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
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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 he takes with it the vow of poverty, who finds his reward in the joy of knowing and in