American Thumb-prints: Mettle of Our Men and Women. Kate Stephens

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      First immigrants to this country—those who came in back in the fifties—discovered the hill’s likeness to the great Acropolis of Athens, and determined that upon it, as upon the heights of the ancient city of the golden grasshopper, the State’s most sacred temple should be built. Thus were inspired library and museum, laboratories and lecture-rooms, of the University of Hesperus, whose roofs are gleaming in the vivid air to-day just as in some ancient gem a diamond lying upon clustering gold sends shafts of light through foliations of red metal.

      The brow of this hill beetles toward the south, but instead of the blue waters of the Saronic Gulf which Sophocles in jocund youth saw dancing far at sea, Hesperus students sight hills rolling to the horizon, and thickets of elms and poplars fringing Indian Creek, and instead of the Pentelic mountains in the northeast they catch the shimmering light of the green ledges and limestone crests of the northern edge of the valley the river has chiselled.

      But how, you ask—thinking of the fervor of the immigrants of 1854 and ’55—how did this university come into being? In stirring and tentative times. The institution was first organized by Presbyterians, who later accepted a fate clearly foreordained, and sold to the Episcopalians. This branch of the church universal christened the educational infant Lawrence University, after a Boston merchant, who sent ten thousand dollars conditioned as a gift on a like subscription. The institution to this time was “on paper,” as these founders said of early towns—that is, a plan, a scheme, a possibility. It finally became the kernel of the University of Hesperus when the State accepted from Congress a grant of seventy-two square miles of land.

      “There shall be two branches of the University,” the charter reads, “a male and a female branch.” In clearer English, the institution was to be open to men and women.

      Seeds of the convictions which admitted women to instruction had long been germinating, even before the independence of women was practically denied by the great Reformation. The idea was in the mind of our race when we were north-of-Europe barbarians. It found sporadic expression all through our literature. It is back of Chaucer in annals of the people and later in such chroniclers as Holinshed. Bishop Burnet, historian of his “Own Time,” and also Fuller, he of the human “Worthies,” determined that “the sharpness of the wit and the suddenness of the conceits of women needed she-schools.” Later Mary Woolstonecraft wrote: “But I still insist that not only the virtue but the knowledge of the two sexes should be the same in nature, if not in degree, and that women, considered not only as moral but rational creatures, ought to endeavor to acquire human virtues by the same means as men, instead of being educated like a fanciful kind of half-being.” And that moral and prudent sampler, Hannah More, declared: “I call education not that which smothers a woman with accomplishments, but that which tends to confirm a firm and regular system of character.”

      A score of the names of these fore-workers for human liberty are known to us. But the names that are not known!—the pathos of it! that we cannot, looking below from our rung in the ladder, tell the countless who have striven, and fallen striving, that we are here because they were there, and that to them, often unrecognized and unthanked, our opportunities are due. They foreran their times, and their struggle made ours possible.

      “ ’Tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what man Would do!”

      But the immediate thought or impulse to make our Western State institutions co-educational, to give to the daughters the collegiate leisure and learning of the sons—to whom or to what shall we trace this idea! They used to explain it in Hesperus by telling you, “The people about us are for the most part New Englanders in blood, you know, perhaps not one, certainly not more than two generations removed to more genial lands, and still retaining the rigor and tenacity and devotion to principle of that stock.” But one naturally answered this by saying, “In New England they did not in the fifties and sixties give their daughters the educational opportunities they gave their sons. In those decades there were attempts at women’s colleges outside New England, but none in the neighborhood of Williams, Dartmouth, Amherst, Harvard, or Yale.”

      The better reason is the historic—noted in every movement of our Aryan race. In this is found what New England civilization has done, not in Hesperus alone, but in Wisconsin, in California, in Minnesota, and wherever else it has united with other forces, and lost the self-consciousness and self-complacency which in our generation are distinguishing and abiding traits upon its own granitic soil. Prejudices which eat energy and dwarf activity colonists have commonly left behind, whether they have entered the swift black ship of the sea or the canvas-covered wagon of the prairie. This was said of those who sailed westward and built up ancient Syracuse some twenty-six centuries agone, and it is true also of the colonists of these later days.

      The drawing up of the charter of the University of Hesperus shows how humanly, simply, and freely State building may be done. Judge Chadwick, of Laurel Town, gives the candid narrative:

      “In the spring of 1864 the Misses Chapin and Miss Elizabeth Watson, who had established a school here, and who were anxious that the University should be organized, besought Governor Robinson to see that it was done. He, or they (or perhaps but one of them), came to me and insisted that I should go to the capital and secure the passage of an act organizing the University. The session of the Legislature was near its close. I went to the capital. In the State library I hunted up the various charters of similar institutions, and taking the Michigan University charter for my guide, drafted the act to organize the University of the State. … Judge Emery was the member of the House. … I do not remember who was the Senator. … I gave the draft to Judge Emery, who introduced it into the house, and by suspension of the rules got it through. It went through the Senate in the same way, and was approved by the governor—Carney.”

      But the seed of fire from which this University sprang in the days when men were fighting for unity, for an idea—this you cannot understand without a word about the brilliant essence that enwraps you in that land—Hesperus air and light. This ether no man can describe. It is as clear as a diamond of finest quality, and each infinitesimal particle has a thousand radiant facets. You think to take it in your hand. It is as intangible as a perfume, as illusive as the hopes of man’s ultimate perfection. The colors of liquid rose are hidden in it and the glow of gold, and it gives flame to the dullest matter. It glances upon a gray tree-trunk, and the trunk glitters in purple and silver-white. It is so limpid and dry that a hill or a bush, or a grazing sheep far away, stands out in clear relief. It vitalizes. It whispers of the infinite life of life. Like the sea, it presses upon you a consciousness of illimitability and immeasurable strength. It is “most pellucid air,” like that in which the chorus of the “Medea” says the Athenians were “ever delicately marching.”

      It is as like the atmosphere of Italy as the sturdy peach-blossoms which redden Hesperus boughs in March are like the softer almond-flowers. The same indescribable grace and radiance are in both essences. But there are the Hesperus blizzards—vast rivers of icy air which sweep from upper currents and ensphere the softness and translucent loveliness of the earth with such frosts as are said to fill all heaven between the stars.

      Under such dynamic skies young men and women have been gathering now these forty years—before the September equinox has fairly quenched the glow of summer heat. During a long æstivation a sun burning in an almost cloudless heaven has beaten upon them day by day. The glow has purified and expanded their skin, has loosened their joints, and clothed them in the supple body of the south. Through the darkness of the night ten thousand stars have shone above their slumbers, and wind voices out of space have phu-phy-phis-pered through secretive pines and rolled tz-tz-tz upon the leathery leaves of oaks. Such days and nights have been over them since the wild grape tossed its fragrant blossoms in damp ravines in the passion of May.

      These students have come from all kinds of homes, from meagre town houses, from СКАЧАТЬ