Florence Converse

“ I cannot say that I was so brave as the girls at the college, who did not shed a tear as College Hall burned—I could not speak, my voice was so choked with tears, and that night I went supperless to bed. But though it seems impossible to believe that College Hall is a thing of the past, yet one cannot but feel that from this so great calamity great good will come—a broader, higher spirit will be manifested; we shall cease to think in classes, but all unite in great loving thought for the good and the upbuilding—in more senses than one—of our Alma Mater. ”

“ If this thing come to pass, wilt thou go with the nobles, or wilt thou go with thy poor?
I hate the nobles! cried Richard passionately. Have I not told thee? I hate mine uncle the Duke, and Thomas of Woodstock that tosseth me in air as I were a shuttlecock. I hate Salisbury, and Devon,—yea, even the Earl of March, Etienne. They do not love me. Their eyes are cold; and when they smile upon me I could kill them. I will go with the common folk, they are my people.
There will not be a king so great as thou, nor so beloved! cried Calote. ”

“ It would be absurd and useless to deny that Wellesley girls have their defects; they are of the sort that press for recognition; defects of manner, and manners, which are not confined to the students of any one college, or even to college students, but are due in a measure to the general change in our attitude towards women, and to the new freedom in which they all alike share. It is true that, to a degree, the graces and reserves which give charm and finish to daily living are sacrificed to the more pushing claims of study and athletics, in college. ”

“ Natheless, I find it hard to believe as how Sir Austin will clip me and kiss me and call me brother. Sir Austin 's a proud man,—lord o' the manor,—and I a silly shepherd. Christ knoweth us poor,—for that he came to earth a poor man. He put our garb upon him. Till Sir Austin and his ilk do put them in poor men's weeds and ploughman's weeds and shepherd's weeds, how shall they know what 't is I suffer, or that rejoiceth me? Men know that they live. Small blame to Sir Austin, or to the King.
O Diggon,—my brother! This is a true word, cried the peddler. ”

“ No wood near Athens was ever so vision-haunted as Wellesley with the dancing spirits of past Tree Days.
On that day in early June the whole college turns itself into a pageant of spring. From the long hillside above which College Hall once towered, the faculty and the alumnae watch their younger sisters march in slow processional triumph around and about the wide green campus. Like a moving flower garden the procession winds upon itself; hundreds and hundreds of seniors and juniors and sophomores and freshmen,—more than fourteen hundred of them in 1914. ”

“ I love mine own, said Kitte. Thy husband I shall love, and thy children. I am glad thy children will be free men.
Calote clung to her mother. And I had forgotten them! she said. Yet, meseems as every peasant in England were child of mine this day, so doth my heart beat for them. I 'm mother to all free English!—Ah! She cast her arms above her head, and her face was shining.
Thou art thy father's daughter, Kitte said; but then she caught the maid to her breast: Thy father's daughter, quoth she, but I 'm the woman that bore thee. Thou wilt not be always content to mother the world only. ”

“ But the glamour of the sun is as potent as the glamour of the moon at Wellesley. High noon is magical on Tree Day, for then the mythic folk of ancient Greece, the hamadryads and Dian's nymphs, Venus and Orpheus and Narcissus, and all the rest, come out and dream a dance of old days on the great green billows of the lawn. To see veiled Cupid, like a living flame, come streaming down among the hillside trees, down, swift as fire, to the waiting Psyche, is never to forget. ”

“ If the knight do the bidding of the ploughman, wherefore shall not Piers' daughter wed the son o' the knight?
He looked within her eyes most tenderly, his voice was deep with pity; he held her two hands in his own.
My Calote,—'t is not King Edward, nor King Edward's son, shall be counselled of the ploughman. 'T is a slow world, and no man so slow as the man at the plough. He hath his half acre to sow. Not in my day, nor in thine, shall the knight bethink him to set the ploughman free for pilgrimage to Truth.
But if he read thy Vision, father, he will. ”

“ Stephen pushed through the gaping crowd at the door, past the dead knight, and would have led Calote away into the fields, but she said:—
Let be! I will go home. I am very sick.
'T was not the King's fault; be sure of that! cried Stephen. They do so many wicked things in his name. He is but a weakling child.
It is time the people arose! answered Calote. Ah, how helpless am I, and thou, and the little King! How helpless is this country of England, where men slay each other before God's altar!
'T is John of Gaunt's doing, said Stephen. ”

“ Religious, democratic, intellectually serious is our Wellesley girl, and last but not least, she is a lover of beauty. How could she fail to be? How many times, in early winter twilights, has she come over the stile into the Stone Hall meadow, and stood long moments, hushed, bespelled, by the tranquil pale loveliness of the lake, the dusky, rimming hills, the bare, slim blackness of twig and bough embroidering the silver sky,—the whole luminous etching? ”

“ Think you I feel, O my lord? Calote answered him. Yet I am of these people. 'T is to-day the first day ever I sat on a cushion.
The boy stared.
But thou shalt hereafter, he said. Etienne will clothe thee in silk, and feed thee dainties. I will give thee a girdle with a blue stone in it.
Nay, not so! she cried. How can I take mine ease if the people suffer? Oh, sweet child, wilt thou walk in silk, and the half of thy kingdom go naked? 'T is for thee they suffer. The white bread thou dost eat, the people harvested. They gathered it into thy barns. And yet thou wilt let them go hungry. ”

“ The women's colleges must speak as individuals; each one must tell her own story, and tell it soon. The bright, experimental days are definitely past—except in the sense in which all education, alike for men and women, is perennially an experiment—and if the romance of those days is to quicken the imaginations of college girls one hundred, two hundred, five hundred years hence, the women who were the experiment and who lived the romance must write it down.
For Wellesley in particular this consciousness of standing at the threshold of a new epoch is especially poignant. ”

“ I marvel thou hast not found me out afore, said Langland quietly. Hast thou not heard me rail right prettily, many a time, against those priests that come to London to earn silver by singing prayers for the dead,—a lazy life; when they might, an they would, be a-starving in country villages for the sake o' the souls o' living poor wights that need comfort and counsel? Let God take care o' the dead, say I, and if a man pray for those, let him pray for love's sake. Yet here be I a chantry clerk in London,—I, that hold it akin to simony to take money for such-like Masses. ”

“ Wherever there are Wellesley women, when spring is waking,—in Switzerland, in Sicily, in Japan, in England,—they are remembering the Wellesley spring, that pageant of young green of lawns and hills and tenderest flushing rose in baby oak leaves and baby maples, that twinkling dance of birches and of poplars, that splendor of the youth of the year amid which young maidens shone and blossomed, starring the campus among the other spring flowers. And are there Wellesley women anywhere in the autumn who do not think of Wellesley and four autumns? ”

“ My lord, Stephen soothed him, hast thou heard how they have cried out all this day in London streets, and at the burning of the Savoy, 'We will have no King called John?'
His name is Henry, the boy answered, 't is a froward child; and then passionately: Natheless, tell me 't is not true! Tell me,—tell me!
Look out of window, sire, on Saint Catherine's Hill, where thy people wait thee! So shall these fears and follies be dispelled.
Let us to the battlement to breathe, said Richard. Is more to see; and I 'm smothered here, walled in with my cousin. ”

“ The students themselves are swift to recognize and rebuke, usually in the "Free Press" or the "Parliament of Fools", of the College News, any signs of intellectual indifference or laxity. Wellesley, like Harvard and other large colleges, has its uninspiring level stretches of mediocrity; but it has its little leaping hills, its soaring peaks as well. Every class has its band of devoted students for whom the things of the mind are supreme; every class has its scattering of youthful scholars to give distinction to the academic landscape. ”

“ When the people discover that they are—that they—are—
Tricked! shouted Buckingham, laughing loud. Tricked, my wise nephew! 'T were well to crush them neath the iron hand of fear, ere they find out this. So, I say, fall to!—Beat them down! Let blood flow! 'T is the one way!
Tricked? the King repeated, frowning. But I was honest.
Ay, my lord, assured him Salisbury. And so wert thou honest if a madman came to thee and gripped thy throat and said, 'Give me thy kingdom, King Richard,' and thou didst answer, 'Yea, freely I give it thee.' Natheless, the madman might not rule England. ”

“ And Fraulein Wenckebach herself said of her profession: "Every teacher, every educator, should above all be a guide. Not one of those who, like signposts, stretch their wooden arms with pedantic insistence in a given direction, but one, rather, who, after the manner of the heavenly bodies, diffusing warmth and light and cheer, draws the young soul irresistibly to leave its dark jungles of prejudice and ignorance for the promised land of wisdom and freedom." And her students testify enthusiastically to her unusual success. ”

“ Thy men are puppets, O poet! he cried. Where is the breath of life in them? Didst never see a man, that thou canst make him so like to a wooden doll? The stone abbot down yonder, on his tomb in the Priory, is more alive than these. Hast seen the Miracle Play in Paul's Churchyard at Whitsuntide? There will be a crowd alive for thee. Hast never seen the 'prentices breaking each other his pate of a holiday in London streets? There be men! Thine are a string o' names my lord Bishop might be a-reading before the altar to shame their owners.
Men be but little more than names for me, young master. ”

“ There in the shadow of the evergreens we lay down on the carpet of pine foliage and talked,—I remember it well,—talked long of the problems of life, of things worth living for; of the hidden ways of Providence as well as of the subtle ways of men; of the few who rule and are not always recognized; of the many who are led and are not always conscious of it ”

“ I have heard my father say, before he died, said Richard, that no man is free, not the king even, for the nobles do bind his hands. I hate the great nobles! They come and look on me and chuck me under chin,—and anon they whisper in corners. They shall not bind my hands!
My father saith the common folk is three times more than the nobles, said Calote eagerly. If thou art friend to the poor, they will serve thee. They will bind the nobles and learn them to love. Oh, hearken to Piers! The Vision of Truth is with him. Take the poor man to thy friend! ”