journey across try by unfrequented roads--that was all; and I khat in college there were many bypaths where I could touch hands with girls who were thinking, loving and struggling like me.
I began my studies with eagerness. Before me I saw a new world opening iy and light, and I felt withihe capacity to know all things. In the wonderland of Mind I should be as free as another. Its people, sery, manners, joys, tragedies should be living, tangible interpreters of the real world. The lecture-halls seemed filled with the spirit of the great and the wise, and I thought the professors were the embodiment of wisdom. If I have since learned differently, I am not going to tell anybody.
But I soon discovered that college was not quite the romantic lyceum I had imagined. Many of the dreams that had delighted my young inexperience became beautifully less and "faded into the light of on day.”
Gradually I began to find that there were disadvantages in going to college.
The one I felt and still feel most is lack of time. I used to have time to think, to reflect, my mind and I. We would sit together of an evening and listen to the inner melodies of the spirit, whie hears only in leisure moments when the words of some loved poet touch a deep, sweet chord in the soul that until then had been silent. But in college there is no time to uh ohoughts. One goes to college to learn, it seems, not to think. Wheers the portals of learning, one leaves the dearest pleasures--solitude, books and imagination--outside with the whispering pines. I suppose I ought to find some fort ihought that I am laying up treasures for future enjoyment, but I am improvident enough to prefer present joy to h riches ag<samp>..</samp>ainst a rainy day.
My studies the first year were French, German, history, English position and English literature. In the French course I read some of the works of eille, Moliere, Rae, Alfred de Musset and Sainte-Beuve, and in the German those o<bdo></bdo>f Goethe and Schiller. I reviewed rapidly the whole period of history from the fall of the Roman Empire to the eighteenth tury, and in English literature studied critically Miltons poems and "Areopagitica.”
I am frequently asked how I overe the peculiar ditions under which I work in college. In the classroom I am of course practically alohe professor is as remote as if he were speaking through a telephohe lectures are spelled i<var></var>nto my hand as rapidly as possible, and much of the individuality of the lecturer is lost to me in the effort to keep in the race. The words rush through my hand like hounds in pursuit of a hare which they often miss. But in this respect I do not think I am much worse off than the girls who take notes. If the mind is occupied with the meical process of hearing and putting words on paper at pell-mell speed, I should not think one could pay much attention to the subjeder sideration or the manner in which it is presented. I ake notes during the lectures, because my hands are busy listening. Usually I jot down what I remember of them when I get home. I write the exercises, daily themes, criticisms and hour-tests, the mid-year and final examinations, on my typewriter, so that the professors have no difficulty in finding out how little I know. When I begaudy of Latin prosody, I devised and explaio my professor a system of signs indig the differeers and quantities.
I use the Hammond typewriter. I have tried many maes, and I find the Hammond is the best adapted to the peculiar needs of my work. With this mae movable type shuttles be used, and one have several shuttles, each with a differe of characters--Greek, Frenathematical, acc to the kind of writing one wishes to do oypewriter. Without it, I doubt if I could go to college.
Very few of the books required in the various courses are printed for the blind, and I am obliged to have them spelled into my hand. sequently I need more time to prepare my lessons than irls. The manual part takes longer, and I have perplexities which they have not. There are days when the close attention I must give to details chafes my spirit, and the thought that I must spend hours reading a feters, while in the world without irls are laughing and singing and dang, makes me rebellious; but I soon recover my buoyand laugh the distent out of my heart. For, after all, every one who wishes to gain true knowledge must climb the Hill Difficulty alone, and sihere is no royal road to the summit, I must zigzag it in my own way. I slip back many times, I fall, I stand still, I run against the edge of hidden obstacles, I lose my temper and find it again and keep it better, I trudge on, I gain a little, I feel enced, I get more eager and climb higher and begin to see the widening horizon. Every struggle is a victory. One more effort and I reach the luminous cloud, the blue depths of the sky, the uplands of my desire. I am not always alone, however, in these struggles. Mr. William Wade and Mr. E. E. Allen, Principal of the Pennsylvania Institution for the Instru of the Blind, get for me many of the books I need in raised print. Their thoughtfulness has been more of a help and encement to me than they ever know.
Last year, my sed year at Radcliffe, I studied English position, the Bible as English position, the govers of Amerid Europe, the Odes of Horace, and Latin edy. The class in position was the pleasa. It was very lively. The lectures were always iing, vivacious, witty; for the instrur. Charles Townsend Copeland, more than any one else I have had until this year, brings before you literature in all its inal freshness and power. For one short hour you are permitted to drink iernal beauty of the old masters without needless interpretation or exposition. You revel in their fihoughts. You enjoy with all your soul the sweet thunder of the Old Testament, fetting the existence of Jahweh and Elohim; and you go home feeling that you have had "a glimpse of that perfe in which spirit and form dwell in immortal harmony; truth ay bearing a new growth on the a stem of time.”
This year is the happiest because I am studying subjects that especially i me, eics, Elizabethan literature, Shakespeare under Professee L. Kittredge, and the History of Philosophy under Professor Josiah Royce. Through philosophy oers with sympathy of prehension into the traditions of remote ages and other modes of thought, which erewhile seemed alien and without reason.
But college is not the universal Athens I thought it was. There one does not meet the great and the wise face to face; one does not eveheir living touch. They are there, it is true; but they seem mummified. We must extract them from the ied wall of learning and dissed analyze them before we be sure that we have a Milton or an Isaiah, and not merely a clever imitation. Many scholars fet, it seems to me, that our enjoyment of the great works of literature depends more upon the depth of our sympathy than upon our uanding. The trouble is that very few of their laborious explanations sti the memory. The mind drops them as a branch drops its overripe fruit. It is possible to know a flower, root and stem and all, and all the processes of growth, ao have no appreciation of the flower fresh bathed in heavens dew. Again and again I ask impatiently, "Why myself with these explanations and hypotheses?" They fly hither and thither in my thought like blind birds beating the air with iual wings. I do not mean to object to a thh knowledge of the famous works we read. I objely to the interminable ents and bewildering criticisms that teach but ohing: there are as many opinions as there are men. But when a great scholar like Professor Kittredge interprets what the master said, it is "as if new sight were given the blind." He brings back Shakespeare, the poet.
There are, however, times when I long to sweep away half the things I am expected to learn; for the overtaxed mind ot enjoy the treasure it has secured at the greatest cost. It is impossible, I think, to read in one day
four or five different books in different languages and treating of widely different subjects, and not lose sight of the very ends for whie reads. When one reads hurriedly and nervously, having in mind writtes and examinations, ones brain bees encumbered with a lot of choice bric-a-brac for which there seems to be little use. At the present time my mind is so full of heterogeneous matter that I almost despair of ever being able to put it in order. Whenever I ehe region that was the kingdom of my mind I feel like the proverbial bull in the a shop. A thousand odds and ends of knowledge e crashing about my head like hailstones, and when I try to escape them, theme-goblins and college nixies of all sorts pursue me, until I wish--oh, may I be fiven the wicked ></samp>sh!--that I might smash the idols I came to worship.
But the examinations are the chief bugbears of my college life. Although I have faced them many times and cast them down and made them bite the dust, yet they rise again and menace me with pale looks, until like Bob Acres I feel my ce oozing out at my finger ends. The days before these ordeals take place are spent in cramming your mind with mystiula and iible dates--unpalatable diets, until you wish that books and sd you were buried in the depths of the sea.
At last the dreaded hour arrives, and you are a favoured being indeed if you feel prepared, and are able at the right time to call to your standard thoughts that will aid you in that supreme effort. It happens too often that your trumpet call is unheeded. It is most perplexing and exasperating that just at the moment when you need your memory and a nice sense of discrimination, these faculties take to themselves wings and fly away. The facts you have garnered with sufirouble invariably fail you at a pinch.
"Give a brief at of Huss and his work." Huss? Who was he and what did he do? The name looks strangely familiar. You ransack your budget of historic facts much as you would hunt for a bit of silk in a rag-bag. You are sure it is somewhere in your mihe top--you saw it there the other day when you were looking up the beginnings of the Reformation. But where is it now? You fish out all manner of odds and ends of knowledge--revolutions, schisms, massacres, systems of gover; but Huss--where is he? You are amazed at all the things you know which are not on the examination paper. In desperation you seize the budget and dump everything out, and there in a er is your man, serenely brooding on his own private thought, unscious of the catastrophe which he has brought upon you.
Just then the proctor informs you that the time is up. With a feeling of intense disgust you kick the mass of rubbish into a er and go home, your head full of revolutionary schemes to abolish the divine right of professors to ask questions without the sent of the questioned.
It es over me that in the last two or three pages of this chapter I have used figures which will turn the laugh against me. Ah, here they are--the mixed metaphors mog and strutting about before me, pointing to the bull in the a shop assailed by hailstones and the bugbears with pale looks, an unanalyzed species! Let them mo. The words describe so exactly the atmosphere of jostling, tumbling ideas I live in that I will wink at them for once, and put on a deliberate air to say that my ideas of college have ged.
While my days at Radcliffe were still iure, they were encircled with a halo of romance, which they have lost; but iransition from romantic to actual I have learned many things I should never have known had I not tried the experiment. One of them is the precious sce of patience, which teaches us that we should take our education as we would take a walk in the try, leisurely, our minds hospitably open to impressions of every sort. Suowledge floods the soul unseen with a souidal wave of deepening thought. "Knowledge is power." Rather, knowledge is happiness, because to have knowledge--broad, deep knowledge--is to know true ends from false, and lofty things from low. To know the thoughts and deeds that have marked mans progress is to feel the great heart-throbs of humanity through the turies; and if one does not feel in these pulsations a heavenward striving, one must indeed be deaf to the harmonies of life.
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