The Campanile, Yearbook

Through the benevolence of the founder, this place has been for you a wide and open field of ardors and endurances, of growing pains and ordered liberty, of comradeship, of dreams and adventures, of the laurels and the loyalties of youth. The skies have been friendly, and the elements kind. I doubt if ever again this side of heaven you will have so many people avowedly planting and planning for you. Four years ago all of you put your hand to the plow. For most of you it has been many a long and sometimes lonely furrow. Few of you have looked back. All of you are shortly to discover how different it is to be completely on your own in the wider world you are about to enter. I need hardly assure you that we who remain behind look forward to your returning whenever you will for such counsel and guidance, help or encouragement, as we may be in position still to offer you.

I anticipate, however, that you are likely to have less and less need of us, because a very large part of what you carry away with you is o four individual gleaning and gathering. That is why I rely upon you for the future, for in the environment of freedom in which you have worked you have acquired the ability to take care of yourselves and at the same time avoid offence to others. I do not overlook either the silent influences of light and beauty that lead to finer taste and therefore to finer judgement, or the sterner influence of thinker and teacher with respect to knowledge and truth, but the real gains alike in character and in culture you have garnered yourselves, with help, to be sure, from native sensitiveness and self-administered discipline. And you have grown in this place the spiritual virtues of moderation and courage, of duty and renunciation, and the flowers, which we share with you, of remembrance, good will, and affection.

No man plants a crop or plans a harvest without work and hope and prayer. That you may continue to work and to hope and to pray, is still the best wish I can make you. “I have planted,” said Paul. “Apollos watered; but God gave the increase.”

-EDGAR ODELL LOVETT