Life — June 15, 1893 — page 4: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

“White there's Life there's Hope.” VOL. XXI. JUNE 15, 1893. 28 West Twexty-Tuirp Sre No. 546. . New York, Published every Thursday. $5.00 year in advance. Postage toforcign countries in the Postal Union, $1.04 a year, extra, Single copies, 10 cents. Rejected contributions will be destroyed unless accompanied by a stamped and directed envelope. “THERE is so much that LiFe could say about the young gentlemen who are about to shift the affectionate embrace of their a/ma maters for the more coy en- , dearments of the unendowed world, that y itis hard to fix upon the point where baccalaureate remarks may begin with any prospect of coming to a = <= reasonable close at the bottom of ae ries page. The question, young gentlemen, SGT of the most immediate interest. to the ‘ majority of you, is how are you to tind your mission in life? Some of you already have definite ideas on the subject with which you will promptly proceed to experi- ment. The tests are likely to be interesting and instructive even in those cases where the results are not quite satisfactory- Lean a little, you of this class, on the assertion that success is born of many failures. Insist upon making your small, preliminary failures duly instructive. Failures of methods in a young man are to be expected. To learn how not to do a thing is almost an inevitable preliminary to learning how it should be done. The failure you have to dread is a failure inthe man. To have shown that you don’t know how, is nothing, for you are young, To have demonstrated that you are bad stuff,—that you are not true, that you are not teach- able, that you are not master of yourself—that is a serious matter. If you are in that case, the world’s job with you is not a work of development, but of re-creation, There must be better stuff worked into you somehow, before good work can be got out. Development is a comparatively simple matter, with plenty of obstacles in its way, of course, but nothing insuperable. But to make a lad over new is a com- plex process that often takes a whole lifetime, and is very liable to be a disappointment at the end, If you have the misfortune to be a poor creature, there are a number of tests which will help you to ascertain just how poor a thing you are. If you must drink whenever anyone is thirsty, if you must spend money that you haven't got, if it is easier for you to lie out of a scrape than to suffer the pains of it, if it is easier for you to borrow than to work, and if you don’t keep faith with womenkind, you have sound * LIFE: reason to suspect that your constituent materials need renovation. Under such conditions your case is not aus- picious, but by way of encouragement to you to take yourself in hand, it is at least possible to say that, of all mundane successes, there is none that is more satisfactory to the sense of fitness than that of the struggling human who finally achieves to build up a sound man out of damaged materials. As for you young gentlemen who have the good fortune to start out with sound stuff in you, it will go hard with you, indeed, if you don’t find the world an interesting environment. Ithas been remarked by someone who coveted the reputation for sagacious talk that nothing is more miserable, unless it is the first year after marriage, than the first year a college- graduate spends in working up his proper place. That year does have its trials, to be sure, as do the years that immedi- ately follow it; but even those tentative seasons have their compensations, too. It is rather pleasant to be young for one thing and to have a lot of other good fellows young at the same time ; and there is the bliss of being hopelessly in love with a more or less impossible girl, which belongs to your time of life, and is by no means an indifferent form of rapture. Get as much solace as you can out of the compensations meet for your day and generation, and bear the passing inconvenience of being jostled into your place with such patience and good-nature as may spring from faith in better things to come, The attrition of the preliminary jostling is necessary to make you fit the eventual place. If you get the place without the jostling, the chances are that you will never fit easily into it. If you have got what you should have got out of college, it has taught you how to learn. If you know that, you can always keep fire under your boilers. Your vessel minds her rudder, for you have learned self-control; your hand, as the commencement orator will tell you, is on the wheel; your charts and compass are before you, and you can read them. Bon voyage to you, fair Sirs, and geod luck! . . . affecting detail of the will of the late Katharine Page Perkins, who gave $150,000 for a new Har- vard dormitory, is a bequest of $5,000 to the Boston So- ciety of the New Jerusalem, “the income to be expended for refreshments at church gatherings.” So at last the traditional oyster in the church sociable soup is to have a companion! Mrs, Perkins might have thought long and sleeplessly without hitting on a bene- faction so likely to immortalize her name as this modest attempt to mitigate the severities of church sociable food. comicbooks.com