Lifes Enthusiasms

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Life's Enthusiasms, by David Starr
Jordan
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Title: Life's Enthusiasms
Author: David Starr Jordan
Release Date: April 7, 2004 [EBook #11939]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
0. START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIFE'S
ENTHUSIASMS ***
Produced by David A. Schwan >
Life's Enthusiasms
By
David Starr Jordan
President of Leland Stanford Junior University
Boston:
American Unitarian Association
MDCCCCVI
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 changed
without weakening the meaning or throwing discord into the melody.
To choose the right word and to discard all others, this is the chief
factor in good writing. To learn good poetry by heart is to acquire help
toward doing this, instinctively automatically as other habits are
acquired. In the affairs of life, then, is no form of good manners, no
habit 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 sermons wherever he
finds it. I take mine from a French novel, a cynical story of an
unpleasant person, Samuel Brohl, by Victor Cherbuliez; And this is the
text and the whole sermon:
"My son, we should lay up a stock of absurd enthusiasms in our youth
or else we shall reach the end of our journey with an empty heart, for
we lose a great many of them by the way."
And my message in its fashion shall be an appeal to enthusiasm in
things of life, a call to do things because we love them, to love things
because we do them, to keep the eyes open, the heart warm and the
pulses swift, as we move across the field of life. "To take the old world
by the 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. Let it
be every morning made afresh by Him who "instantly and constantly
reneweth the work of creation." Let "the bit of green sod under your
feet be the sweetest to you in this world, in any world." Half the joy of
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 eyes open that
nothing worth our while shall escape us. And everything is worth our
while, if we only grasp it and its significance. As we grow older it
becomes harder to do this. A grown man sees nothing he was not ready
to see in his youth. So long as enthusiasm lasts, so long is youth still
with us.
To make all this more direct we may look to the various sources from
which enthusiasm may be derived. What does the school give us in this

direction? Intellectual drill, broadening of mental horizon, professional
training, all this we expect from school, college, and university and in
every phase of this there is room for a thousand enthusiasms. Moreover,
the school gives us comradeship, the outlook on the hopes and
aspirations of our fellows. It opens to us the resources of young life, the
luminous visions of the boys that are to be men. We come to know "the
wonderful fellow to dream and plan, with the great thing always to
come, who knows?" His dream may be our inspiration as it passes, 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 our own
lives with the richest materials ever at our hand. Life is contagious, and
in the fact lies the meaning of Comradeship. "Gemeingeist unter freien
Geistern," comradery among free spirits: this is the definition of
College Spirit given us by Hutten at Greifeswald, four centuries ago.
This definition serves for us today. Life is the same in every age. All
days are one for all good things. They are all holy-days; to the
freshman of today, all joys of comradery, all delights of free
enthusiasm are just as open, just as fresh as ever they were. From the
teacher like influences should proceed. Plodding and prodding is not
the teacher's work. It is inspiration, on-leading, the flashing of
enthusiasms. A teacher in any field should be one who has chosen his
work because he loves it, who makes no repine because