Produced by David A. Schwan <davidsch@earthlink.net>
Life's Enthusiasms
By
David Starr Jordan
President of Leland Stanford Junior University
Boston:
American Unitarian Association
To Melville Best Anderson
That is poetry in which truth is expressed in the fewest possible words,in words which are inevitable, in words which could not be changedwithout weakening the meaning or throwing discord into the melody. Tochoose the right word and to discard all others, this is the chieffactor in good writing. To learn good poetry by heart is to acquire helptoward doing this, instinctively automatically as other habits areacquired. In the affairs of life, then, is no form of good manners, nohabit of usage more valuable than the habit of good English.
Life's Enthusiasms
It is the layman's privilege to take the text for his sermonswherever he finds it. I take mine from a French novel, a cynical storyof an unpleasant person, Samuel Brohl, by Victor Cherbuliez; And this isthe text and the whole sermon:
"My son, we should lay up a stock of absurd enthusiasms in our youth orelse we shall reach the end of our journey with an empty heart, for welose a great many of them by the way."
And my message in its fashion shall be an appeal to enthusiasm in thingsof life, a call to do things because we love them, to love thingsbecause we do them, to keep the eyes open, the heart warm and the pulsesswift, as we move across the field of life. "To take the old world bythe hand and frolic with it;" this is Stevenson's recipe for joyousness.Old as the world is, let it be always new to us as we are new to it. Letit be every morning made afresh by Him who "instantly and constantlyreneweth the work of creation." Let "the bit of green sod under yourfeet be the sweetest to you in this world, in any world." Half the joyof life is in little things taken on the run. Let us run if we must—even the sands do that—but let us keep our hearts young and our eyesopen that nothing worth our while shall escape us. And everything isworth our while, if we only grasp it and its significance. As we growolder it becomes harder to do this. A grown man sees nothing he was notready to see in his youth. So long as enthusiasm lasts, so long is youthstill with us.
To make all this more direct we may look to the various sources fromwhich enthusiasm may be derived. What does the school give us in thisdirection? Intellectual drill, broadening of mental horizon,professional training, all this we expect from school, college, anduniversity and in every phase of this there is room for a thousandenthusiasms. Moreover, the school gives us comradeship, the outlook onthe hopes and aspirations of our fellows. It opens to us the resourcesof young life, the luminous visions of the boys that are to be men. Wecome to know "the wonderful fellow to dream and plan, with the greatthing always to come, who knows?" His dream may be our inspiration as itpasses, as its realization may be the inspiration of future generations.In the school is life in the making, and with the rest we are making ourown lives with the richest materials ever at our hand. Life iscontagious, and in the fact lies the meaning of Comradeship."Gemeingeist unter freien Geistern," comradery among free spirits: thisis the definition of College Spirit given us by Hutten at Greifeswald,four centuries ago. This definition serves for us today. Life is thesame in every age. All days are one for all good things. They are