CHAPTER II. SOME COLLEGE MEMORIES (2)
I AM asked to write something (it is not specifically stated what)
to the profit and glory of my ALMA MATER; and the fact is I seem to
be in very nearly the same case with those who addressed me, for
while I am willing enough to write something, I know not what to
write. Only one point I see, that if I am to write at all, it
should be of the University itself and my own days under its
shadow; of the things that are still the same and of those that are
already changed: such talk, in short, as would pass naturally
between a student of to-day and one of yesterday, supposing them to
meet and grow confidential.
The generations pass away swiftly enough on the high seas of life;
more swiftly still in the little bubbling back-water of the
quadrangle; so that we see there, on a scale startlingly
diminished, the flight of time and the succession of men. I looked
for my name the other day in last year's case-book of the
Speculative. Naturally enough I looked for it near the end; it was
not there, nor yet in the next column, so that I began to think it
had been dropped at press; and when at last I found it, mounted on
the shoulders of so many successors, and looking in that posture
like the name of a man of ninety, I was conscious of some of the
dignity of years.
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